“Anti-communism crusader Lorraine Badoy should help expose the communists in UP.”
These are sad times for the University of the Philippines.
The recent Times Higher Education’s World University states that UP is no longer the number one university in the Philippines.
As a regular observer of developments in my alma mater, I believe that UP’s slide to second place in the Times list is a consequence of what UP’s administrative and academic personnel, and contemporary UP students, have been busy with.
The UP charter mandates that the state university should educate its students, make them leaders in their chosen disciplines, and produce outstanding research.
Under ideal circumstances, therefore, UP should produce graduates imbued with impeccable or nearly impeccable theoretical and practical skills and acumen, and generate research output which adds to existing human knowledge.
That may have been true in the past decades, but it isn’t the reality today. Instead of academic pursuits, many UP faculty and students have taken the wrong path through internecine politics and communism.
Many of the current crop of UP faculty members have been spending more time in politics than in academic undertakings.
They were so obsessed with their hatred for then President Rodrigo Roa Duterte that most of all classroom and online instruction had been devoted to finding fault in the Duterte administration.
Many of the current UP administration officials and faculty have absolutely no tolerance for pro-government views, and harass those who refuse to toe the “anti-establishment” stance anointed by UP officialdom.
I remember the time in August 2018 when UP President Danilo Concepcion attended a party of the Marcos-era Kabataang Barangay hosted by now Senator Imee Marcos at the Bahay ng Alumni in UP Diliman.
Concepcion is an “alumnus” of the KB and is a known ally of Imee Marcos, the older daughter of the late President Ferdinand Marcos Sr.
The next day, angry UP faculty members and radical students publicly demanded Concepcion’s resignation. They insisted that the presence of pro-Marcos personalities in UP Diliman violated the “sanctity” of the campus and the memory of radical UP faculty and students who fought the Marcos government and martial law in the 1970s and the 1980s.
Those radicals conveniently forgot that UP is public space, and the KB event was held at a venue open for lease by any organization. They stopped badgering Concepcion only after the latter issued a public apology for attending the gathering.
Imagine that!
UP faculty members and students dictated on the UP President what event he may and may not attend inside a state-owned university campus!
The same radical elements are opposed to allowing the presence of policemen inside the UP campuses, on the hollow excuse that their presence there threatens academic freedom.
In other words, the radicals insist that UP campuses are above the law!
The UP Diliman Chancellor boasts that the campus is free space for anyone and everyone who wishes to hold a protest activity there.
That propaganda, however, applies only to anti-administration protests. The Duterte Youth tried to hold a pro-government rally there, but they were repeatedly refused permission to do so by the UP Diliman Chancellor.
In 2014, UP Diliman students hurled projectiles and insults at then President Noynoy Aquino’s Budget Secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad after the latter delivered a speech at the UP School of Economics.
Abad had been invited as a guest in a symposium, and his speech did not sit well with the radicals.
Irene Marcos-Araneta was almost beaten up by radical UP students when she attempted to watch a play at Palma Hall in UP Diliman. The timely intercession of security guards saved her from the violent mob.
A Protestant preacher who told his congregation during a Sunday service at the UP Film Center in Diliman (which they leased) “the Bible considers homosexuality a sin” was almost lynched by radical UP students.
Parents have been complaining about the spread of communism in the UP campuses.
As early as their first year in college, many UP students fall prey to cadres of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army-National Democratic Front troika who clandestinely poison their minds about the government.
Inevitably, the reds entice the gullible and idealistic among the UP students to abandon their school work and attend communist meetings held in stealth.
After a brief period of communist indoctrination, the youngsters join the rebels in the countryside and take up arms against the military establishment. The waylaid kids are then forced to shoot it out with soldiers, and get killed in the fighting.
In the end, many of these UP students return home in a box to their grieving parents who were under the impression that their children have been all along studying to become UP graduates who can be of service to the nation.
Anti-communism crusader Lorraine Badoy should help expose the communists in UP.