BLAMING U.P.
By Luis V. Teodoro
16 October 2004
TODAY


THE University of the Philippines is in the middle of choosing its
next
president. If you're the kind of newspaper reader who reads
everything from
the op-ed pages to the lifestyles sections, you might have noticed
those
"column feeds" and "personality sketches" extolling one of the women
candidates that have suddenly materialized in the pages of certain
Manila
broadsheets.

The subject is a UP professor who's also a media personality. She
once ran
for senator but lost, and for this "campaign" she's also using her
media
connections to the fullest.

To do PR work she also seems to have hired this former broadsheet
editor
whose staff quit on her in 1999. In behalf of her client, the former
editor
has been grinding out these puff-and-boost pieces that
have seen publication in several newspapers -- and which, in the
worst PR
tradition, take considerable liberties with the facts.

The pieces don't mention that her client was booed during a forum in
UP's
main campus in Diliman, for example. They claim instead that she was
the
most applauded in all the six forums (only five of which
she attended) in UP's various campuses where the candidates for UP
president were supposed to present and explain their visions for UP,
which
will be celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2008.

The search for UP president is supposed to be serious business, but
obviously even some UP alumni look at it as no more serious than a
campaign
for some small-town elective post. Unfortunately, like most UP
students who
couldn't care less, the public is not overly interested in who's
going to
run UP for the next six years, primarily because they can't see what
relevance UP has to them.

True, some parents still think a UP education's the surest way to
riches,
mostly through a UP College of Law or College of Medicine degree. But
even
that's giving way to the thought that sending Junior to STI or AMA
instead
for a caregiver's course so he can learn how to scour bedpans in a US
nursing home could be simpler and even better.

This is UP's current tragedy. Its relevance to Filipinos during the
last
several decades has become limited to how much more a UP degree can
guarantee a good job than other universities -- and even that belief
is
fading. What's worse is that the more discerning, including some UP
alumni
themselves, tend to see UP as an institution that at the very least
owes
the Filipino people an explanation.

As Conrado de Quiros of the Inquirer said during an informal
consultation
with UP alumni and the media called by another woman candidate for UP
President, UP has not so much served the nation in the last 96 years
as
done it a disservice. UP alumni are all over the government,
business, the
sciences, the media, the arts and the professions, but seem not to
have
made any difference on how the country has turned out -- or, as the
less
charitable might put it, have actually ran the country into the
ground.

UP alumni have been in government since the second decade of the 20th
century. They have been senators, congressmen, judges, and
presidents.
Ferdinand Marcos, arguably the worst president the
Philippines has ever had (with Mrs. Arroyo in Malacanang Marcos may
lose
his franchise to that previously uncontested distinction), was an
alumnus
of the UP College of Law.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is herself an alumna of the UP
School of
Economics, eleven of whose faculty members recently predicted the
collapse
of the economy within two years unless the
fiscal crisis is resolved (but who apparently did nothing to prevent
it,
some of them having served in NEDA and the Department of Budget and
Management in several administrations).

Considering the state of the country, and the pre-eminence of UP
alumni in
keeping it firmly on the road to economic, political and judicial
perdition, shouldn't UP be actually apologizing to the country rather
than
crowing about how many senators, justices, congressmen, presidents
and
secretaries of economic development and planning it has contributed
to the
government - not to mention the hordes of crooked lawyers, operators
and
corrupt businessmen it's graduated?

But of even greater interest is how UP can change all that in the
future,
in terms of how the training it provides can actually make people
ethical
as well as skilled-in the arts of governance, for example, or in the
practice of law, or, for that matter, in the mass media - so that, if
they
do end up in government, they can help end corruption rather than
contribute to it.

In addition, it was asked during the same consultation, can't UP
training
do something about the "departure-lounge syndrome" -- meaning the
widespread desire to leave the country to make money abroad the
minute one
gets a diploma? It's not only the graduates of Fatima College of
Medicine
who make for the airport upon passing the Medical Board exams, after
all.
Entire UP College of Medicine classes have also been known to leave
for the
US within months of graduation.

Both can of course be done, even if some of those in UP's current
central
leadership passionately and cynically believe otherwise. But it will
require UP's re-engagement with the public first of all, so that it
will be
perceived as it really is -- an intellectual resource for the nation,
rather than, at best, a path to riches very much like Ali Baba's
password
to the fabled cave of the Forty Thieves - or, at worst, as a clutch
of
aliens living on another planet they call "Excellence" while the
country
goes to hell.

Re-engagement would mean UP's talking to the public by, among other
means,
making its position known on the issues that concern Filipinos,
whether it
be hunger or the state of local TV, amending
the Constitution or the encouragement of arts and letters, human
rights
violations or foreign policy.

Individual faculty members do make the results of their research and
their
views on these and other issues known now and then, just like the
School of
Economics 11 did. But these have been few and far
between, and far from an institutional effort.

Beyond a sustained effort to talk to the people, UP should also be
listening to what the people are saying, in a continuing national
dialogue
that should make it an institution the citizenry can rely on
to make sense of the complexities of this society, and what can be
done to
address its many problems.

Meanwhile, within UP itself, training in the various disciplines
should
include a strong ethical component (in only a handful of disciplines
are
there now courses in ethics) as well as an emphasis on this country's
history, how Philippine society works, how it can be changed for the
better, and what values should guide it - the classical tasks of the
social
sciences as well as of the humanities.

The cynical -- and some are at the very top of the UP administration -
-
will say it won't work, however. It's a view that would leave things
the
way they are in both the University of the Philippines as well as
government and society at large. It's also violently at odds with
that most
fundamental assumption of all that should inform all educational
institutions: that people can learn, and in learning, make a
difference
even in a society as hopelessly mired in its own corruption and
deceit as
Philippine society is.

UP has no other recourse but to find the road that would lead to
something
other than collective perdition. Otherwise the Filipino people might
as
well save their money and shut down UP, or else just
keep it hobbling along in slow decay. Its sole consolation would then
be
only the fact that, at least, Maj. Gen. Carlos F. Garcia and all
those
stalwarts of Philippine Military Academy class 1971 now under
investigation
for corruption and various other offenses are not its alumni, and
that
there's actually a school other than UP Filipinos can blame for the
country's woes.