Each time a University of the Philippines (UP) student is killed or arrested in a military encounter, I am asked why our classrooms breed radicals. There is nothing wrong with cultivating an intellectual disposition that goes into the roots of things. But academe equally obliges its participants to subject their convictions to critique and rational argument, without fear of ridicule or exclusion.
We do bear an unspecified responsibility, however, for the decisions our students make later in life. This education equips them with competencies essential to society’s division of labor, but their stay in the university also forms them into the kind of persons the nation looks for in its leaders. And that comes with a cost.
Having lived most of my adult life in the university—as student, instructor, professor, faculty regent, and now emeritus professor—I have seen the many ways in which UP both reflects and shapes our nation’s self-understanding. Teaching and research are the university’s core functions, but they are not all that it does.
A national university worth its name performs the role of the public sphere, the nation’s “Plaza Miranda,” where social realities and ideologies, and the large questions of policy, leadership, and citizenship, are rationally debated. UP claims a central place in this sphere. It defines the issues and sets the tone of national discourse, navigating politics, the economy, science, and the media without being bound by any of them. In this role, it sometimes thinks of itself as the nation’s conscience.
In such a setting, academic life cannot be confined to the classroom and the laboratory. It spills over into student organizations and publications, forums and discussion groups, the rhythms of extracurricular life, and the expressions of public opinion in the streets and in the communities.
Students who come to pursue a professional career end up not just with an engineer’s or a lawyer’s diploma, but with the capabilities and attitudes that qualify them as leaders, engaged citizens, and thoughtful human beings. We call these traits “Tatak UP,” with no small pride, even if the label is sometimes a source of discomfort for parents and employers who prize conformity above all.
It would be too much to ascribe all of this to UP. The university is fortunate to attract each year a generation of the top high school graduates from across the country, who come with their own expectations of a well-rounded education. UP’s role is to provide an environment that fulfills those expectations while tempering them with the discipline of reason.
We typically think of the role of the university as consisting of two functions: research and instruction. Both are vital to the emergence of a modern society and provide the rationale for state support. But there are other, lesser-known responsibilities that modern society has come to expect of a university, writes the sociologist Jürgen Habermas.
The first is the cultivation of those “extra-functional” abilities and attitudes that have become part of expected professional qualifications: the capacity to exercise authority, to take decisive action in urgent situations, and to assume responsibility for actions taken. The second is the critical interpretation, transmission, and further development of the cultural tradition of the larger national community. This function is crucial to a nation’s continuously evolving self-understanding, no less important than the technical knowledge the university passes on.
There is a third function, often less acknowledged, that universities have come to play with the emergence of the public sphere: the formation of students’ political consciousness. By this I do not necessarily mean an antiestablishment orientation, but a frame of mind that has political consequences. It is an awareness that arises from understanding the fundamental causes of a society’s persistent problems and the structures that reproduce them, and from the yearning to participate in social transformation.
A student may pick this up in a GE course in politics, sociology, history, or economics. But it may also come as a personal realization in any subject, or in a nightlong discussion in a dormitory room. This is not a process the university systematically plans for. An apolitical consciousness, inward-looking and focused on gaming the system of grades, can equally result from a brief stay in the university.
The most urgent accountability for what happened in Toboso belongs elsewhere, with the state and those who command its weapons, and with the inquiries now underway. The question I ask here is smaller and turned inward. It is the only question I can answer with confidence.
For every student who leaves school or the professional path to join the underground, there are many others who go through the rituals of professional qualification aspiring to nothing more than becoming a billionaire before 50. For both, the university must somehow bear some responsibility. Those of us who teach carry something we do not always like to carry, and it is the likes of those young UP students tragically killed in Toboso, Negros Occidental, that most reminds me of its weight.
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