In the aftermath of a provocative question concerning the essence of the University of the Philippines, this text unfolds as a brooding meditation on the contradictions entangling this institution. It chronicles my disillusionment awakening to realities obscured behind mythologies of equal opportunity and self-actualization. As critical perspectives reveal systemic inadequacies rooted in chronic underinvestment, active hostility towards intellectual dissent, and the University's own complicity in perpetuating the "Miseducation of the Filipino," a nuanced reckoning emerges. One transcending convenient narratives that pay lip service to high-minded ideals whilst dismissing inconvenient truths of compromised academic integrity and stalled societal progress. Herein lies an exploration of the complex identity of an iconic national university, suspended between enduring as both standard-bearer of endangered enlightenment values and casualty of wider sociocultural indolence. Delving into the implications of its precarious state for the dreams of Iskolars seeking redemption for the nation's fractured psyche.
The question, so polite in its banality, nonetheless grates: “What is the University of the Philippines like?” I mutter something anodyne while resentment simmers within at the implicit expectation to summarize an entire ecosystem of compromise and discontent into a tidy package, a commodified “brand”.
Few care to confront the true nature of this once-proud institution, now crumbling under the weight of neglect and scorn from the very powers charged to nurture it. To speak plainly of the University of the Philippines is to speak of the failure of the academic endeavor in our benighted nation. It is to speak of the lie of meritocracy in a society rigged to benefit insiders. Of chronic underinvestment and willful sabotage by political forces at best indifferent, at worst actively hostile, towards the life of the mind. The University of the Philippines stands as a monument to the broken promises of Philippine society itself. One must develop a taste for tragedy to seek truth here. But most prefer the comfort of conventional platitudes over interrogating inconvenient realities.
So I temper my response.
We are known for our academic freedom, and the assertive pursuit for truth that comes with it. We claim we have produced a thousand figures that run the country, consistent with the institution's ethos to 'shape the minds that shape the nation'. However, the truth is that we do not have much at all – in fact, we lack even adequate student spaces. Our budget, dependent as it is on ever-diminishing government funds, continues to be slashed yearly, strangling what little remains of the institution.
What I failed to tell kuya R is we try so hard to pretend otherwise, vowing to soldier on, insisting that we will continue to make do with what meager resources have not yet been snatched away from our grasp.
And even as I mouth these half-truths, my inner cynic snarls in contempt at such gestures for redemption. In the quest to survive, the University of the Philippines has had to mimic too closely the very forces that have driven it to the brink. Craven administration coddles the corrupt while ignoring pleas to preserve integrity. Demoralized students prioritize status over substance, becoming adept at sycophancy, excuse-making, and empty rhetoric.
Like the nation that spawned it, the University of the Philippines has squandered its proud heritage of scholarly excellence and free inquiry. We are left to sift through the debris of institutional breakdown and the stench of abandoned principles. Perhaps meaningful reform will arrive in more enlightened times. For now, disillusionment – at least for me – reigns, and understanding true purpose feels ever more like trying to unlock mysteries in a strange and dying land.
The question continues, even if the answers grow more difficult to discern. That stubborn persistence, in the end, may be the truest measure behind the essence of the University of the Philippines – whatever idealism still flickers in the Filipino heart that finds refuge here, tended by lost souls who persist in believing that knowledge and justice should rise above power and greed. I suppose this is what the University of the Philippines is like – both a casualty of national dereliction and a lone standard-bearer of endangered values worth fighting for.
. . .
My undergraduate journey is shadowed by a persistent lack of resources from the University, a specter that materializes at pivotal junctures, shaping the boundaries of my potential. In stark contrast to those heirs of privilege, born into the lap of generational wealth and elite circles, my path is one of inventive struggle. Relying on external institutional scholarships and the modest earnings from my internships, each stride I take is carefully measured, a silent promise to tread lightly and not weigh down my parents with additional burdens.
How many promising talents, I often wonder, have withered, unripe, for want of this same, dogged resourcefulness? There's a coldness in my recollection, an absence of sentimentality, for an alma mater that offered little beyond the skeletal framework of an education. I remember, instead, the self-driven grind: the scrappy, calculated moves for learning experiences and neglected problems of scale my university indifferently overlooked. Budget flights booked, modest rooms found, all to attend workshops at Columbia, Oxford, Singapore Management University, Washington DC – ambitions crafted solely from my own blueprint through the guidance of mentors. What might have unfolded, had I spent those four years in halls more liberally steeped in intellectual spirit, rather than in a perpetual scramble for the mere scraps of academia?
Between hurried intervals foraging knowledge amid understocked libraries and jostling for dangerously outdated equipment in dilapidated labs, iskolars glimpse pristine images of youths our age at universities elsewhere. Their days unfold in arched halls of well-funded plenitude: technology continuously upgraded, libraries drowning in subscriptions, mentors with time to nurture their minds. As talents thrive in carefully curated hothouses, we persist as weeds poking through cracks, determined to bloom nonetheless.
And so I drift through the university’s gilded tales of equal opportunity and self-actualization, the pronouncements ringing hollow against infrastructure crumbling from government indifference. What remains is a proving ground where dreams germinate or perish based on individual hunger. Any striving beyond the minimum mandated by degree relies on the enterprising student cobbling together resources for upward mobility through sheer will and improvisation.
Perhaps this enforced adversity breeds a grit that soft coddling precludes. Had I simply been handed all I needed to excel, would fear of squandering that investment have pushed as hard? When a safety net exists, would I develop the relentless drive that comes from knowing that the net was never there in the first place?
I watch carefree peers coasting on familial wealth, gliding from campus to connections cultivated for generations. For them, this place offers a respite for self-discovery before inevitable ascent. Meanwhile, the rest of us claw upwards through parallel trenches: scholarships parlayed through sleepless overworking into opportunities auguring fresh hopes. But chances to prove oneself remain yet rarer than those assumed as natural rights by golden children. Beyond the university’s gilded veneer, ground reality reverts to an arbitrary sorting machine, determining fates based on background over merit.
And so I cannot in good conscience offer the usual bromides here – meritocracy mythology, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps nonsense, or other intellectually dishonest platitudes. Everything from baseline healthcare access to basic dignity flows along channels carved by advantage and power, not equitable distribution of talent and character. Ahead promises only endless siege, wrestling for each minor advance.
One might wish this University could claim as its sole redemptive grace that it serves as on-ramp for mobility, an engine hustling strivers to escapes previously unglimpsed. Yet even half-realizing such dreams relies solely on that hunger kindled in those who grasped early that within these grounds no hand would uplift them over walls of scarcity barricading their horizons.
Everything gained was through the mercies of patrons who saw potential however obscured. My experiences overseas may have polished me, but all these could not conceal the peripheral origins trailing my presence like a stray shadow. How many of my peers endured even deeper privations without ever attracting similar fortune?
. . .
The specter of Renato Constantino's The Miseducation of the Filipino haunts all discourse concerning our failure to cultivate true national consciousness and sovereignty. Long before buzz terms like "decolonizing education," Constantino meticulously delineated how colonial indoctrination conditioned generations to servility by eroding cultural memory and self-esteem. His excavation of the methods by which American occupiers engineered compliant subjects powerfully foreshadowed Foucault's theories on forcefully manufacturing consent. Students molded into reflexive deference towards hegemonic worldviews would emerge with identities fragmented and invalidated – perceiving even the English language itself as a gateway to assimilating into white-centric hierarchies.
Constantino laid bare the roots that endure in the Filipino psyche today – servile towards foreign influences, insecure expressing nationalism, and incapable of framing communal issues beyond individualistic solutions.
We lacerate Constantino’s ghost by avoiding confrontation with the painful truths he unearthed. To this day, the systems of our education evade responsibility for their own complicity in replicating structures of intellectual servitude. Voices demanding systemic reform remain marginalized despite glaring urgency. Students are deterred, both explicitly and through insidious signaling, from interrogating received verities around Western academic models, administrative approaches, and metrics of intellectual authority. Those seeking to advance alternative models of scholarship and knowledge face immense internal resistance from stakeholders invested in existing hierarchies.
Thus the systems of our education continue derelict from their duty to catalyze societal investigation of our damaged psyche’s roots. It largely mimics the same forces it ought to critique, thereby failing both its students and the nation it supposedly serves while reproducing sins of mis-education. This abdication of responsibility to heal deformities of identity and purpose instead perpetuates the mechanisms by which generations are conditioned towards fragmentation, denial, and self-disdain.
The University’s timidity towards confronting its own unacknowledged yet pervasive issues ensures Constantino will continue haunting its undiscovered country like an avenging ghost. Only direct redress through open discourse and reform on his identified pressure points offers escape from this purgatory. With each act of evasion, Constantino’s caustic diagnosis of education’s destructive complicity will only grow more definitive and unavoidable.
And so students continue experiencing the University of the Philippines less as a nurturing cradle of promising talent than a proving ground for grit. Every ambition comes saddled with doubt in its prospects for realization. To publicly voice yearning towards some national transformation or sociocultural renewal invites reputational costs and alienation. Instead the pragmatic student internalizes survivalism – milk the degree then exit for other shores where prospects seem less stifled.
The University of the Philippines produces top-tier researchers, yet strangulates their homegrown intellectual traditions and knowledge forms. It celebrates graduating cliques tight-knit as tribes, yet actively obstructs their mobilization towards solidary purpose beyond individual advancement. For all its pantheon of distinguished faculty both foreign and local, their cumulative wisdom fails to permeate the passive learning by disempowered multitudes. So the masses depart taking only what personally resonates with them rather than a shared agenda of national renewal that was never openly excavated nor debated during cramped intervals between institutional requirements demanding compliance.
Perhaps our systems of education simply reflects wider realities, rather than sustaining its own distinct responsibility. Philippine society at large touts admiration of prodigious sons and daughters claiming global stages, yet withholds equivalent material support nor elevation of their status and security back home. Talent thus becomes export commodity rather than abundant capital reinvested towards the common uplift.
But surely the nation’s premiere institution of advanced learning cannot excuse its complicity so easily by pinning blame entirely upon ambient culture? At a minimum, such a locus of scholarly discourse and youthful energy might seed spaces encouraging exploration of the very questions and frailties which haunt us – if only we are not so actively discouraged and rendered taboo. There are reasons the best works dissecting damaged aspects of our still-colonized psyche emerge mainly from overseas academia more welcoming of sharp introspection concerning internal power relations and inequality.
Perhaps the specter granting the University of the Philippines no peace even as it hastens far away is precisely all the unreconciled inquiries from brilliant youth over the years, whose restless doubts and hopes for meaning beyond individual security went unheeded. They crash against the gates urging action towards alignment between knowledge and consciousness, thought and collective liberation. But finding no entry, their restless force accrues as a perennial battering tide.
Until direct admission is offered, Constantino's sentinel shade will stand ward over their turbulent clamor. Shielding those seeking refuge for their inquiries until the gates open to meet the streaming mass. Only then may the University of the Philippines yet transmute itself into the fertile delta where channels of talent merge as a surging current. Awakening society from languor towards overdue reckonings and realignments with destination horizons obscured for too long.
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