U. P. Double A

A considerable segment of the Filipino community represents a large portion of our literate population. The use of the ever familiar “You Pea” (U.P.—University of the Philippines) to catch the attention of this reading audience might be just plain self-serving. So, OK, we learned a few things about marketing at Teachers’ College. But would it be so bad if some of those learned alums of the prestigious Philippine institution parked their minds right around this column on Mondays? No reply necessary.

U. P. came to mind this week when I chanced on remembering that Manuel L. Quezon, Philippine Commonwealth president and solid patron of this premier State University, particularly its flagship Diliman campus, just had his 140+ birthday anniversary. We used to remember Quezon in school for his brilliance and nationalism, he of the “I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans” fame. In my youth, U.P. was associated with brilliance in individual achievements and excellence in government service. Mind you, that was when I was young!

Last week, I learned that the UP Alumni Association of the CNMI was raising funds to donate a furnished school room in a High School in Calamba, Laguna. I was impressed and moved by the effort.

I must confess that I had been a UP groupie since I finished high school, though the only shadow I cast on its venerable halls was when I was visiting my puppy love attending the pre-nursing school. On occasion, I also tried catching my boyhood buddy at the law school when he was not too busy hazing a neophyte to his fraternity.

I turned 14 when I entered 11th Grade, the first year of college in the Philippine educational system, patently too young by my mother’s reckoning to be left alone in the free market of illustrious and dubious ideas. Besides, while Papa was off to graduate school abroad, my mother could only afford to get my sister and I to attend school in the alluring big city of Manila was through a Church-related institution where we qualified for scholarship. My heart was at U.P. in more ways than one! Later, U.P. would institute an adopt-a-student-program. My sister and I both ended up finishing at a provincial teachers college. My sister later managed to attend U.P. grad school as well as graduate her daughter from the U.P. College of Law, magna cum laude, so I vicariously participated in their efforts and accomplishments.

It would be later, on the tail end of the Marcos regime when the government acceded to a World Bank funded environmental project in the Visayas that focused on decentralization and local autonomy, that I got back to hanging out with U.P. alums, mostly from the agricultural station at the Los Baños campus. I was involved as a consultant in the organizational and community development component of the government project. At an initial symposium held at the Silliman University campus, I was addressed as a “Doctor,” and in a radio interview, was asked “what course I finished and what year I graduated from the University of the Philippines.” The joke among my colleagues, usually over a case of San Miguel beer, was that I was setting up all this mistaken identification so that the faculty members of the UPLB sociology department would be forced to foist upon me an honorary degree. By then, my love-love relationship with U.P. had settled into a chuckle-correction-dodge routine. This would be repeated many times over, especially when I participated in the Asian Development Bank funded effort to extend low interest loans to credit unions and cooperatives at the onset of the Cory Aquino administration.

Needless to say, these mistaken identifications were not something I shied away from. The coup d’grace occurred in Hawaii. There was a group of active U.P. alums at the University of Hawaii, and in the mid-90s, while acting as a volunteer Community Liaison for the newly landed Philippine Consul General, I was again mistaken as a U.P. grad by those who frequented the Consulate. One prominent member of the alumni association actually sat me down as asked if I would consent to being made an honorary member.

In 1995, U.P. started its distance learning program with the Open University. I’ve actually toyed with the idea, but in the sunset years of my academic life, it seemed like it would only serve the requirements of the ego. Then again, this old goat may pick up a second wind and remain related to academé until the waning years of second childhood. Hey, these are new times, and I am definitely one of the people!

But back to the UP Alumni Association of the CNMI. For many voluntary organizations, pride in recognition often overwhelms the native sentiment of confidence in service, which is often the original impetus on why such unit of civil society is organized in the first place. But particularly among Filipinos, the pride of recognition is gladly worn up one’s sleeves. Over polishing of such pride often undo group unity and foster divisiveness when recognition oversight hits personages who think their contributions should have been properly acknowledged.

I had written and spoken on other occasions that there’s a new breed of descendants from the Philippine archipelago who are irreverently street-smart and globally oriented. They are proud in the diversity of their heritage, and are not hung up in pealing off the onion skins of colonial accretions to their personalities so that they can discover their true souls. In fact, after all the skins are peeled off, there is hardly a core left but the last layer of skin! They are focused in their loyalty to an emerging reality and order, and seek their vocation and identity in their life giving expenditures in the future, rather than their identification with the glories of the past. They see the need, they zero in on the deed. Don’t matter who gets the credit. I call them Pinoys.

I am sure there are Pinoys with the UPAA. And when they decide that in addition to assisting the classroom needs of the kids “back home,” they also add the requirements of their sons and daughters “at home” in the PSS of the CNMI, then they shall get a new rating in my book, U.P. triple “A.”