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WITH a fresh charter and a string of business deals
covering vast landholdings, the University of the Philippines (UP)
may yet break free from the yoke of financial straits that has
prevented it from becoming a true people’s university.
It appears that what the state
university needed was the assumption to power of business-minded
faculty members, which is ironic for a school that had long been a
bastion of anti-commercialism. The school’s current leadership
largely hails from the College of Business Administration—a clear
sign that much has changed in the so-called university of, and for
the people. (That was how it was defined by its original
American-period charter created by the Philippine legislature.)
The changes have been obvious to
anyone driving along Commonwealth Avenue these days. What used to be
a huge wasteland—stretching from the boundary of the Iglesia ni
Kristo compound all the way to the Quezon Memorial Circle—has
become a showcase for real estate development.
That huge swath of land has been
sublet to the Ayala group, one of the country’s biggest
conglomerates. The turnover saw the development of the area into a
hub for business process outsourcing (BPO), one of the country’s
sunrise industries.
Seeing the flat structures—the
buildings are no more than five- to seven-stories tall—reminds one
of Silicon Valley in San Jose, California—the cradle of so many
dot-com successes that inaugurated the world’s entry to the
information age. Indeed what better way to reinsert UP into social
relevance.
For years, the state university
had been in a stupor, with its habitués locked in Cold War-era
debates long abandoned by the world outside. Pro-people necessarily
meant aligning oneself with defenders of a dead ideology and its
variants.
This refusal to embrace change
locked the university in a perennial state of penury, year-in and
-out seeking alms from a begrudging Congress. For those who spent
their learning years in UP cannot forget the little comfort offered
by waterless toilets, the decrepit chairs and tables, the flickering
lamps, the graffiti-laden walls, the rundown halls and theaters, and
the lack of laboratory supplies and equipment.
More crippling was the flight of
professors to schools that offered higher compensation, if not to
jobs outside the academe. While UP maintained its intellectual
preeminence in the country, its stature across Asia, if not around
the world, suffered.
Many of those teachers who remain
opted to stay more because they adhered to, or at least tolerated
the stifling ideology that had been responsible for the
university’s state of disrepair. They allowed a minority to
appropriate the state university’s voice, foisting upon society a
brand of activism that had long been discredited elsewhere.
This is why anyone who attended
UP from the 1960s to 1990s would still feel at home in the
university these days, as they would be barraged by the endless
issues of tuition hikes, education’s commercialization and other
mouthfuls of meaningless drivel.
Fortunately for the current and
future generations of UP students, the university appears to have
awoken from this trance. For that, we salute the university’s
present leadership. UP may yet reclaim its status as a world-class
seat of learning.
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