THE UNIVERSITY AND THE
BURDEN OF INDEPENDENCE
Caesar I. Agnir
1958-1959
Three days away from today, counting from
Uncle Sam’s calendar, the Philippines would be thirteen years old as a nation. As
usual the insipid routinariness that punctuates every July 4th celebration will
be reenacted with the same jaded monotony - the traditional asinine bombast that
officialdom, the cultivated meaninglessness of historians attempting to situate the
realities of the present against the implications of the past, the ritual professions of
scoundrels of dedication to the ideals of independence, and many more of this huge farce.
It has become jargon and fashionable for
criticasters to show up the shallowness of our so-called independence and to indict
officialdom for making forfeitures of our claims to independence. And yet, no one has made
any serious effort to locate the precise locus of this attitude , this attitude of
‘making forfeitures’ in derogation of our sovereignty or abdicated their right
of independent action, it is the general mass of our people.
What have they surrendered in a manner that
would detract from their independence?
In these times, to any young nation the
substance of independence is not to be found in territorial sovereignty. The burden of
independence lies in the distinctiveness of a people. Independence in this sense is to be
equated with the sovereignty of its spirit, the firmness of its will to be recognized by a
separate identity. Tested in this mold, the Filipino people is not independent - it is a
slave to its own weaknesses. It is a hodgepodge of foreign influences, not of it
destructive of the native Filipino character. It is bad enough that the Filipino people is
to weak to resist the incursions of these influences; it is worse still that it is only
too glad to embrace anything foreign, to lose out its own identity and totally assimilate
its roots into the foreign. But its own weakness, the Filipino people has virtually
abdicated its right to independence.
But is that surrender so base that there
can be no redemption?
The survival of the Filipino race as
Filipino depends, to our minds, on whether such a redemption is possible. We are confident
that it is highly probable so long as those who dictate the course of national events are
willing to recognize this problem and conduct official affairs from the perspective of
this goal. Yet, judging from the quality of our government officials which the wisdom of
experience has divined for us, this expectation is a utopian dream. If our officials
cannot generate this movement for the restoration of the Filipino native identity, where
then can we locate the burden of redemption?
If this is an ideal, and it is, then it is
only logical that the universities should spawn the seeds that will restore the Filipino
people to its native identity. The universities are more intimate with the workings of
culture and traditions, with the history of national aspirations for distinct nationhood ;
it is here that freedom and independence are not only predicates of action but specimens
for intellectual dissection. In fact the latter is a special province of the University of
the Philippines . And it is in this sense that it can lead this crusade for redemption -
impress upon its youth the values of spiritual sovereignty that make for substantive
independence. |
