First Quarter Storm: Days of thunder at the BA

It all seems like a fairy tale, now that crude oil prices hover between $120 and $140 per barrel. In the late 1960s, oil price increases — $3.10 per barrel in 1966 vs. $3.32 in 1969, which meant an increase of three centavos per liter — caused explosive student demonstrations. 

Shouts of “Ibagsak” shattered the peace in UP beloved’s hallowed halls of academe, escalating into the First Quarter Storm or FQS in Jan. to March 1970 and the Diliman Commune a year later, on Feb. 1 to 9, 1971.

Business students and faculty are — by background, inclination and aspiration — generally pro-establishment. As fate would have it, however, I was appointed dean of the College of Business Administration just when the waves of unrest were mounting into a tsunami of demonstration, protest and conflict.

Demonstration leaders (mostly strangers) used to station themselves with bullhorns in front of then Benton Hall, home of the College of Business Administration. Since classroom windows faced front, classes ground to a halt whenever the orators were in good voice. The official policy was to avoid confrontation, but the BA lobby became our combat zone. Activists wanted the lobby for the same reason that I wanted them out. With balconies on two upper floors and external stairs leading all the way up, the lobby was a perfect arena, visually and acoustically. 

It was a case of win some, lose some. 

A bunch of speakers took over the lobby one day, discoursing away to a couple of hundred students standing in the lobby and leaning over the railings of the floors above. I offered to debate them in the second floor assembly hall, but the speakers paid no attention. It was as if I were invisible. I walked up anyway, thinking, “Gosh, I’ll really lose face.” However, my colleagues quickly swung into action and started shooing students in after me. The assembly hall filled up and the lobby speakers had no choice but to follow. 

Another time, about a dozen rallyists took over the lobby, bullhorn at max and pointed in my direction two rooms away. I saw red, marched out, grabbed the bullhorn and stomped back inside without missing a step. The speakers must have been stunned (as I was, never having done anything that came near) for they left without a word. The next day, one of them returned, asking to have the bullhorn back as they needed it for a demonstration at Congress. I directed him to campus security, whom I had previously called to keep the offending instrument under lock and key.

I also had my share of surprises. A student asked for a contribution in aid of some worthy cause and, feeling rich, I gave P30. I was thereafter gratefully acknowledged as a supporter of the movement in the preface of the incendiary booklet that turned out to be the worthy cause.

As matters heated up, UP president SP Lopez organized a march to Malacañang. Assembly was at Agrifina Circle in Rizal Park. Leading the procession were SP and we deans, each bearing his college standard. It could have been Brutus and his boys out to get Julius Caesar, with flags waving in the wind at the head of a long procession of toga-ed academics marching the length of Ayala Boulevard, up Ayala Bridge, right on Gen. Solano, and straight to the Palace gates on JP Laurel. Matters were a bit disorganized and I was with the business faculty at the fountain across the street (the one with the big bird), wondering what next, when word went around that the leaders of the march (SP and the deans) were already upstairs. 

I learned later that President Marcos coldly asked each one in turn what he had in mind and what he wanted done. The stammered responses were reportedly neither fully coherent nor memorable. Absentmindedness also has its rewards.

In the final days of January 1971, protesters blocked University Avenue. Buses and cars were turned back. Among those refused entry was a math professor. Something snapped. He drove back home to UP Village, returned waving a gun and furiously dared anyone to stop him. Some took him at his word, he fired, and a student got hit.  He died three days later. I felt sorry for the student, of course, but also for the math professor. He had been my teacher in the mathematics of finance, an intense man who knew by heart the logarithms of one to nine up to the sixth decimal place.

The shooting led to the weeklong Diliman Commune. Fortunately, all we had at BA were typewriters and a mimeograph machine, but mass comm students took over DZUP, and physics and chem students commandeered labs and supply rooms. Under student management, DZUP began to broadcast, by way of musical intermission between harangues, a baritone voice that sounded like that of a famed resident of Manila’s San Miguel District, crooning Pamulinawen to a female given to deeply-felt moans. The accompaniment sounded like creaking bedsprings. 

The physics labs also began producing objects which, on hitting something, turned into a big ball of fire (I saw some being thrown behind the education building). Then there was the economics professor who refused a stout piece of lumber offered by an excited student for the professor’s self-defense. His polite reply was, “No thank you, but I am on their side,” pointing to the approaching police.

Campus life adjusted to the new environment, particularly as rallies and protests had begun to shift to Congress on P. Burgos Street and Malacañang. There was no Jessica Soho delivering real-time news and after a Management Association of the Philippines dinner at the Manila Hilton (I was in my new tux), I innocently drove home via my usual Mendiola shortcut, straight into the tail end of a grade-A demonstration. Electric wires were still swinging from above, broken glass and stones still littered the street, heavy shields still against walls, and suspicious looks were thrown my way from all sides.

BA people, both students and faculty members, were tagged as “reactionaries” and indeed some of my colleagues were toughies. I must have been classified as a “hopeless but harmless” reactionary. My activist friends and I never really talked ideology. One time, I accidentally walked into one of their plottings. We looked at each other, said “Hi,” and resumed what each of us was up to. It was only years later, when I read the moving biography of Edgar Jopson, that I fully realized what it was all about. 

Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, which didn’t really cause that much of a stir at BA. I would say most sighed in relief as classes resumed without the disruptions of the previous two years. Such was not the case in other units where some faculty members and students were picked up and others went into hiding even if, as rumor had it, no one was looking for them.

Starting Out In Teaching

Before all that excitement, all I had really hoped for was a quiet life. Being able to go home for lunch and playing with our little baby was my idea of peace and order. I meant to be an accountant and had applied to Philippine Manufacturing Company (Procter & Gamble), then the employer of choice. I was to be assigned somewhere in Mindanao (still a shangri-la then) to do surprise counts of salesmen’s cash on hand. Unfortunately, I flunked the medical examination and so missed out on a P&G career. Fate intervened and I was offered a UP job as assistant instructor for the princely salary of P245 a month (there was no 13th-month pay back then). Obviously, university health standards were more accommodating than P&G’s. 

Anyway, I had two months free, so I decided to attend summer classes in Baguio, in public speaking and whatever else was available, which turned out to be personnel management. The professor in personnel was Pines Hotel manager, so our classes were at a plush hotel function room, six students and him. 

I stayed at Patria Inn, by the cathedral, in a large dormitory room.  Both courses have served me in good stead, but I learned just as much from my dorm mates who included Jose Ma. Sison and Oliver Lozano, then just entering their freshman year.

Back in Diliman, Gerry Sicat (then also assistant instructor, later NEDA director general and World Bank official) and I were given the little room off the BA Building’s third floor lobby. The College of Business Administration (including the economics department, which was not yet a school) was then located on the shorter left wing of the building’s third floor and our little room was intended for the film projection equipment of the Little Theater on the second floor. The back wall had holes that kept in the hot air that wafted from the un-air-conditioned theater below.

Research and years of experience must have shown that new instructors would do the least harm in introductory economics and so it was that I was told to go forth and teach Economics 11. Academic freedom, a big issue in those days, meant that no one may tell teachers what to teach. That the textbook was Samuelson’s Economics was just about all I knew. Armed with an old course outline, I began to read. Yes, read. My undergraduate major was accounting and my passing Economics 11 and 12 was to me proof enough of the reality of divine mercy. I was often just one lesson (even less) ahead of the class and was lucky to have the patient Gerry Sicat a desk away to unveil mysteries like supply and demand.

Basic economics and I parted ways when I finished my master’s degree and was assigned third- and fourth-year business subjects. BA students had a big dose of me. The college was shorthanded and anything that no one could or wanted to teach was often tossed my way — finance, marketing, policy, operations research, name it and I’ve probably taught it. 

Several semesters, I was teaching four or five different subjects.  It is true that the best way to learn is to teach, except that it’s hard on the nerves of the teacher and tougher on the part of the taught.  I must have had close to a thousand students and whether out of fear or charity, no one complained.  It has always been a pleasure to run into them all these years, even when the conversation begins, “Confess, you’ve forgotten me,” or “You gave me a five.”  It’s always nice to hear, “You were one of my best teachers” even if you suspect the guy must be kidding.

A highlight of those years was moving into my own office, mine alone, on the ground floor of the newly constructed Benton Hall.  (Named after prewar UP president Guy Potter Benton, it was built with the help of a BA fundraising campaign.) To brighten my room, I splurged P35 on a nice Cesar Buenaventura street scene from a Mabini gallery and another P5 on a black palayok on which I put some water plants that promptly bred mosquitoes. 

Dean Jovino Lorenzo brought his own air-conditioner but the rest of us were happy enough leaving our doors and windows open. We used to sneak into the dean’s office when he was out and luxuriate in the cold air. He caught me once, fortunately not sitting at his desk as we often did.

Working At Quezon Hall

I  had visions of a future in finance and big business, and trustingly accepted (as a third-year undergraduate) the high-sounding post of “assistant business manager” of the Philippine Collegian at a salary of something like P25 a month. My only duty, it turned out, was to see to it that everybody got paid on time. To be precise, I had to follow up the fortnightly payroll, on foot from the BA building to the Administration building and back, passing the lagoon both ways). I never even stepped into the Collegian office, but I suppose the job’s being on my CV demonstrated experience and qualification enough to be Carlos P. Romulo’s assistant for finance and development.

I got appointed in the aftermath of a crisis. The UP Board of Regents had approved a general salary increase late one fiscal year, paid out of nonrecurring savings. Of course, the approved budget did not cover the next year’s higher salary bill and pressure was exerted on Malacañang for a special fund release. 

President Marcos realized he had no choice and gave in, though not without a little drama. He came to the university and met with the deans at a special university council meeting where he announced the fund release. I was assigned to go to the Palace to brief him on our need (some P2 million). It was nice riding in a big limousine with the President, though I had to go home by bus afterwards.

College Deanship

Being BA dean was more than keeping classes open, the place clean and the lobby peaceful. Like other managerial posts, deanship means dealing with people — faculty and supporting staff, students, alumni, potential donors, regents and bosses at central administration, congressmen and senators who passed upon the university budget. 

Lots of things had to be done and unless I wanted to do everything myself, I had to get everyone mobilized. In the process, I mastered skills that never came up at Pines Hotel, like nagging and instant recall of promises, assignments and deadlines on seeing a face. The college faculty office row had two entrances and we all got pretty good — the faculty at avoiding me and me at catching them.

Then as now, faculty and staff salaries were low and retaining good faculty members was a problem. Fellow Dean Florentino Herrera, Jr. of the College of Medicine used to charge 10 centavos per call on his office phone, with takings going to what he told me was the “Dean’s Telephone Fund.” He spent it on supplies when the college budget ran out, as it always did. Inspiration struck. By coincidence, a law had just been passed granting science foundations full tax deductibility on donations received. It wasn’t easy convincing Dr. Juan Salcedo of the National Science Development Board to agree that business research is also scientific research, but he finally agreed and the UP Business Research Foundation was born, easing the lot of all concerned.

The foundation also put art on the college walls. I decided my Buenaventura street scene needed company and made friends with artists hoping to get something nice at a big discount. The long trip to Vicente Mansansala’s home in Binangonan didn’t bother me, though I stood little chance with fierce lady competitors who went as far as posing nude to get a work. Once, Mang Enteng had a good year and asked me to help do his tax return. I suggested he donate something to the foundation to reduce his taxes. He did and that’s why the college has some beautiful Manansalas.

With a bit of string pulling, we got a Marcos type school building (ordinarily used for grade schools) for badly needed office space. I thought it would be nice to name the building after Rosie Solidor, the long-standing (and long-suffering) college administrative assistant, in recognition of the hardworking and unsung administrative staff.  

We had a little ceremony to lay the cornerstone filled with newspapers of the day, sundry mementoes, and coins for good luck. The building still stands behind Benton Hall, now used by the College of Arts and Letters. It’s still called Solidor Hall and I’m happy the name remains.

Going on two years into martial law, my old roommate Gerry Sicat asked me to be his deputy at NEDA. He took it up with President Marcos, who apparently said, “Shouldn’t I at least meet him first?” 

I wasn’t fully sold to the idea since I was by then also a partner at a large audit and consulting firm. Gerry took me to the Malacañang Palace and the President motioned us to the private area behind his study. He spent the next 45 minutes talking me into the government service (the UP community then, as now, did not really think of the university as part of government). 

In the end, too young and green and in all honesty, flattered at being singled out by the commander-in-chief, I agreed to join government for a year (which eventually stretched into 12 years). 

The President asked, “When do we swear you in?”  I replied, “I’m in no hurry, sir.” To which he said, “We are.” He called for an oath-of-office form, called in as witnesses the people waiting outside (which happened to include my ex-boss Cesar EA Virata, former BA Dean and at that time secretary of finance) and swore me in on the spot. 

No wife, no children, no photo-op. My Benton Hall days were over. 

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The dramatis personae of that long-ago time no longer occupy center stage. The stars were Ferdinand Marcos and Ninoy Aquino; the Lopezes — Eugenio Sr. and Jr. and SP; Senators Tañada, Pelaez and Osmeña — have passed away. 

Many in the supporting cast — activist and reactionary alike — went on to conquer the heights of the establishment. A few, like the tragic Edgar Jopson and others like him who believed they could make a difference, died for their convictions. 

BA students are no longer at Benton Hall. Born after EDSA, they take for granted double-digit inflation, triple-digit crude oil price, the chasm between the rich and the poor. They are used to reports of election cheating, natural resources giveaways, graft in the hundreds of millions. They dream of working abroad or maybe in a call center. 

The name Emmanuel Pelaez does not ring a bell, he who said, “What’s happening to our country?”

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Editor’s note: Jaime C. Laya graduated BSBA (magna cum laude) from UP and subsequently earned his MS Ind. Mgt. from Georgia Institute of Technology and PhD from Stanford University.  He joined UP as assistant instructor upon graduation in 1957, rose through the ranks and ultimately became professor of business administration.  He was appointed dean in 1968, at age 29, the youngest to hold the post.  He joined the government in 1974, successively appointed deputy director general of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), deputy governor of the Central Bank of the Philippines, minister of the Budget, governor of the Central Bank of the Philippines, and minister of Education, Culture and Sports, in which capacity he was also chairman of the UP Board of Regents. On leaving government in 1986, he founded an audit and consulting firm that was to be one of the country’s largest when he retired in 2004. He now serves as independent director of various enterprises. 

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