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THE resolution passed by the U.P. Diliman’s University Council has
joined the widespread clamor from the academic world for the
incumbent president to resign. In turn this clamor has led to the
re-energizing of the students as a force for change.
The history of U.P. is replete with instances of
mass action expressing dissent against policies not only of the
government but of the officials on campus.
The first stirrings of unrest on the issue of
nationalism were seen in the protest launched against the American
editor of The Manila Times for causing the publication of what the
U.P. saw as a scurrilous attack (carrying the byline of Manuel Xeres
Burgos, Jr.) on the first Filipino U.P. president Ignacio Villamor
who served from 1915 to 1920.
During the term (1921- 23) of Guy Benton,
faculty and students protested the unjustified firing of Rizal
scholar Austin Craig by Benton and the board of regents. The issues
the protesters invoked were academic freedom and due process.
The presidency of Rafael Palma (1923-1933) saw
many improvements on campus amid a liberal and nationalist
atmosphere. Teodoro Agoncillo and Leopoldo Yabes said Palma’s term
was the “golden age” of the U.P. They remembered how Palma stood
up against Quezon on the independence issue.
The country was divided into “pros” favoring
the Hare-Hawes Cutting Bill brokered by Sergio Osmeña and Manuel
Roxas, and the “antis” led by Quezon and Law dean Jorge Bocobo
who were opposed to what they said was a defective bill. Debates
were held on campus between Palma and Quezon which easily turned
acrimonious.
The pro-Quezon Philippine Herald accused Palma
of stepping out “from the university cloister” and indulging in
politics while Philippine Magazine editor A.V. Hartendorp said U.P.
had become “a center of political agitation.” On the other hand,
the “pros” in the academe referred to Quezon as a “despot”
and challenged his dictatorial tendencies.
Quezon retaliated by freezing the U.P. budget in
the legislature. By the end of 1933, Palma was out of a job
and without gratuity pay or pension.
Quezon worked for another independence bill, the
Tydings-McDuffie Act, which was basically the same as the bill that
Quezon bitterly opposed.
The next U.P. president Bocobo was apparently
beholden to Quezon but he did not stop students and faculty from
criticizing him. Philippine Collegian editors Wenceslao Vinzons and
Arturo Tolentino together with Carmen Planas formed the “Young
Philippines” to oppose Quezon’s hegemony in politics.
Issues of the Collegian were censored with
editorials blacked out by simply turning over the lead slugs (in
letterpress printing). Renato Constantino was said to have been
scolded by Quezon when he criticized the president’s speech on
“partyless democracy.”
The period before the war saw U.P. intellectuals
like Salvador P. Lopez, Fred Mangahas, Jose Lansang and Gabriel
Bernardo turn to Left causes like anti-fascism, boycott of Japanese
goods and proletarian literature. The older intellectuals nurtured
the younger ones like Constantino and Angel Baking and met at the
Ivory Tower, a coffee shop run by long-time U.S. exile and poet Ma.
Gracia de Concepcion on Herran near the campus.
Bernardo also ran a bookshop off Escolta (like
the postwar Popular Bookstore of Joaquin Po) which carried titles
anticommunists would call subversive. Columbia-educated chemist
Vicente Lava in U.P. Los Baños would play a lead role along with
brothers Jose and Jesus in the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Zoologist Agustin Rodolfo returned (with an American wife of Russian
descent whom he met in Madison, Wisconsin) after a stint in a Soviet
animal husbandry experimental station—an experience not looked at
kindly by the House committee on anti-Filipino activities later.
After the war a vituperative manifesto against a
Philippine president was published on March 29, 1951 in the
Collegian (under my keep) during a rally to Malacañang. The
manifesto, authored by Leonardo Perez denounced the “act of
Elpidio Quirino and his subservient Board of Regents” in forcing
U.P. president Bienvenido Gonzalez to retire. The statement was
signed by student leaders including Marcelo Fernan and Teodoro
Padilla who would later become Supreme Court justices. Sadly,
Perez later became the head of CAFA investigating U.P. professors
for “communist” activities, a senator, and head of the Comelec
that rigged the results of the 1985 snap elections.
Protests, manifestos, and marches would become
commonplace in U.P. campuses in the post war period to the present.
It seems that the liberal nationalist dissent before the war was
child’s play or relatively safe compared to what activists on
campus were involved in during the 70s and martial law period when
students and faculty members were jailed or martyred.
The critical mind nurtured and honed in the
academe has a way of summoning the passion to change unjust
situations. What begins as dissent and counter-consciousness,
to use Constantino’s term, develops into a programmatic effort to
right the wrongs. What may be an objective analysis turns to
the inevitable question, “What is to be done?”
Hence, while the university has turned out
graduates who would become part of the Establishment, it has its
share of revolutionaries who have heeded what Karl Marx said about
people of learning: “Philosophers have only tried to interpret
society in various ways, the point however is to change it.”
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