RAYMUND FERNANDEZ
Professor Madrilena de la Cerna remembers it as the “college that refused to die.” At one point in its history, the Philippine Congress “forgot” to include this state run Junior College in the national budget.
This was after its students protested the actions of a local Congressman.
This led to a closure of the school, albeit temporary.
One would have thought this would leave a scar, a lesson perhaps, against the very idea of protesting. But not quite.
By the end of the 1970s, at the height of martial law, the students of the University of Philippines Cebu College, now known simply as UP Cebu, made a name for itself by establishing through protest actions its Student Government.
It was the first college under the UP System to do so after the martial law declaration. And so it did and still does have an impact reaching beyond the natural limits of its size and scale and the natural rationale of its existence.
Having a UP unit here is a way for Cebu and the regions to get back service for the taxes they pay.
It gives local citizens the obvious benefits of having an alternative to studying at the National Capital. But there is really the fact and principle of liberal and secular education, which is the true brand of UP education.
People seldom talk of this.
It is a complex issue.
But some Fridays, I see students praying with a priest under trees at one of many gathering places here. And then I remember something about the ultimate benefits of states not favouring one religion over others.
It is the only condition by which all persuasions, religious or not, freely thrive. It is not true that God is not here. In fact, all the Gods gather here regularly and freely.
“Freely,” is a good key word. It was the first thing I realised when I became a student here in 1976.
By then, I had spent four years moving from one school, one university to the next, searching. I had grown to hate schools.
And yet, after breathing in my first whiff of the local air, freely, I decided: Here was the best place to find myself. By the mid 1980s I was teaching here.
I am now making ready to retire as a professor.
Without even thinking about it, I may have spent the longest chapters of my life here. But this is not tragedy.
I have learned to be free here. I have learned the value of freedom. It is a value I try to teach.
And freedom is inevitably a little big thing, like candlelight revealing itself inside the big darkness.
UP Cebu is a little university that refuses to be small. Inside the 30 years or so that I have been here as a student and then a teacher I have seen this place grow to what it is now from a school where classes were held under the cover of acacia trees, becoming in due course little huts we called gazebos.
It took a while for regular classrooms to be built. This was a place that struggled hard for every facility, every little piece of advantage, it ever had.
There is no student who has ever passed through here who does not carry a meaningful measure of discontent. It is what marks us. And one must wonder if we all realise how it is this discontent which drives us forward and makes us what we are.
This was never a place that was easily led.
Every administrator who ever led this school deserves a medal. Each one most likely carries a scar already.
There was always a ferment here, intellectual and otherwise. It takes a while to understand its value in the search for truth and how this same peculiar ferment gives us the capacity to dream things that seem possible only in the realm of imagination; in fact, the capacity to imagine the impossible.
It was this same ferment which made UP College Cebu earn its simple name: UP Cebu, autonomous unit of the UP System, nationwide. If in 1976, someone said it would ever happen, the immediate reaction would have been, You’re dreaming!
And yet, here we are. If only for being here, from being “a small college that refused to die” to what UP Cebu it is now and will become, we might as well call ourselves the very embodiment of the act of dreaming, one hundred years of celebrating it – this act of dreaming.
More names of dreamers than can be contained here, but see how well they fit and happily inside one name, short, simple, and sweet: University of the Philippines Cebu.