Another book by multi-awarded creative writer (playwright, shortstory writer, essayist), literary critic and educator, Dr. Isagani Cruz, was launched recently.

Dr. Cruz is the president of The Manila Times College (TMTC).

At the Manila Hotel last week, literati, authors and great names in academe attended the launching of the fourth volume of The De La Salle University Story.

C&E Press published the book for De La Salle University (DLSU).

The publication of Dr. Cruz’s portion of The De La Salle Story and the first three volumes that came out earlier in 2011 and in 2012 is part of the DLSU centennial celebration.

Then DLSU President Carmelita Quebengco’s concept of The De La Salle Story is a creative departure from the usual history books about great institutions. She asked each of the authors to be personal and creative.

The authors of the first three volumes of The De La Salle Story are the late Brother Andrew Gonzales FSC; poet and novelist Cirilo Bautista; and poet and creative nonfictionist Marjorie Evasco.

Dr. Cruz, in his own words, “decided to tell the story of today’s university from the inside, from someone intimately involved in its growth. This book, thus, continues a personal literary journey that started some years back—the exportation of the techniques of nonfiction to other forms of writing, in this case, that of institutional history.”

So, he writes in the preface, following his chosen literary genre, he wrote his fourth volume “of the history of the university following the structure of a play, that is, in three acts, with plot points [or turning points] separating the acts from each other, with one character [himself] moving the action forward through complication and conflict.”

The full title of Dr. Cruz’s book is The De La Salle University Story—Volume 4: The State and/of the School:An Autobiographical Academic History.
This is his capsule biography:

Former Philippine undersecretary of Education Isagani Cruz (B.S. Physics, University of the Philippines, Diliman; M.A. English, Ateneo de Manila University; Ph.D. English, University of Maryland) is a Professor Emeritus, a University Fellow and the Academic Publications Executive Publisher of De La Salle University.

He writes plays, essays, biographies and short stories in Filipino and English, for which he has won numerous national and international awards, including the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in Literature Hall of Fame and the Southeast Asian Writers (SEAWrite) Award. He has been a professor or a visiting fellow at various universities in the Philippines, the United States, Iran, Japan, Taiwan and the United Kingdom, including the Univeristy of Oxford.

He heads the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership, the Manila Critics Circle, Wika ng Kultura at Agham, Books for Philippine Schools Foundation, and Libro Amigo Publishers. He is the Curriculum Adviser of the Steering Committee of the K-to-12 program of the Philippine government.

He is the Project Director and Host of the Teaching Literature TV series on Knowledge Channel of the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education. He helped set up the Philippine Association of Scholarly and Academic Publishers, the Philippine Journals Online project of the Oxford-based International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, and the Philippine E-Journals project of C&E Publishing.

He is former president of the Philippine Studies Association and the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association.

He is a retired Senior Bibliographer of the Modern Language Association of America. He is the former Program Director of the Philippine Cultural Education Program of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. He is a member of the English Speaking Union Philippines, the Techical Panel on General Education of the Commission on Higher Education, the Technical Advisory Council of the Congressional Commission on Science, Technology and Engineering, the Filipinas Licensing Copyright Society, and iCubed.us (Hong Kong).

He has been decorated by the Government of France as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite and by the Ramain family as Honorary Sultan of Iligan City.

He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and innumerable columns for newspapers and magazines. He is a columnist of the Philippine Star.

He has written or edited more than fifty books. Among his notable works are:

• The Other Other (2010)

• The Lovely Bienvenido N. Santos (2005)

• Bukod na Bukod: Mga Piling Sanaysay (2003)

• The Basic Education Curriculum in 17 Easy Lessons (2003)

• Pito-Pito (2001)

• The Best Philipine Short Stories of the Twentieth Century: An Anthology of Fiction in English (2000)

• The Alfredo E. Litiatco Lectures of Isagani R. Cruz (1996)

• Movie Times (1984)

• Beyond Futility: The Filipino as Critic (1984)