Where Students Fear to Tread
Ask anyone to describe UP, and you’ll never get answers not coupled with the word activism. In UP it’s always students versus the administration.
And that’s basically partly what’s wrong. We commit ourselves in pickets not because we care, but because we childishly just have to maintain a tradition, even if that means having to compromise our ideals and values.
Perhaps we students think too idle that we get effortlessly won over by the sweet remarks uttered by the student-leaders themselves, and join the activist bandwagon without thinking again. We grouse against the issues because we think thoughtlessly of their immediate consequences on ourselves, and not on their payoffs for the whole University in the long run. This nonchalant behaviour, unknowing of the future, is a manifestation of our own abject stupidity and wide egocentricity.
In the perspective of a common student—a student who typically draws observations only from what he sees and hears—what I saw was, behind the cajoling remarks spat by our student-leaders, there was concealed a propaganda, how dark no-one really knew, that somehow wanted really badly to suggest and impress on every mind that each step the administration takes is a wrong move, always a trap to manipulate us and always a manoeuvre to benefit them. Two years is enough to transform and give you sense to scrutinise when you’re in an activist community. But I must say that two years is also enough for me to learn to scrutinise the very same people that taught me to set indifference aside.
The University would not issue a policy if it had no basis. We are pressed for money, time and other factors. We cannot afford to wait for our sluggish government, which itself cannot manage to pay its debt, to subsidise us. In times like this we cannot afford to stand high with our pride, and for once just have to give way.
If we fear that moving to a large class, with which currently the students are not acquainted, will altogether boil down to undermining the quality of education, then we have to take actions in the gentle, legal way. We don’t have to unleash our collars and growl like a vicious dog as we always do. After all it is an issue about the implementation of the large class policy and the relative progress of the university, and not whether the chancellor is a double-dealing shark and his son a jerk.
Largely, maybe the problem here is not whether the University has a sucky administration, but that essentially we students fear to succumb to change. The University works to effect change, not to profit. They are professionals, not just an anywho picked up somewhere and then put to work. If we keep going on thinking shallow and superficially, then the very purpose of our efforts are put to waste, and the prospect of progress we long to have, gone for nothing.
The students themselves said that the University does not receive enough subsidies. But three years ago when the administration proclaimed an increase in tuition and other fees to back itself, for we’ve complained it doesn’t receive enough, some students self-defeatingly went off to protest against it. And now that the administration tries to make allowances for all by proceeding for large classes, we still act like babies wailing in the dead of night.
Activism is a welcome view in a difficult time, but if it is also one that dismisses certain realities a little too easily, then it’s activism for the wrong cause. If we line up in the streets shouting like hell but do not live up to what we fight for, then we Iskolars ng Bayan does not after all deserve the name we’re credited with. Lastly, we always sing the UP Naming Mahal, with the left arm raised, but then again, I ask you: do we really sing with conviction?
The statements I drop here may be considered a rubbing of a stone against another stone. But, when everything seems so wrong and gets overlooked, I guess we just don’t have a choice but to have to resort to that.
