U.P. Beloved

I never learned to sing that song, U.P. Beloved, during my three and a half years at the Diliman Republic. I did, though, learn to sing other songs there, like Bayan Ko, and the National Anthem with clenched fist upraised. You learn a lot of things at U.P. that’s not part of the curriculum, and that you don’t learn in other, lesser, schools.

I am a lifetime member of the U.P. Alumni Association, although I don’t attend homecomings (my press release is that I’m "too young" to be attending homecomings), like the one set for Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Bahay Alumni. Thus this is the time for nostalgia about Diliman, and the piece by fellow alumna Malou Mangahas brings back many fond memories. I’m sure the sentiment will be shared by many of you readers who have passed that way too, especially those "old enough" to have experienced Diliman in all its activist glory. I almost did not make it to Diliman precisely because of that: my mother believed I’d turn communist for sure if I went to U.P. But fate and the duplicity of some nuns at the school I was made to attend thankfully and happily steered my path towards Diliman anyway.

Despite some dubious alumni now in government besmirching the university’s good name I am proudly a U.P. graduate, veteran of the ikot and the blue book and the "infirmatay", of picnics at Balara and going to American Lit class dripping wet because it had rained on our picnic, of the rare times in my life I tried the femme fatale routine to get out of being hauled off to the campus police headquarters for having protest leaflets in my history book. I was never arrested but was dispersed a couple of times at rallies on the steps of Palma Hall, then the AS Building, one of the few intsiks then who attended rallies. I was an English major–one of only a handful at that time when English was burgis though spoken, correctly, without any twang, forced or otherwise–and to prove we were not "irrelevant" we joined boycotts and on-campus marches and teach-ins. Our tambayan was the FC (Faculty Center), where one of our professors, on study leave in the US, let us use her office. Along those corridors walked some of the best minds I’ve ever encountered, writers and scholars who brought the ideas of Shakespeare and Milton and Thoreau and Descartes alive and made them relevant to a country in turmoil and to young minds struggling to make sense of it all. It was a good time, and it was a good place to be, our U.P. Beloved.