Christ in tears

Have you seen Christ in tears? I have. And I know the exact date, 03 December 2008 Manila, and I know the exact place, 4th Floor, Shangri-La Plaza at EDSA-Shaw Blvd, Mandaluyong City, the Philippines. It was a moment of grace. It was through the intercession of one of the Mandaluyong residents, and I thank him.

‘Christ in Tears’ is what I call Tony Meer’s painting of Christ that I saw on the opening evening of his 3rd 1-man show at the Shangri-La on Wednesday. This is a long-haired, bearded and moustachioed Messiah crying.

‘This is my Christ,’ Tony Meer says. ‘He’s not suffering. These are tears of joy. He is happy to sacrifice himself.’

I’ve never seen anything like it, I tell Tony Meer, in awe. Christ in tears. I’ll be damned!

Here are images of Tony Meer's other paintings in exhibit - photos by Tony Meer's boys.

Look at cool Looc guys celebrating

Happy Birthday, Roman Romeo Nagpala!

18 November 2008. Your age is a great number, 69, and very significant, very meaningful, and very graphic. Here are some of your friends celebrating - you can't see me because I'm the one shooting all you guys. Later, when we meet again, you can identify the faces and I'll type in the names. The sinigang sa hipon was great. The broiled tilapia was great. The skin of the lechon was great - at first. The evening was great. Actually, I took about 150 shots.

Wanted: A New Chancellor for a Cash Cow College

The image is apt: You see a modern-day building of the 100-year old University of the Philippines Los Baños, and beside it a gnarled at-least-50-year old acacia tree growing – the old alongside the new. I took that photograph on Valentine’s Day last year in a moment of admiration. The old sheltering the new. One typhoon and that tree toppled to the ground, roots up; it's gone now. For everything, there is a season, a time for the old and a time for the new. Tree today, gone tomorrow.

For the last 50 years, I’ve been in and out and around the University of the Philippines Los Baños; notwithstanding, for the last 36 years, since 1972, when this Cow College became a University, I’ve never had any avid interest in who becomes the UPLB Chancellor. I also have not been interested in answering the question, ‘Quo Vadis, UP Los Baños?’ Until now. Today, I think of them as one question and one question only: ‘Quo Vadis, under Who?’ When choosing a leader, the chooser is the master.

In her August 20 column, ‘Choosing the next UPLB Chancellor’ (At Large, inquirer.net), Rina Jimenez-David of the Philippine Daily Inquirer brings out the questions and answers in the current competition for the position of being the next Chancellor of UP Los Baños. She names two candidates (lady first):

Candida ‘Ayds’ B Adalla, Professor of Entomology, 2-time and 1st woman Dean of the College of Agriculture of this great University.

Luis Rey ‘Rey’ I Velasco, Professor of Entomology, ending his first term as Chancellor of UP Los Baños.

Actually, there is one other candidate (uplb.edu.ph):

Felino ‘Fel’ P Lansigan, Professor of Statistics, Research Fellow of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA).

Discussing, Rina did not mention Fel and I won’t either. From where I sit, this is a classic battle of the sexes, the lady on one hand and the gentleman on the other, Ayds versus Rey. And I feel privileged that I have known them both personally. Both have strong personalities.

Rey was only that high when I was boarding at the Velasco’s Dorm in the middle 1960s, when P50 was good enough for a whole month of meals (except breakfast). His father, Jose Velasco, a good man, already a name in our Cow College at that time, didn’t mind me, a boarder, eating with the rest of the family, and I wasn’t a relative either. He had a scholarly mind, and I minded that. Many years later, I remember Rey favoring the Philippine Agricultural Scientist (Philippine Agriculturist) with much-needed funds for producing the journal, for the purchase of computers, if I remember right, in that office where at that time I was an associate editor helping out Editor in Chief Ofelia K Bautista work for the journal’s ISI-accreditation by producing, at my end, well-edited, (almost) letter-perfect camera-ready copy. ISI is the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for technical journals. We succeeded in getting the journal to be ISI within a year, I think, thanks also to Rey’s assistance – that journal is heavily reliant on computers for editing, reviewing and desktop publishing the manuscripts.

Ayds was one of my students in Horticulture at the Cow College in the late 1960s when she was First Year. I gave her a grade of 1, as I did Vic Ladlad. Many years later, I was pleasantly surprised as well as intrigued no end to learn that Ayds had become Dean of the College of Agriculture and Vic had become an NPA commander. One chose academic freedom, the other political freedom.

Did I as instructor do something right – and something wrong? My wife says each one of us chooses his/her own path of life. Did not Ayds Adalla and Vic Ladlad choose theirs and differently? I remember only that I was teaching the class of Ayds and Vic how to think for themselves even as I showed and told the young minds via the lab exercises in the field about methods sexual and non-sexual – yes, I am referring to the multiplication of the species.

So, what else is new? In case you don’t know, I must explain that in the propagation of plants, sexual refers to the use of seeds for planting and non-sexual (technically, asexual) refers to the use of grafts, buds, marcots, stems or leaves to multiply the tree, vegetable, or ornamental. Sex of those species is not that interesting, no.

Now then I can say that this time the battle for the next UP Los Baños Chancellor is also sexual – The Battle of the Sexes. This is exciting!

In her Inquirer column, Rina chooses to pit the male against the female on two different aspects (my reading of Rina): leadership potential and a record of (alleged) wrongs and rights, and Ayds wins hands down – I will let it be. Rina is entitled to her views, and I am entitled to mine. While no longer a young man, I would rather dream dreams and see visions.

Now then, I will judge the two better candidates on the basis of a vision: UP Los Baños as The Great Asian University of the rich, for the rich and by the rich – rich in ideas, rich in innovation, rich in opportunities for the poor (and inarticulate) to transform science not only into a piece of paper to get an employment but more so into an entrepreneurial system for the small man with a family, that which is not necessarily a small family. As a Roman Catholic, this is the only family planning I believe in – a father, mother, children all together planning for a family-size enterprise. (I’m much interested, because I’m not very good at this.)

The way I see it, UP Los Baños should be the Asian leader for education not simply for employment but more so for entrepreneurship and not simply in agriculture but also in food. I’m dreaming of the Asian Center of Knowledge in Food and Agriculture – for employment and entrepreneurship: I can dream, can’t I? In fact, what is wrong with UP education is what is wrong with the whole Philippine educational system: as a horse on a saddle, it is blindly led towards employment and almost totally ignores entrepreneurship.

I have learned by email from my good friend Jerry Quibilan that Senate President Manuel Villar once had a dream for one million entrepreneurs – what happened to that dream, Mr Senator? Did you suddenly wake up and realize that it is an impossible dream? Precisely! That’s why we must dream – what is the value and excitement of dreaming if we dream only the possible? UP Los Baños used to be called, in derision, a Cow College. I say, let us make UP Los Baños a Cash Cow College – where everyone learns to be an entrepreneur and not simply a job-seeker, a higher-class seller of wares or, worse, a be-degreed intellectual mendicant. Why do 3,000 Filipinos leave for abroad everyday? It is a measure of our success as educators! Our universities have successfully trained them to look for jobs, and when they can’t find them here, they look elsewhere. So, if we consider OFWs modern-day heroes, then heroism begins in the classrooms of our universities. Me, I’ll look for my heroes elsewhere.

Rina Jimenez-David writes that under Chancellor Velasco, the UPLB Chancellor has frozen the delights of students to hold their own student body elections, that is, ‘students rights have been curtailed.’ Actually, rights can be curtailed only if they are not exercised, if nobody dares to exercise them. Who was it who said? ‘There are no tyrants where there are no slaves.’ Jose Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines. The exercise of a right comes not from the law but from the one who exercises such a right. As far as the executive is concerned, a human must be respected – but, when it comes to human rights, first of all, as far as the human is concerned, a right must be exercised.

Have there been ‘demoralizing events’ in UP Los Baños under Velasco as Rina reports? Of course there are. The whole country has been suffering from one demoralizing event after another – so, what else is new? We Filipinos are the ones who demoralize ourselves. If there is a ‘continuing suppression of labor rights,’ that only means there is a continuing non-exercise of labor rights by labor. A right is not a gift; rather, it is an exercise.

If there is at UP Los Baños ‘a prevalent atmosphere of cynicism and frustration,’ that is because we cultivate it. In any University, it is not the Chancellor who cultivates cynicism, not to mention elitism – it is the constituents who do. If the leader is bad, why should the followers follow?

Will the selection of Ayds Adalla as the new Chancellor signal ‘a new direction for the University’ – a new beginning? Only if the UP Los Baños staff and students see the wisdom of a new beginning. Also, that depends on what kind of new beginning. I have yet to see a Chancellor of this University come up with new ideas on how to make UP Los Baños relevant to the needs of the times – as dictated by the needs of the people, and not as dictated by the needs of the professors in their chosen, respected, tightly guarded disciplines. As in the whole of UP and indeed of all the kingdom of science, the approach to science for development has always been top-down – I am the top, I tell those of you at the bottom what to do because I know better. I know my discipline right side up; I am up-to-date in my knowledge bank; I am the one with the postgraduate study from a prestigious university abroad, not you, got it?

And the ladies and gentlemen of Congress who don’t have a PhD either? On the subject of which way out of poverty, they also have the belief that they know better. The Battle of the Sexes goes on. Their proposed law on reproductive health in fact looks at marriage as a battle of the sexes, the wife having as much right to her body as the husband. Family is family; if you equate poverty with the number of children in the family, you have reduced matrimony to a matter of money, downgraded an institution much valued by our society if not by your belief.

Is man-made family planning your best law? That’s the problem with man-made laws.

I know Ayds Adalla is a Roman Catholic, Couples for Christ; she and her husband were pioneers in Laguna in propagating Gawad Kalinga (‘Give Kingly’ is my translation) - in those good old days, they had to bake cakes and biscuits to sell in order to raise funds. GK is telling us: Pay good attention, people. Build up communities, not build down families. Even as I am a Roman Catholic with 12 children and only 1 wife and no extra-marital affairs of any kind, and I own neither a house nor a car nor a motorcycle, I have no quarrel with science – but I do have a quarrel with scientists who think they know better. In a public forum this year organized by UP Los Baños (with Rey Velasco as Chancellor) at the height of the rice crisis (with Ayds Adalla attending), one of the scientists’ main proposed solutions to poverty is to control population, aka reproductive health, and that’s when I publicly asked a rhetorical question, which was also a challenge to all scientists and scholars who thought mostly in terms of economics:

Is man-made family planning your best science?

UP’s Choice.

The Blue Ocean, Or As You Like It

The first time I heard it, it was a bolt out of the blue. Director General William Dar, Team Captain of top-performing ICRISAT, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics based in India, had suddenly asked us while we were enjoying a lull during the April 2008 National Dryland Agriculture RDE Conference held at the Clark Special Economic Zone in Pampanga (for a report, see my ‘The Drylanders’ in my blog), ‘Do you know what a Blue Ocean is?’ No Sir. ‘Then you don’t know what a Red Ocean is either.’ No Sir. William Dar had been reading, learning; he was a graduate of UP, the University of the Philippines. He was trying to teach us something. As for you, what you don’t know can hurt you. As for me, another UP grad, sometimes I don’t know everything.

Four months later, here comes the story of still another UP grad, Johnlu Koa, a Chinese Filipino who hit upon a Blue Ocean idea of selling hot pandesal (the favorite Filipino bread roll) in the unholy hour of midnight – and that was 16 years before the concept now called ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ was broadcast to the world and made popular by a book researched for, brainstormed & written by W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne with the title Blue Ocean Strategy and the subtitle How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant (2005, Harvard Business School Press). Johnlu’s midnight-snack strategy made him a local millionaire; Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean strategy made them international millionaires – the book sold 1 million copies in its first year and has been published in 41 languages (blueoceanstrategy.com). It's an idea whose time has come.

Johnlu’s pandesal strategy and Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy have exactly the same idea: Create a new or different market. Blue Ocean comes with Red Ocean. Perfect, pretty metaphors. A Red Ocean is where competition is bloody, where the waters turn turbulent and crimson; a Blue Ocean is where you are your own competitor, where the waters turn pacific and sapphire and gold. The only difference is that in Johnlu’s case, the innovation is in the market niche, not the product, pandesal, which is already of proven value. In the case of the Blue Ocean Strategy, the product may be an innovation itself, like CSI, the stunningly successful TV 3-series series that is in a class by itself. I know because I watch all 3; I am part of the market niche that CSI Miami targets best. This is TV marketing at its best.

No, the Blue Ocean Strategy is not ‘finding the hole in dough of opportunities’ as Margie Quimpo-Espino puts it in her article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer issue of July 20, page B1 – from the same dough, it’s either baking a different bread, or baking the same bread but finding a different market niche, which is what Johnlu did. (In the electronic version of her story dated July 19, MQE has it right right in the title, 'How The French Baker started by creating his own market,' inquirer.net. That tells me something about editors of broadsheets and electronic sheets.) Unless there's quality control, like consumer goods, not all stories are created equal. On the other hand, stories not being equal can bring out a Blue Ocean story. (And in this case, not all editors are created equal.)

Johnlu had approached the management of the canteen at the Meralco headquarters in Pasig City, and he was told that somebody else was already supplying them pandesal for breakfast. Oh. If you can’t solve a problem, change the problem. For breakfast? The usual. Johnlu thought: How about if I supplied them bread in the dead of night for the midnight shift? The canteen owner said Yes and to deliver the bread a little after midnight, at 0130 hours. Sold!

At that time, Johnlu was his own driver and delivery man, earning from himself a monthly salary of P750. That’s why he created the job in the first place, to earn money from his labors. The only difference was that in creating his job, he created jobs for others. That is the multiplier effect of entrepreneurship. May Johnlu’s tribe increase!

Did Johnlu enter that market niche because no one wanted to serve it? No. It was that only he saw that market niche; it was that only he was the innovator, the Blue Ocean strategist of the midnight hour. He made himself competitive by not competing.

Pandesal is a popular early morning and mid-afternoon snack in the Philippines, and always comes with coffee. The name ‘pandesal’ or ‘pan de sal,’ which means literally ‘bread with salt,’ suggests a Hispanic origin of this bread roll. If so, this is one Spanish legacy we Filipinos can thank God for.

With the market cornered at Meralco, Johnlu took his midnight pandesal to other institutional clients near his Honey Bread bakeshop: Mercury Drugstore, Unilab and Abbott Lab who had their own breadless midnight-hour shifts. Man can live by bread alone when it’s midnight and he has to stay awake and work.

And with that, he was on his way to becoming a young millionaire in a Blue Ocean he himself created from out of the chaos of bakers, suppliers, delivery boys and hungry mouths.

In 1989, when Chinese Filipino billionaire Henry Sy was building another megamall, the SM North Edsa mall, he invited Johnlu Koa to put up a branch of his Honey Bread bakeshop and at the same time come up with something new. That is to say, Henry Sy himself had been thinking Blue Ocean Strategy even if he didn’t have a name for it. Johnlu came up with The French Baker. He had been visiting Paris a few times and become enamored with French baking. Johnlu’s French Baker did the baking right in the shop, where the smell of fresh bread was coming from somewhere, so you could be sure your bread was hot from the oven. In the afternoon, they would offer the unsold bread at bargain prices, so that there would be no stale bread the next day. All the innovations made Johnlu Koa a Blue Ocean millionaire at 28.

Today, The French Baker has 36 shops. And today, Johnlu Koa is thinking Blue Ocean Strategy again – baking up in his mind the idea of a 3-times-more-expensive-than-usual kind of the bread, which he calls Lartizan. He already has one shop recently opened, the Lartizan Boulangerie Francaise along Jupiter Street in Makati City. He’s going after the Triple A market, which is under-served. If I understand Johnlu, Lartizan has something to do with the popular notion of a return to nature, a return to wellness as a proactive choice and not simply having one’s disease treated as a reactive non-choice. A Blue Ocean innovation of a product in another under-served market.

A Blue Ocean you create is where you are lord and master, where if you told the waves to be quiet, they will obey you.

Johnlu Koa credits part of his huge success to his alma mater UP for his knowledge – he graduated cum laude from UP Diliman with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration in 1979 – and for giving him his network of friends and acquaintances. Johnlu is only being diplomatic. UP teaches a student neither to be an entrepreneur nor to create a new market where there was none before. UP has and can teach only what it enjoys: academic freedom, not economic freedom, not financial intelligence.

Credit must go (no pun intended) to Johnlu’s father, who loaned him P 50,000 in 1989, with which he set up Honey Bread in Kapitolyo, Pasig City. Aside from pandesal, Honey Bread made hamburger buns, hotdog buns and other bakery stuff. His parents had wished to put up a bakeshop, having attended several baking classes.

And he was inspired by a bakery in Cubao, Quezon City, near where the Koas lived before, where young Johnlu would buy bread as baon (take school) and who noted that the bakery was always buzzing with activity. The friendly neighborhood baker must be doing something right!

And no, Johnlu Koa didn’t stop with his midnight pandesal success; during the day, he would work in a little conference room that he transformed into his R&D workplace, experimenting, baking new things from his own dough. ‘One dough can do so many, and it’s fun!’ he says. The Blue Ocean Strategy calls that value innovation. I call it creativity. Creativity is making dough while you’re having fun.

When Johnlu was already earning ‘hundreds of thousands,’ his alma mater UP invited him to teach marketing. He accepted. ‘I had a chance to practice what I had been teaching. I experienced how to work for somebody – a school.’ A graduate of Business Ad teaching Marketing? Sometimes UP makes a great mistake. He had started his own business because he didn’t want to study first and then look for a job later; what he did was create himself the job, and then he went back to school – as a teacher. That’s funny, because almost everything UP teaches you is employeeship, the mentality of a hired hand, which is not very intelligent. So, yes, whoever hired Johnlu did one right thing – UP could learn from the genius of its own students!

Then now-UP President Emerlinda Roman hired him as College Secretary. Nobody knows what was going on in the mind of Roman, but we know what was in Johnlu’s. ‘I was a young instructor dealing with 60-year-olds. It was an opportunity to learn how to run an organization.’ He was in charge of 2,500 students, 80 faculty and 100 staff. No Blue Ocean strategy came out of this experience – not from Johnlu, not from UP.

Johnlu profited from the experience. Now, did UP learn from Johnlu’s lesson of the midnight pandesal? I think not. UP officials weren’t sitting in class when Johnlu was teaching.

One thing I have learned from all this is that the Blue Ocean Strategy, which is creative thinking and doing the doable that is not being done, is applicable outside of business, such as inside science, inside journalism, inside university.

In any case, is UP interested in using its head and teaching students the Blue Ocean Strategy? Ah, if its Centennial history serves me right, I see my alma mater UP is interested in teaching its students only one thing; I see Red Ocean – where the business is defined and the territory is confined and therefore over-populated, where everybody is trying to steal the market from everybody else, where there is fierce rivalry, where the rule is Survival of the Fittest, where there is fighting, where there is blood.

Will UP ever learn?

Avoidance of Relevance.

Did you know UP is as American as apple pie?

UP, the University of the Philippines got its new Charter in April 29 and celebrated its Centennial in June 18, Manila time. Too young to matter much, too old to matter more.

A loyal UP graduate, I did not attend the celebration of the Centennial of my alma mater at UP Diliman in Quezon City. I forgot. You can’t blame me: I’m 68. A fool too old to mind. Now that UP is 100 years old, is it any wiser, or is it just another old fool?

Inadvertently, my absence at the Centennial celebration turned out to be a case of my avoidance of irrelevance. And so still I feel good, as otherwise I, graduate of UP Los Baños, would have had to witness those 100 naked UP Diliman play boys running the gauntlet of male and female starers and see-and-tellers gathered on campus. Flights of flesh, flights of fancy. The flesh was willing, the flesh was weak. They called it the ‘Oblation Run’ (Marlon Ramos, inquirer.net). Were the 100 play boys all from UP? Nobody could tell, as they all wore masks. For sure they were all boys.

I say to those play boys: You show your physical attributes and yet are ashamed to show your face? To display one’s physical attributes has never been part of the UP Mystique; it’s not a mistake, as smart UP sculptor Guillermo Tolentino showed in his original UP Oblation, those genitals showing – those which UP President Jorge Bocobo put the fig leaf on (Wikipedia), that which was a mistake. But, as UP Law scholars should know, nudity is irrelevant and immaterial to the UP case.

And so I feel better, as the Inquirer report says the Oblation Run ‘steals the show in UP Centennial activities.’ I never approved of scene stealers.

If naked this way comes is the way scholars celebrate the founding of a University and make a spectacle of themselves, I question the intellectual credentials not of the scholars but of that University. If the students have not learned, the school has not taught.

The UP Centennial? Stateside, what else! Made in the United States of America. It was on June 18 of 1908 when Yankee Governor General William Cameron Forbes signed the ‘Philippine Bill,’ as recommended by the American-dominated Philippine Commission, into Act 1870, officially creating the University of the Philippines. So you see, the Americans did not create Jose Rizal as the National Hero of the Filipinos: they created UP as the national university of the Philippines. It was Yankee W Morgan Shuster, Secretary of Instruction, who in February 1908 presented the ‘Philippine University Bill’ to the Philippine Commission, who readily approved it (Fernando A Bernardo, 2007, UPLB: A Century Of Challenges And Achievements, Los Baños: UPLB Alumni Association). So, UP is as American as apple pie! We Filipinos owe the Americans our democratic ideals; we even owe them our education. Thank you, Yankees!

So, my missing out on the UP Centennial celebration wasn’t really a big deal, even if it happens only once in a lifetime. The University of the Philippines has become irrelevant – the UP intellectuals have seen to that. (Since the Americans designed UP, you can blame the avoidance of relevance to the American intellectuals too. Note also that the Americans are avoiding the relevance of climate change.)

And the new UP Charter makes sure relevance does not matter to this University at all! From the title ‘An Act To Strengthen The University Of The Philippines ...’ to the ‘Effectivity’ clause (Section 31), it’s all of 5,341 (Word 2003 count) – and there’s not a whisper of the word relevance. Since the UP Charter reflects the mindset of its authors and their associates, allies, advocates, I say they all suffer from a fright of identifying with the people. ‘Relevance,’ according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is ‘pertinence to the matter at hand’ and ‘applicability to social issues.’ Do I take it that from now on UP is to avoid social issues lest its theory become pertinent and its practice become applicable?

If naked UP Diliman comes, can UP Los Baños be far behind? The uplb.edu.ph website shows a bare title ‘University of the Philippines Los Baños: UPLB’ and displays the naked slogan, white text exposed against a nude red background: ‘Iskolar ng Bayan: Tunay, Palaban, Makabayan!’ Scholar of the State: True, Militant, Nationalist! This webpage alone is a study in relationship, if not in communication, if I’m not mistaken. Consider the following:

UP Los Baños is a University spoken for by students? That’s not news to me. All UP is spoken for by students, period. It happened in my time too, when we students thought we knew better than our professors. For instance, I was the boy who cried wolf, the one who wrote the open letter ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ that mocked the celebration of Loyalty Day (in that Cow College then) and declared it to be loyalty to the Americans during World War I – and I signed my name. My (double) mistake. That open letter made me persona non grata to UP Los Baños alumni and their allies. I have forgiven myself, thank God, if some people will never ever forgive me. Like so, many of the young are brash and foolish. Old hat. Been there, done that. Sorry.

The UP Los Baños homepage is telling me that Truth, Militancy, Nationalism are the bedrocks of this UP campus? I always thought the 3 pillars of UP Los Baños were Instruction, Research, Extension. So what’s the relevance of the 3 new pillars to the old 3 pillars? In this campus, I majored in education; I suppose I need more education on this.

So, okay: Is Truth a proper study of Science? Of course. ‘Science is the search for Truth,’ says Linus Pauling, a (double) Nobel Prize winner, for Chemistry in 1954 and Peace in 1963 (Thomas Blair, harvardsquarelibrary.org). And I say Religion is also the search for Truth. Albert Einstein did not profess to any religious faith either. I admire Pauling and Einstein, but if I have to choose, I’ll pick Science and Religion anytime.

What about militancy? ‘Militancy is having a combative character; (being) aggressive, especially in the service of a cause’ (American Heritage). You can be relevant and militant at the same time, but it all depends on your cause. My causes are Truth, Beauty, Goodness.

What about nationalism? ‘Nationalism is devotion to the interests or culture of a particular nation’ (American Heritage). That’s fine with me; I have no quarrel with that. Still, globalization is upon us all, not to mention global climate change – all that renders nationalism relevant but narrow. It’s territorial imperative all over again. That’s why I admire Ateneo University and the National Hero of my country, as the Jesuits never taught Jose Rizal love of country; instead, they taught him love of people; they taught him not nationalism but internationalism.

The problem with nationalism is: Your nationalism or mine? The University of the Philippines has 7 campuses – UP Baguio (located in Baguio City), UP Diliman (Quezon City), UP Los Baños (Los Baños, Laguna), UP Manila (City of Manila), UP Mindanao (Davao City), UP Open University (Los Baños, Laguna), UP Visayas (Iloilo City). The new UP Charter was signed by Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo April 29 this year at the UP Visayas Cebu College campus. Why the strange location? Because Diliman, Quezon City is hostile environment to GMA while Cebu City is friendly territory. Birds of a feather flock together; some birds just peck on the others.

Now that UP has its own Charter Change, will the noisy half of UP intellectuals advocate for and stop opposing a national Charter Change? I half-expect it.

Of the UP Charter, I have a pdf copy that I downloaded from the UP Los Baños website and transformed into a Word 2003 document. And why did I do that when our Core Two Duo desktop PC with 2 GB of RAM is good enough for Adobe Reader 8 that is good in what it does? Because Word 2003 is a better reader to a writer who wants to work directly with the text. After I transform the pdf into a doc file using Word 2003 tricks, Microsoft’s Bill Gates counts the words for me. With Word 2003, I can zoom into the text say 500% with a single mouse click; I can split the window into 2 or more; I can easily copy text. I enjoy what I’m doing, researching and writing, and Word 2003 is a genius to my genius.

What’s more, when you enjoy what you’re doing, Serendipity surreptitiously walks in the door and you discover things you never expected. And that’s how I have come to know that the UP Charter is, would you believe, half serious and half funny! Consider these:

The Charter says ‘The University of the Philippines is hereby declared as the national university’ (Section 2). In my view, that is because UP itself has failed to assert its role as The National University in fact if not in name – it has failed to provide ‘distinctive leadership in higher education and development’ (quote from the Charter, Section 3). Now UP can claim the title it deserves in theory but not in practice.

The Charter says UP is ‘a community of scholars dedicated to the search for truth and knowledge as well as the development of future leaders’ (Section 3). Truth is there for all to admire, but not a word about Beauty and Goodness, my goodness! I must blame Jun Lozada for this; for all his crusading, he has made his claim for truth stick in the minds of priests and preachers, senators and scholars alike. Jun Lozada must be a good non-preacher preacher, not that his truth agrees with me.

Missing out on the 3 universal ideals – Truth, Beauty, Goodness – what’s the matter, ladies and gentlemen of the Philippine Congress, as well as activists for the UP Charter: You don’t appreciate that Holy Trinity? Or, nearer home, you never heard of Rotary International? The Rotarians know that truth is not enough. In any case, that’s what I told the Rotarians the Rotarians knew when I was invited in by Jerry Quibilan as a guest speaker last May 19, Monday, of the mother club Quezon City Rotary, where Dante Liban is President. I told the distinguished gentlemen that I noticed the Rotary 4-Way Test talks not only about Truth (‘Is it the truth?’) but also Goodness (‘Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?’) – and, I said, if you combine truth and goodness, isn’t that Beauty?

Unlike Jun Lozada from many a captive audience of his, I didn’t get the applause I expected from my captive audience, so it shows that Truth, Beauty and Goodness are appreciated only half the time.

I don’t have a problem with that. But I have a problem when the UP Charter speaks of the search for truth and knowledge. Unlike the wise guys who authored the UP Charter, I can’t separate truth from knowledge. I can’t separate chaff from grain either – you can’t have rice without one of the other. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Actually, there’s more where that comes from. Consider that the Charter mandates that

The University shall lead in setting academic standards and initiating innovations in teaching, research and faculty development in philosophy, the arts and humanities, the social sciences, the professions and engineering, natural sciences, mathematics, and technology; and maintain centers of excellence in such disciplines and professions. Section 3 (a)

Whew! Can you read that in one breath? You can avoid relevance by being wordy. The quote, this essential part of the UP Charter, does not pass Frankenstein’s 4-C Test; I give it 1 star out of 4 stars possible. It is Concise, but it is not Comprehensive, not Clear, not Coherent. I’m inspired to give it another C: Chaotic.

There is Instruction (Teaching) as well as Research – but where is Extension as the University’s 3rd main function? Has the UP Charter reinvented the University and cut off its Outreach duty and responsibility? Starting with UP President Emerlinda Roman, do I understand that from now on UP is giving scant attention to public service? That UP is not supposed to extend the truth and knowledge that it discovers ‘to enrich the lives of all citizens’ (quote from extension.uiuc.edu)? I am unhappy to note that the Charter enumeration that begins with ‘the arts and humanities’ and ends with ‘and technology’ is a laundry list. I didn’t know Philippine legislators are henpecked.

There’s more. Note the Charter emphasis: ‘maintain centers of excellence in … disciplines and professions.’ This is another avoidance of relevance. In law, it’s called an escape clause. This is setting a dangerous University tradition, a law encouraging the professors to mind their own business, in this case, their disciplines. This must be the territorial imperative, as I remember Robert Ardrey calling it. Attachment to ‘an area of space’ (quote from amazon.com) is animal instinct and, of course, man is an animal. So, while UP knows what it knows, law is on the side of UP as it is not obligated to maintain centers of excellence based on the disciplines or professions that are to totally immerse in collaboration, integration, not obligated to summon synergy. It’s a triumph of mortal law over moral law. When the law is not against you, it’s with you.

‘Maintain centers of excellence in … disciplines and professions’ – by such declaration, the UP Charter minders remind us that the pixels are more important than the Big Picture, the pieces of the puzzle are greater than the Big Puzzle. That is to say, the new UP Law is effectively against the Law of Holism, which states that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Excellence is not in the details; it is in the whole.

And there’s more in all those 5,341 words. The UP Charter ‘recognizes the separation of Church and State’ (Section 9). Since the brains of the Charter separate the physical (Reason) from the metaphysical (Faith), I believe UP is bound to search only for half the truth, because Reason is one avenue to the truth while Faith is another. That is my faith.

One last word. The Charter says UP is dedicated to the ‘development of future leaders’ – but this country can’t wait; it needs the development of present leaders now! Growth is a process, so UP training in leadership must begin in high school and leaders must emerge while in college; after college is too late. By that time, it would not be surprising that the students would have learned to lead only in holding parliaments of the streets, or talking people down, or doing writedowns, not writeups. Been there, done that. Half of UP graduates grow old looking too highly of themselves and you know, if you are a UP Professor, you can teach only half of old dogs half of new tricks.

And by the way, I did notice it was a full moon when UP celebrated its naked American-made Centennial. THAT NIGHT, IF YOU LOOKED UP, YOU WOULD HAVE SEEN A NAKED FOOL’S MOON.

UP Los Baños historical faces

History to remember, faces to recognize

Buy this coffee-table book
Centennial Panorama: Pictorial History of UPLB
and you get this text book free
UPLB: A Century of Challenges and Achievements

The inspiring past you can see in photographs and stories of these 2 books by an alumnus, Fernando A Bernardo, former Deputy DG of IRRI. You can read the story of UP Los Baños in the stories of the men and women who became pioneers and leaders of this University, one of the finest in the country and in Asia. The many old photographs alone are worth browsing. UP Los Baños is the only University in the Philippines that celebrates a Loyalty Day every year, on October 10. It has won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding.

Other distinctions of UP Los Baños include:

· High passing rates of graduates

· Originated the concept of ‘development communication’

· Has an AgriPark & Science Park

· Here occurred the most perfect rescue of POWs (1000+ foreigners) in history, with Filipino guerrillas participating

· Studied bioethanol from sugarcane before World War II

Notables among UP Los Baños graduates (past):

· 2 UP Presidents: Bienvenido Ma Gonzales, Emil Q Javier

· 3 Secretaries of Agriculture: Salvador Escudero,
William D Dar and Domingo F Panganiban

· NEDA Secretary: Cielito F Habito

· Commissioner of NIST: Jose R Velasco

· Secretary of Labor: Patricia Santo Tomas

· Civil Service Commissioner: Patricia Santo Tomas

· Secretary of Science and Technology: William Padolina

· President of UP Open University: Cristina Padolina

· President of UP Open University: Felix Librero

Notables among UP Los Baños graduates (current):

· UP President: Emerlinda R Roman

· Chancellor of UPLB: Luis Rey I Velasco

· Director of SEARCA: Arsenio M Balisacan

UP Los Baños, a center of scientific journals:

UPLB has the highest number of world-class (ISI Web of Knowledge-accredited) journals in the Philippines, 5 out of 7:
Philippine Agricultural Scientist (with OK Bautista as Editor)
Philippine Entomologist
Asia Life Science
Philippine Journal of Veterinary Medicine
Philippine Journal of Crop Science (Frank A Hilario as Editor)

UPLB Alumni Association to the rescue

When Fernando A Bernardo was about ready to write the 100-year history of UP Los Baños, he came to the realization that it would be ‘doubtless a monumental undertaking,’ considering the number of years covered. It was such a challenge to the writer

because researching, reviewing and appreciating 100 years of written and unwritten accounts of the problems and tasks, the hardships and vicissitudes of life in a remote area, and the travails and triumphs of the leaders and faculty of this institution in spite of all odds is doubtless a monumental undertaking. With libraries and archives that were burned during World War II, one would expect old but important publications and documents missing.

He decided he needed external assistance. So he approached Pids Rosario, President of the UPLB Alumni Association, for support. Rosario asked that a coffee table book be also produced in the same breath, a pictorial history of UP Los Baños. Agreed. That is how 2 books came about from one historical research:

(1) UPLB: A Century Of Challenges And Achievements
(2) Centennial Panorama: A Pictorial History Of UPLB

The first book is mostly text, the second many old and rare photographs and text. Both books are for learning from the past.