THE university was almost the same as the day I walked away from adolescent innocence without nary glancing back.
The quiet hallways. The empty classrooms. The fallen leaves that lay scattered about in their final dance with the wind. Too many memories left to wither away.
My return was, in a sense, a personal healing. It was coming to terms with the wounds and scars of the past. A return to a nexus, where lives unfolded and individual journeys came into being.
December 1992. Tension between the university’s student leaders and the school administration over issues of campus repression and skyrocketing tuition fee increases was mounting up. Earlier in summer that same year, university administrators prevented several of us from enrolling for the first semester in my second year in college because of our participation in a march-rally protesting against academic repression in various universities all over the country.
It was a rude awakening for a 17-year old. Choices were made and lines were drawn between bubblegum apathy and an awakening of one’s social consciousness. After giving in to the school administration’s demands for us to sign waiver forms to be allowed to enroll again at the university, we immediately reconsolidated our cell groups.
Within weeks, the University Student Council and the university newspaper were our twin ramrods against the school administration’s ironclad grasp on the students. It was raw idealism at its best and at its worst. Only a few of us were fully and consciously aware of the purpose behind the cell groups, the radical graffiti on the university’s walls and the clandestine discussions on progressive literature.
We were ticking time bombs waiting to explode.
And explode we did in the twilight of December 16. Thousands of students, either on their own accord or under peer pressure, walked out from their classrooms and converged outside the university’s main gate. That night became the genesis of a more than two-month boycott of classes by the university’s college and high school students.
Extraordinary bonds and friendships were forged in fire and ice in the barricades built around the university gates. But it was a blaze that raged out of control. Only a few of us were prepared for the school administration’s willingness to use coercion and violence to suppress the boycott and break through the students’ barricades.
I was at home, recuperating from a head injury caused by a policeman’s truncheon when a cell group co-leader informed me that a combined force of five platoons of policemen and the university’s private security guards broke through the barricades for the fourth and final time.
It was March 1993. Seventy-three of us were officially blacklisted from the university’s rolls and countless were placed under permanent probationary status for the rest of their academic years. Of those 73, more than half would join progressive people’s organizations as volunteers, staff-members and community organizers. Fifteen would go “full-time” - activist parlance for joining the ranks of the underground movement as New People’s Army (NPA) regulars.
It has indeed been too long since those days of disquiet and nights of rage. I rececently I walked through the university’s hallways for the first time after almost seven years - not as a hot-blooded young intellectual ranting about Marx and Mao but as a guest of the new university administration president, in her formal investiture.
New buildings have been built in the campus grounds and old edifices have been torn down. Still, the memories have remained as fresh and crisp as the sound of crackling leaves under footfalls of men. I immediately recognized my professors in Communication Arts and in Social Sciences during my freshman year at the university.
We watched as the new university administration president formally took over the reins of authority in a ceremony attended by the country’s top education officials and government executives.
For many of us, it was a healing ceremony - a turning of the circle of life.