The American Frank

Can UP Upbuild Itself &

Pick The Philippines Up?

Frank A Hilario
Copyright June 2006
Published by American Chronicle 29 June under the title
‘A Damaged Academe: How can University of the Philippines
Save the Ship of State?’
frankahilario@gmail.com

YUPEE/UP. UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES IS THE STATE UNIVERSITY: TODAY I REALIZE THAT THE FUTURE OF UP IS THE FUTURE OF THE PHILIPPINES, THAT’S WHY I’M UPSET. UP IS A DAMAGED ACADEME. Brilliant image from UP Baguio entitled ‘Oblation 2004′ at its website, upbyrbk.tripod.com/).

When it comes to material wealth, millions of Filipinos are below the poverty line. When it comes to UP, we’re below ground level, not above either. Do the anti-Gloria Macapagal Arroyo UP geniuses recognize that, admit it? Some UP geniuses (inside and outside the University) are in an uprising of mind as they believe GMA the President has lost her moral ascendancy to govern the country. On my part, I don’t know of many great things the geniuses of UP have done for the country in the last 100 years. What I know is that before you point to the mote in your sister’s eye, please look into the mirror first. Genius or not, you have to mind your upbringing – and history.

Historically, UP is the intellectual capital of the Philippines. It belongs in the upper class at the cerebral level. Many leaders of the country have come from this University. Perhaps the most brilliant UP graduate of them all was lawyer Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, Ilocano, who became the 10th President of our country. While in prison for having been charged in court for the murder of his father’s political opponent in Ilocos Norte, Northern Philippines, he reviewed for the bar and came out #1. Unbelievable? President Manuel Luis Quezon couldn’t believe it. When Marcos became President, he declared Martial Law, and millions of Filipinos rejoiced! It too was unbelievable. The Filipinos believed in the good side of Marcos, the good side of Martial Law. An Ilocano, I did too.

The non-radical intellectuals feasted on freedom and Marcos’ patronage and were creative and productive. (No, I wasn’t one of them.) Marcos himself pursued national development, via upholding the law on the national language (today called Filipino) in pursuit of building one nation, one spirit (isang bansa, isang diwa), and via infrastructure in pursuit of building bridges: linking the Filipinos to the world and to themselves (the arts), linking the Filipinos in the North to those in the South (the roads), linking the Filipino mind to the rest of the world as well as discovering more of the world (the sciences). At the Los Baños Science Community, through Presidential Decrees we got the systems and structures our experts dreamed of, among others the creation of the Philippine Council for Agricultural Research (PCAR), the National Institutes for Biotechnology (Biotech) with its own building, and the Forest Research Institute (FORI), where I worked as Chief Information Officer. Marcos understood the mind of a scholar – he was one.

It was the Philippines in Renaissance; the intellectuals and/or geniuses applauded; the whole world applauded. Until corruption got the better of the best. So, what else is new?

Today, how stands the Philippines among the Asian countries? Just look at UP and you will know. In fact, the whole world knows; at least the Asians know. In 1999, UP was ranked by Asiaweek as a lowly #46 among the universities in the whole of Asia. Based on its own grading scheme with a range of 1 pt (Excellent) to 5 pt (Fail), UP got a 5. In the very field where it was meant to be a star, UP was a supernova whose light was going out, its awesome energy spent.

Failure. I know all about it, having been a clear case of it myself. In UP, I was once a College Scholar; then I fell in love and stumbled and hurt myself, and so I got more than my share of 5s, so I was declared ‘Extreme Delinquent’ and got kicked out of UP – except that I was readmitted, thanks to Ms Filomena Campos, who went on to co-build with her husband Amado Campos the Central Luzon Agricultural College into the fine regional University it is today: Central Luzon State University. She wasn’t the power behind the throne – she was up front. In the Philippines, UP is the toughest University to graduate from for two reasons: (a) very high standards for student performance, and (b) terror professors too many for comfort – some of them even gloat when nobody passes their course! They all have a lot to learn. UP has a lot to learn.

In that same shocking year, 1999, when that Asiaweek survey came out, feeling upstaged for the first time, UP was in an uproar. So, a UP committee was formed to study the #46 problem and recommend a plan of action, short-term, long-term, today, tomorrow. A year later, in 2000, UP went down even more, downgraded to #48. UP couldn’t stand upright. Too late the hero? Like I was more than 40 years earlier, UP had clearly become Extreme Delinquent. UP used to be uppity, way UP there, #1. The Philippines was once the showcase of democracy in Southeast Asia: How can the country regain her lost glory? A State can be only as great as its State University. So: How can UP upgrade itself and be readmitted to the elite circle of Asian universities? First, it must learn what’s wrong with her.

Some people blame UP’s fall from grace on the lack of financial resources, low wages of faculty and staff, little research and publication outputs, and the Philippine Congress for cutting government support to UP by tens of millions of pesos year after year. The UP geniuses don’t blame themselves: they blame the budget-cutters, the national leaders, the big-time politicians.

I don’t blame them. I am a UP alumnus, Class ’65, graduating after having over-stayed for 2 years. I had quite a few failing grades myself in the hard sciences. I blame UP for wrong teaching – for instance, in my case, I hated the meaningless memorizing of technical terms (they called it ‘scientific’ names) for organs and organisms, fauna and flora, especially the fauna. Rote teaching goes on even today. UP taught me to be a good teacher – for my BS, my weighted average was 2.36 pt, which told me I was good enough, because my 5s had been factored in; I passed the Philippines’ very first Teacher’s Exam, 80.6%, which tells you I know my Education – and to me rote teaching is unforgivable. In fact, I feel like upbraiding UP for more mistakes than teaching the wrong materials and in the wrong manner, as well as in the wrong language – as I shall update you. UP must upgrade herself. Instead of too much patriotic love, perhaps go back to Platonic love and the Socratic Method of teaching/learning? The geniuses don’t have all the answers – they don’t even have all the questions.

UP was founded in 1908. What lessons has UP learned in its almost 100 years of existence? Let’s review the pertinent history of the State University – but not chronologically, because the disorder that I present intimates the future upheaval I’m aiming for:

(A) 2004: UP makes a historical sexual deviation. The history of this University shows that it has made many mistakes, so what’s another one?

(B) 1937: UP nurtures a historical fallacy. Almost 70 years ago, UP made a paradigm shift to constricted nationalism.

(C) 1987: UP ignores a historical correction of a logical error. Almost 20 years ago, UP made another mistake by rejecting the mandate of the new Constitution on the national language: That the old national language be supplanted with the new. At the very least, UP wasn’t paying attention to the language of the Cory Constitution. UP did not believe in Cory Aquino as Philippine President.

(D) 2006: Quo Vadis, UP? Having rejected Windows and embraced Linux and Open Source, can the UP System recover from the fatal errors she has made as shown in her history of log-ins and log-outs?

So now allow me, a non-historian, to write the modern intellectual history of UP, my Alma Mater, if briefly. I owe part of the idea of this article, of course, to the classic journalism piece of James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, specifically his article ‘A Damaged Culture,’ written only a year after People Power, in November 1987 after he studied the Filipino culture and found it unwhole. The Philippines: Sick. (If you like, you can email me for a free copy of Fallow’s article.) And how stands UP? The same, status quo, I’m afraid. Uppermost in my mind is that it seems to me UP has become irrelevant to the development of the country. It has paid too much attention to nationalism to the neglect of everything else. When I consider the error of her ways, I wince. UP is downright downlifting.

Now, the details of what I shall call The UP Problem.

(A) 2004: UP makes a feminine mistake.

In November 2004, the UP Board of Regents elected Ms Emerlinda Ramos Roman as University President. That was a big mistake. For two reasons:

First, you see, there are seven UP campuses all over the country (I list them here in the order of their importance or impact in the education of the Filipinos): UP Diliman, UP Los Baños, UP Manila, UP Visayas, UP Mindanao, UP Baguio and UP Open University. UP Diliman (in Quezon City) has the much-deserved reputation of being the intellectual capital of the University of the Philippines, so much so that when people say ‘UP’ they are referring to UP Diliman. You find many geniuses there. UP Los Baños is the only campus posing a challenge to the academic leadership of UP Diliman. You find not too many geniuses there. Now, if you didn’t know, Ms Roman comes from UP Los Baños: she finished her secondary education at UP Rural High School at UP Los Baños; she finished her BS in Agriculture at UP Los Baños. A blue-jean UP Los Baños product. She is a genius. Her ascension as UP President is a blunt statement to the effect that UP Los Baños can produce the leader that UP needs – and a woman, and the first woman at that! Just when UP needs salvation, from UP Los Baños comes the deliverer. I imagine the UP Diliman male geniuses wouldn’t want to think more about that. In point of fact, UP Los Baños has contributed 3 UP Presidents: Bienvenido Maria Gonzalez (1939-1951) (a genius unsung), Emil Q Javier (1993-1999) (a genius misunderstood), and now Emerlinda Ramos Roman (2005-2011) (a genius to watch).

Second, all the first 18 UP Presidents, all males, failed to look deep into the state of the State University; it took the guts of this lady to look deep, even deeper. Today, as the 19th UP President, having studied all her life at UP (Diliman for her MS and PhD), and having assumed office a year ago on the 20th of July 2005, Ms Roman knows more than enough to tell us that she wants to promote (a) UP as a center of excellence and a center of culture in the country, and she wants to run (b) UP as an efficient University. What a revelation! What that clearly means to me is that (a) UP is not a center of excellence and is not a center of culture in the country, and that (b) UP is not an efficient University. Not having really left UP for the last 40 years, I know she is right or, which is the same thing, I know I am right. UP is no longer the center of excellence, no longer the center of culture of the Philippines. UP needs a wake-up call from within. If you look into the comfort rooms of any office, you have seen the stark reality of efficiency, UP or down. What can you say about faucets and comfort room flushes that have not been working for weeks, months, years? Visit UP!

As it turns out, Ms Roman’s election as the first lady President of UP is a big but happy mistake of the State University. That is uplifting for UP; I’m male but I’m up in the clouds. There is hope for the geniuses of UP and the rest of us after all.

After the good news, the bad news. Now, let us go back in time and examine two major, sad mistakes of the geniuses of UP.

(B) 1937: UP begins to nurture a historical fallacy. And UP doesn’t realize it.

I already said that almost 70 years ago, UP made a paradigm shift to narrow nationalism. A logical mistake. UP failed to recognize an error when it saw one. This is how it happened:

In 1935, when Manuel Luis Quezon was President of the Philippines (which was then a Commonwealth under the vassalage of the United States of America), the first Philippine Constitution was passed. Among the many provisions of the Constitution was for Congress to ‘take the necessary steps towards the development of a national language which is based on one of the existing native languages.’ In 1936, Commonwealth Act 184 created the Committee on National Language; as an upshot, based on the Committee’s solid recommendation, in 1937 Quezon issued Executive Order 134 declaring Tagalog as the sole basis of the national language.

My question: Why a national language based on only one language when the Philippines had 100 languages more or less? Obviously, some people had upraised Tagalog as the best of the hundred, and well it might be: But that was beside the point. The point was to develop a common language. How did the languages of the world, especially English develop and grow? By borrowing from the languages of the world. I cannot assume that the Filipino geniuses of language did not know that. My question: Why did those geniuses not want to ‘borrow’ from our own rich heritage – languages, cultures, folklores, history? My answer: It was probably someone’s upmanship – or the resident geniuses weren’t thinking.

And so it came to pass that even the genius of UP was herself taken by the charisma of Quezon and she took to heart this new dogma of linguistic faith. I can imagine all was quiet in the Diliman front. And so the learning of Tagalog was imposed from North to South, East to West in the Philippines. And since Tagalog had always had a limited vocabulary, it came to pass that the passionate shepherds of the national language took it upon themselves to invent new words, the ridiculous, the sublime and paralytic. In high school, we were made to memorize the Balarila (Grammar) of Lope K Santos, and I hated all of it: those diacritical marks, those stressed vowels, those spellings, those quaint words. For all intents and purposes, Tagalog was not the basis of the national language – it was the national language. While I loved the Tagalog series Diwang Ginto (Golden Spirit) written and edited by Juan C Laya, there was no love lost between me and Tagalog grammar and vocabulary.

And what did UP do? It led the country in equating nationalism with speaking and writing in Filipino (Tagalog). Logical but limited. For the Ilocanos like me and the Cebuanos, Bicolanos, Ilongos, Pangasinenses, Pampangos, Muslims and all the others, for all these years, for all our getting, did we get understanding? No. We did get tired of it all. Especially the antiquated Tagalog translations of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. They wanted us to study ancient Tagalog, not the ancient wisdom of Rizal.

The hegemony of Tagalog as the basis of the national language lasted 50 years. Too long. The development of a national language was meant not only for our tribes to be able to exercise freedom of expression in one common tongue; it was meant to unite us. So, did the imposition of Filipino as a national language unite the 100 tribes in the country? President Manuel Luis Quezon won our tongues and hands but lost our heads and hearts. Like all hegemonies, the power of this one crumbled to dust over time. Today we are as united as one giant pail of one hundred live crabs, each one trying to get on top of the other. Led by UP, the universities in the Philippines embraced and would not let go an unscientific idea for half a century.

UP destroyed its own credibility by pursuing an illogical proposition: Equating Filipino (Tagalog) and its use with love of country. Is it that patriotism is the last refuge of scholars?

(C) 1987: UP begins to ignore a historical correction of a logical error.

Then the country woke up from her Rip Van Winkle sleep of logic lasting 50 years and declared the failure of Filipino based on Tagalog as a national language. This is on record – In 1987, the Cory Constitution, still in effect to this date, declared that Filipino, the national language, ‘shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages.’ That was a civilized way of saying, ‘The hell with Tagalog-based Filipino!’ History repeats itself. UP repeats its own mistake by insisting on treating Tagalog-based Filipino as The National Language. That’s bad; because Tagalog has a restricted vocabulary, when you think in Tagalog, your thinking is likewise restricted.

The last 20 years have been more than enough time for the geniuses of UP to have done something about further developing the language called Filipino on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages. Instead, it is as if UP continues to reject the 20-year old (1987) Constitution as it has continued to promote Filipino based on the provisions of the outdated 70-year old (1937) Constitution. Doing that, UP has rejected its role as the intellectual vanguard of the Philippines. UP has failed us Filipinos.

My theory is (as already explained elsewhere; you can visit my other blogsite, Filipination: http://filipination.blogspot.com; read also in American Chronicle my earlier article: ‘The Asian Flu, The Virus of Militarism & The Filipinos, a Separate Peace’), that indeed a common language will unite the Filipinos into one nation if that common language is developed out of the 100 languages of these 7000 islands. No more, no less.

(D) 2006: Quo Vadis, UP? Quo Vadis, Philippines!

From her hard disks, UP has erased Windows in favor of Linux; it has unloaded Microsoft Office and uploaded OpenOffice. Similarly, UP should now get rid of Tagalog-based Filipino, stop protecting it as a read-only file and send it the way of all trash. Delete! It is the intelligent thing to do. UP must set the national example.

I’m pinning that hope on the first lady President of UP, Ms Emerlinda Ramos Roman. I know a little more than you do about her because the other week I googled for bits & pieces about her and as a result I was able to write a different little biography of her for the Metro Manila Chapter of the UP Los Baños Alumni Association (I titled it ‘The Lady President Who Can: Dr Emerlinda Ramos Roman’ – you can email me for a copy if you like, in Word, or visit my blogsite at http://thewordaccordingtofrank.blogspot.com/).

In any case, she is an open book as far as her plans for UP are concerned; she has published a Presidential Decree, if I may call it that, of 22 pages, with the title ‘The University of the Philippines: A National University in the 21^st Century.’ (It is also readable at up.edu.ph/.) In it she notes ‘the formidable challenges’ that UP faces: ‘globalization, unprecedented scientific and technological achievements, new imperatives for national development, the worldwide trend to reduce government spending for higher education.’ She has her job cut out for her. She must; UP must; we must.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I can tell, UP rejects globalization, as if it were a USAID grant being offered on a silver platter. If I were UP, I’ll take the platter and run! You can’t fight globalization like you can’t fight City Hall – unless you were Don Quixote, who won the critics’ pen but couldn’t win a girl’s heart. In the Philippines, it can be said that globalization came in prehistoric times, when the first non-Filipinos reached the shores of these islands. Probably Chinese. If you like, globalization came when the Portuguese soldier of fortune named Ferdinand Magellan discovered these islands by mistake in the name of Queen Isabella of Spain. And so it was that Lapulapu was the first Filipino to reject globalization in the Philippines – he killed Magellan. But history tells us Magellan was not globalization himself. Lapulapu couldn’t stop Hispanization even if he was a brave man with a sword.

By ‘unprecedented scientific and technological achievements’ Ms Roman must be referring to the Internet, WiFi hotspots, genetic engineering, digital cameras, computer-generated and animated films, mapping of the human genome, cloning, objective-oriented programming, fuzzy logic. Now, where are UP’s scientific geniuses going as far as breakthroughs are concerned? I can guess – in all directions.

By ‘new imperatives for national development’ Ms Roman must be referring also to the raging controversy of where the Philippine government is going: Parliamentary or nowhere? UP has a voice but I haven’t heard it yet, except the shouts against the incumbent President, my President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. They want her out ASAP; they want the presidency down and up for grabs. Is that SOP? Is that how best to effect change: Kick somebody’s ass when you don’t like her anymore? Resign! is a barbaric yawp. (With apologies to Walt Whitman, whom Sourire reminded me of, flickr.com/). I would like to think of my Alma Mater as capable of being much more civilized than that. ‘When the country is in crisis,’ former UP President Francisco Nemenzo said on the day he retired from UP, 9 February 2005, ‘habitual faultfinding is counter-productive’ (sambal.upd.edu.ph/). From UP to UP: Take that!

And since Ms Roman realizes ‘the worldwide trend to reduce government spending for higher education,’ I expect her to advise the loud crowd of UP to stop protesting in the streets against budget cuts etcetera and start thinking of ways to raise the level of thinking on solutions rather than problems and ways to raise funds other than by marketing that piece of ground where we find UP Diliman. Diliman is sacred ground. What is also sacred ground is the brain, and its blessings can be obtained if we stop being hotheads and each uses his head like it’s been designed to: Think of the true, or the good, or the beautiful – or all of the above.

Otherwise, not unlike Frank Baum’s Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz, UP will continue to lead the Filipinos walking the Yellow Brick Road leading to the Wizard of dOze. Hopefully, the FILIPINOS WILL WAKE UP in another 50 years.

As for me, I’m not going England – I never liked the Bloody British except a few, like George Bernard Shaw and Cardinal Spellman and Princess Diana - but I’m going English. I have been going English for the last 50 years anyway, since high school. We Filipinos are the #1 knowledge workers in the world because we are so good in English we beat even the British, Americans, Canadians, Australians and all the rest of the English-speaking world in debates and elocutions. Ask Ms Patricia Evangelista, young columnist of the Philippine Daily Inquirer; she won over 59 other contestants in the 2004 international public speaking contest in London when she was 18 – the decision of the Board of Judges was unanimous, according to Board Chairman Brian Hanrahan from the BBC (Rodel Rodis, inq7.net/). A backward country beating all those advanced countries, my God, it must mean something. It does, dummies: English is our comparative advantage. The foreigners who hire Filipinos and who put up computer programming stations and call centers in these islands know that, even if the geniuses among us don’t.

The Philippines cannot go through the classical stage of agriculture to industrial development any longer – that’s history. Already there are too many competitor countries and their products are now here in these islands, all offered at competitive prices. What we should do is leapfrog everybody else, and we can do that only with information and communication technology, with knowledge management (KM). Knowledge will set us free from the chains of poverty, at the very least from backward-thinking. UP should know better. We need to uplink. KM is good for us because we are good at working with words, with ideas, for us, for others. If we use our heads more creatively, we can be subversive of the classical stages of development – the old idea that you have to develop agriculture first before you can develop industry – with KM we can catapult the Philippines into the 22^nd century in 5 years (would you believe 7?). I know it’s an uphill battle, but since we’re down, there’s nowhere to go but UP!

UP can lead us in this regard – unless the geniuses of UP are now afraid of being subversive.

What I have in mind is nothing less than an upheaval, UP in the lead:

One, the Philippine government pursues the vision of helping the poor millions through entrepreneurship.

Two, at the same time, UP learns and teaches about risk management using available and accessible knowledge in the fields of agriculture, business, fisheries, health, forestry, mining, education etcetera.

Three, at the same time, UP pursues the mission of uniting the hundred tribes in the islands by initiating the building of a database for a common language.

Fair enough? Tough enough!

For the Philippine government, the vision of a new entrepreneurship? Upfront, the Philippine government will lead us to a new vision: the Philippines on top of the world. I have a dream: 5 million family entrepreneurs in 5 years. Let the young see visions, let the old see dreams come true. Let us use knowledge as our capital, our mind as labor, and our genius as the tool for accessing the resources we need.

The formula for entrepreneurship? You cannot find it in the textbooks or in the schools of management but in real life. Look around you: Why is the American McDonald so successful it can multiply itself (and money) so fast? And why is the Filipino Jollibee thriving as a copycat? Because they have mastered the art of the franchise, according to Michael Gerber, author of the best-selling radical management book The E-Myth Revisited (2001, HarperCollins, paperback, 288 pages). Gerber’s thesis is that if you start your small business with franchising at the back of your mind, you are guaranteed to succeed – and you will be writing your own manual on paper or in your mind that nobody can copy. The beauty of the franchise idea, as re-discovered by Gerber, is that you can start small, really small, and yet you can dream big, really big. Buy a copy of his book today, or visit his website, e-myth.com. In the meantime, having read that one, I can summarize for you Gerber’s book in my own words, by saying that there are 7 elements necessary for you to succeed as an entrepreneur, and these are your: (1) primary aim, (2) strategic objective, (3) organizational strategy, (4) management strategy, (5) people strategy, (6) marketing strategy, and (7) systems strategy. And you know what? You don’t need to go to school or attend a seminar to succeed as a franchising entrepreneur in the Gerberian model. And in the meantime, Gerber’s little book on big ideas has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide.

I said 5 million Filipino family entrepreneurs in 5 years: that’s the vision. I believe in the Filipino family, that’s why.

UP to learn risk management and teach it? It would be a lesson UP will never forget. Farming is a risk and that’s how it should be taught. Business is a risk and businessmen know that – UP has to risk to learn to mind its own business. Fisheries and forest products are a risk – we have dwindling resources. Health is a risk – we have to learn to be well in body, mind and spirit even as we battle real and imagined enemies. Nobody is studying risks except the financial sector here and abroad – it’s time for UP geniuses to learn from financial geniuses.

UP to pursue national unity via a new common language? Isn’t Filipino enough? No. It is not the solution but the problem. So what if it is a beautiful, intelligent language? It is not intelligent enough; it is not beautiful enough – the Ilocanos like me, the Cebuanos, Ilonggos, Chavacanos, Muslims, Pampangos, Pangasinenses, Bicolanos whoever, we have not been able to identify with it for the last 70 years (not for lack of trying) – and it has resulted in even more divided loyalties.

I propose another national language, and I would like to call it by a lovely name, the beautiful Filipinas. Following the 1987 Constitution, we shall now develop Filipinas from out of the 100 languages we have in these pearls of the orient seas. And UP can lead in this. There is absolutely no need to invent words to reflect local and modern experiences – we have 100 languages to pick from. Our vocabulary will be richer theoretically 100 times! The English language is probably not that rich. This is real nationalism, words and ideas and cultures elevating themselves and merging into one language, coming from the ground UP, literally. A new nation will be born because the people will be united in spirit and in truth as they jointly and joyfully come out with a common tongue to speak terms of endearments to themselves and to the world. A dream come true. To help make the dream come true, all the schools have to do, inexpensively and almost quietly, is create any number of Filipinas subjects or courses regular and elective so that in a single year millions of students are active participants in this, the Filipino Renaissance, the greatest Filipino revolution ever – the intelligent creation of a modern language by the pooling of the genius of 100 tribes. I have already called this pooling of Filipino genius Filipination. Sounds crazy it just might work!

Now, this genius isn’t finished. I have two propositions.

One, why not declare English the Philippines’ national language for commerce, science, education, communication, industry? I’m upbeat about this. Filipino is out of date and out of sync – for instance, how can you teach the basics of computing to a child in Filipino?

Two, why not declare Filipinas (not Filipino) as our national language for culture, for nourishing our immature nationhood? We will build Filipinas as our common language from scratch; as we do that, Filipinas will slowly and surely become the national language of the Filipinos as it is enriched with words and ideas from the hundred cultures of the Philippines. At the same time, we can also be creating our own Filipino English, enriching the language, enriching ourselves, enriching the world.

English I say. One of the criteria for the Asiaweek judging of Asian universities is the number and quality of publications in world-class journals. (Asiaweek is dead but the stamp of inferiority on UP does not fade.) How can you publish in a world-class journal if your brilliant thoughts are in Filipino? You can translate, but something (great) is always lost in the translation. Perhaps you can talk and write about computer animation in Filipino, but can you program in Filipino? Can you do research in biotechnology in Filipino? Perhaps you can program in fuzzy logic in Filipino, but how can you sell that software outside the country?

UP Diliman is not really in a dilemma, needing to choose between two evils: GMA or bust. All she has to do is GROW UP! When UP does that, this country will too.

I repeat: English is our competitive edge. My challenge: UP knows its David Ricardo economics, but now the Filipinos are asking her: Will you lead us to profit in practice from the theory of comparative advantage? Ms Roman graduated from UP Diliman with a doctoral degree in Business Administration, so I hope the UP Lady will shout a resounding Yes! Remember: 18 male UP presidents have all essentially failed; this time, will the female of the species prove deadlier than the male? It’s the Lady’s call and I’m waiting with bated breath. Otherwise, I shall have to forget her and turn my attention to another UP genius.