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”