Echaves: Beyond the march

THEY come, they go….faculty, students, school officials, staff, and even owners. Only the alumni are a school’s permanent members.

Schools do their best to churn out their desired graduates, primarily because by their fruits they shall be judged. Alumni are their seeds to immortality in a society’s collective memory.

Some years back, this crack went the rounds about martial rule in the Philippines.

“Nur Misuari founded the Moro National Liberation Front. Jose Maria Sison founded the central committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and its military wing, the New People’s Army.”

“During this time, the Senate President was Gil Puyat. Querube Makalintal was the Supreme Court Chief Justice until 1975, after which he became the Speaker of the Interim Batasang Pambansa.”

“Juan Ponce Enrile was the Minister of Defense. And President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos declared martial rule in 1972.”

“They were all graduates of the University of the Philippines. No wonder the country was in such mess.”

While alumni assert they have become their own man or woman, alma maters nevertheless continue to caution students and alumni about unexamined lives. So we read of alumni in verbal fisticuffs with their alma maters.

In the US, for instance, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Kellyann Conway’s posturing came under fire from the president of Trinity Washington University, Patricia McGuire. Conway is an alumna while McGuire has been president since 1989.

McGuire criticized Conway’s coining of the phrase “alternative facts,” particularly for insisting on the Trump team’s calculation of the size of crowds at his inauguration, and claiming that it drew the biggest crowd in the history of presidential inaugurations.

McGuire described Conway as participating in shaping and spreading “a skein of lies as a means to secure power.”

Stung, Conway went irrelevant and asked why McGuire received the $ 50,000 she and husband donated during her alma mater’s fund-raising campaign.

To observers who saw the dispute as a political cat fight, McGuire stressed, “This is about a core value of higher education -- the truth. The issue with truth and truth-telling is central in all we do. If we academics don’t stand for truth, what’s the purpose of what we do?” 

That’s where the San Beda College must come from when disagreeing to some posturings of its most famous alumnus, President Rodrigo Duterte.

Its dean of the Graduate School of Law, Fr. Ranhillo Aquino, questioned Duterte’s push for the reinstitution of the death penalty.

He reminded the House committee hearings to focus on the illegal drugs trade instead of the de Lima-Dayan love affair.

And he questioned Duterte’s preference for China over the US, saying that in choosing partners, it is still wiser to stick to one you’ve spent longer time with, than with another you’ve had “nothing more than the political equivalent of a one-night stand.”

Unfortunately for some leaders, mentoring…solicited or not…must go on beyond the graduation march.