Corona earns UST doctorate

MANILA, Philippines - At 62, Chief Justice Renato Coronado Corona, who was conferred the degree of Doctor of Civil Law by the University of Santo Tomas yesterday, said he wants to set a good example to the country’s young people by inculcating the value of education.

Speaking before the start of the Solemn Investiture of the candidates for degrees of the University of Santo Tomas-Graduate School at the Puerto Real in Intramuros, Manila, Corona said the youth should continue acquiring new knowledge and new information in devoting their energies to the discipline of the mind.

“I think that’s important - the intellectual infrastructure of our country of the next generation,” he said.

Corona was one of the youngest magistrates ever to be appointed to the Supreme Court on April 9, 2002.

“You might be asking why a justice of the Supreme Court is still studying, I think that it’s important to emphasize to our young people the importance of studying and learning new things,” he said.

“Education does not end in the classroom. In fact, when you graduate, that’s the only time that you start your education,” he added.

The STAR’s Helen Manalansan Flores and former Malaya reporter, now Cavite provincial prosecutor Emmanuel Velasco also obtained degrees in Master of Arts in Communication and Master of Laws, respectively, in the same ceremony. 

In his Address of Thanks, Corona said the heart should be involved in education because education will mean nothing if it is directed at the mind alone.

“How many brilliant people, with fancy degrees and titles after their names, have we met with no heart, no conscience and no moral values?” he asked.

“At the end of the day, we must accept the fact that our education carries an unavoidable moral burden and a grave social responsibility to God, to our fellowmen, to our country and to our society,” he said.

Corona said education is not simply a matter of ingesting information or of committing facts and figures to memory, but the forming and stimulating of the mind not only to think but to think correctly, and most important of all, to choose rightly, wisely and well.

He also took the occasion to recall the times when his mother used to take him and his two brothers to the UST Museum where they were “awed and inspired.”

Since then, he said several members of the family have graduated from UST.

“But there is yet another reason to feel a pardonable sense of pride in this accomplishment: the four Presidents, the three Vice Presidents and the six Chief Justices of the Supreme Court who graduated from this eminent institution and whose illustrious paths I am extremely privileged to follow,” he added.