Soul search

THERE is more to the search for the next chancellor of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu than a contest between the incumbent, lawyer Liza D. Corro, and the challenger, professor Rolando B. Tolentino.

That is how a newspaper framed the “fight”.

The writer missed the story. When the storyteller misses, the story slips past and disappears.

A university is not a boxing ring. To be sure, there are passions seething or running rampant but these are details, not the story itself.

The story are the students. They are proof of life beyond the campus. The monks in the Dark Ages saw themselves as the keepers of enlightenment. They copied books by hand and preserved knowledge while the monastery walls kept the world, savage and cretinous, at bay.

Monks, no matter how learned, wither. Libraries, no matter how great, crumble. As it was in the Dark Ages and in every period thereafter, the world overruns enclaves of learning and unheedingly proceeds with its business.

So is the academe mere shadow on the wall of history? Covering priests squabbling over parish assignments and plum salaries, I wrote that a church of the poor should nip venality at its seminaries.

Two friends—a former seminarian and a former rector—observed that temptations begin in the seminary, where students watch the priests come to class with the latest car model or dangle a medallion that can serve as the cat’s saucer.

We covet what we see. We become disciples of our mentors. We practice what we learn.

Enrolling last August at UP Diliman, I swam in a raging current of students hoping to qualify for a slot. Free tuition in state colleges has spiked the desirability of UP.

Any of those private high school students I queued with have better chances than others of getting in UP. They are better fed, better educated, better supported. Even in UP, excellence is still a sieve privileging the privileged.

What do we give the young who swim against tremendous challenges? An overweening belief in the individual, entitled to reap the rewards of their striving?

Excellence alone will set UP for obsolescence. Only honor and excellence are UP’s true hallmarks, my teachers say. As I say, too, to my students.

The world is such that we in the academe must connect with the “barbarians” at the gates. We are them. By definition, the Middle English “university” traces its roots to the Latin “universitas,” meaning “the whole”.

As alumna, teacher, and student, I believe that UP Cebu should be led by professor Tolentino as its next chancellor. He can catch the tail of the story, steer UP Cebu to find its soul. All else is a march beyond the pale.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 11, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Finding Rizal

ON the evening of the last day of pre-enlistment for the coming first semester in our school, I received frantic messages from graduating students.

These incoming seniors were worried that they might not be able to graduate on time because of a misunderstanding over P. I. 100, which is the mandated course on Rizal’s Life, Works and Writings.

The University of the Philippines (UP) system requires all undergraduates to enroll in P. I. 100 in compliance with Republic Act (RA) No. 1425. Some students mistakenly presumed that P. I. 100 is one of the options to meet six units of Philippine studies, which are also prerequisites for graduation.

Millennial frustrations with Jose Rizal come to mind today, June 19, the 155th birth anniversary of the national hero. Students gripe about the relevance of Rizal to their lives, specially since P. I. 100 is required during the final year of college, when seniors address weightier concerns, such as thesis, internship and the dilemma to date or go solo on their last prom.

So while the course description is Philippine Institutions 100 on paper, among generations of students resentful of the “useless” academic burden of studying the “national sell-out” chosen by American imperialists for epitomizing the unheroic values of accommodation and assimilation, P. I. 100 is sometimes referred to in less exalted terms as “P__ I__, Rizal” 100.

Long before the curse-spewing presidential elect Rodrigo Duterte turned this profanity into a statement of “cool,” I noticed how the youth may be the most irreverent but they’re not alone in being cavalier in their remembrance of Jose Rizal.

One of the quizzes I give to test students’ power of observation is to ask them to recall the heroes and historical figures featured in our coins and bills. While reviewing the mistakes I made in taking the quiz, I noticed for the first time how the profile of Jose Rizal is featured in the P1.00 coin.

Among the coins of lower denomination—P0.01, P0.25, and P0.10—P1.00 is the coin that’s most commonly used. It’s telling that I didn’t even remember the familiar profile before taking the pop quiz.

Passed on June 12, 1956, RA 1425 was posted on Vol. 52, No. 6, p. 2971 in the June 1956 edition of the Official Gazette. Viewed online on www.gov.ph, the law mandates the youth to read Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo”.

Section 3 directs the Board of National Education to translate the novels and other Rizal works into “English, Tagalog and the principal Philippine dialects”. It also stipulates that Rizal’s works should be printed in “cheap, popular editions” and distributed for free through purok organizations and barrio councils throughout the country.

In the 60 years since the passage of RA 1425, Section 3 remains a pipe dream, a delusion, even an unkindness. It is not just our failure to translate Rizal into all the mother tongues and make him accessible to the masses. Not even the absence of free copies of Rizal’s great novels of national consciousness in the barangay and pure.

The phrase that cuts is buried, fittingly, in Section 3: free copies of Rizal’s novels should be made available to “persons desiring to read them”.

Where do we find them?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettettabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu's June 19, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, "Matamata"