As my school counts down to its centennial

OK, boys and girls, let's pull our heads from the sand this morning. Let's un-stick our necks from the mud and see the world for what it is, not for what we wish it were. Here's shocking news from GMA News:

Four Philippine universities made it again to the Top 200 Asian universities list of consultancy Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd. (QS) for 2010, even as this is not really a cause for celebration in a country with about 2,000 institutions of higher education.

Leading the Philippine schools is the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University, which tied Taiwan’s National Central University at the 58th spot. Ateneo rose from the 84th spot it occupied last year.

State-run University of the Philippines’ rank fell from 63 to 78, while University of Santo Tomas ranked 101st, an advance from its former 144th spot.

De la Salle University suffered the worst blow among the four Philippine universities, falling from the 76th spot to land at 106th.

In measuring quality, QS used the following criteria: Asian academic peers (30 percent), papers per faculty (15 percent), citations per paper (15 percent), student-faculty ratio (20 percent), Asian employer review (10 percent), international faculty (2.5 percent), international students (2.5 percent), inbound exchange students (2.5 percent), and outbound exchange students (2.5 percent). – (GMA News)


We Lasallians know in our hearts that La Salle is an excellent school, perhaps even the best educational institution in the Philippines. Not long ago, there were suggestions that La Salle was the best school in the Philippines, better even than U.P. Yet, as we count down to our centennial celebrations next year, we are besieged by reports that Asian academics no longer think highly of our school and, conversely, those same academics are becoming enamored of the Jesuit institution which is bent on throwing sand in our face.

What happened?

The report reprinted above presumably provides an explanation for why La Salle no longer scores as well as Ateneo in university rankings. Yet, from my perspective, the criteria used probably should favor La Salle. What is really going on?

I think there is widespread perception out there that La Salle does not produce the kind of graduates that Ateneo does. If you want to know about a school's quality, look at the graduates. This is how schools are generally rated. Harvard is considered the top school in the U.S. because its graduates are the leaders in most fields. Princeton graduates, Yale graduates, Columbia graduates, Stanford graduates, UC-Berkely graduates, etc. manage to rise to the top. Ergo, those are great schools.

Ateneo produces many of the country's leaders. Look at the Presidency. The last three Philippine presidents are products of Ateneo. National conversations and discourse are often led by graduates of Ateneo. The school is heavily and prominently represented in culture, science and - now - even in business. Lasallians have always been in command of the commercial world and this has become a problem. There is widespread perception that Lsallians are one-dimensional. That we are good business people and nothing much else. We are too busy making money or are just not interested in anything else - least of all being leaders in the country's drive to economic ascendancy.

We have ceded the high ground to Ateneo and U.P. And now, apparently, to U.S.T.

In La Salle's Internet circles the moderators have adopted the policy of non-engagement. If it's serious stuff, or controversial stuff, or politics, we are cautioned to stay away. We're just not interested. We will talk about the birthday parties we are going to attend, the chicks we will surround ourselves with, but we will not be caught commenting on the sad state of our country. We abhor serious topics, they are too "heavy" for our taste.

We do not want to speak out against the country's elite, who have mismanaged the country for close to a century, partly because we are the elite and partly because most of us are marketing men and women and therefore take pains to avoid the prospect of displeasing anyone.

People take potshots at us as society boys, gay boys, China, Inc. or conyo boys. If not for our women graduates, people would have an even lower opinion of us.

I am in the process of reading the celebrated novel, Ilustrado, by Miguel Syjuco. Miguel is a son of one of my classmates in La Salle-Taft, Augusto Syjuco, Jr. I think it's reasonable to assume that Miguel would speak of La Salle, his dad's alma mater, more favorably than he would of Ateneo. Never mind that Miguel actually grew up in Canada, where his family elected to wait out the Marcos years.

I was taken aback by a passage in Ilustrado:


And so it became a habit for Crispin and me to trade these well-worn classics, particularly the ones about our distinguished alma mater, writing them on slips of paper to pass like shibboleths when next we'd meet.

"These male students loiter around Shoe Mart Megamall," one note said. "One is from the exclusive Ateneo de Manila University. One from the rival De La Salle University. The third, named Erning Isip, is from the populist AMA Computer College. The three students spot a very pretty light skinned girl. Each of the boys takes a turn at trying to woo her. The Atenean says: 'Why, hello there. Perhaps I should text my driver to bring my BMW around to chauffeur us to the Polo Club so we can get some gindara?' The Lasallista says: 'Wow, you're so talagang pretty, as in totally ganda gorgeous. Are you hungry at all? Let's ride my CRV and I'll make libre fried chicken skin and Cuba libres at Dencio's bar and grill.' Erning Isip, the AMA Computer College student, timidly approaches the girl. Scratching the back of his head, he says: 'Miss, please, miss, give me autograph?' "


It is clear that Miguel has a low opinion of the school that his dad attended and grew up in.

I know the characterization of the Lasallista in Syjuco's Ilustrado is a stereotype and perhaps unfair. The problem I have, though, is that I've heard Lasallians (people from La Salle are no longer called Lasallistas) talk in Taglish. Whether most Lasallians talk in Taglish is not a conclusion I'm prepared to concede. But clearly Syjuco seems to think that at the very least Lasallians are less educated than Ateneans.

It is this widespread perception that we are fighting. It's an uphill climb. Ateneo has managed to convince Asian academics that it is far superior to La Salle and it will take years before La Salle can reclaim the top spotlight from its much-ballyhooed rival.

And so we've gone full circle. When La Salle started in 1911 with a little school in Paco, Manila, the high-flying Ateneo de Manila was already one of two premier educational institutions in the country, along with University of Santo Tomas. La Salle was just a dream, a gleam in the eyes of the Christian Brothers who first ventured in the only American colony in Asia. The University of the Philippines was only two years old.

Now, nearly 100 years later, La Salle is taking the back seat to the venerable Ateneo. While La Salle is going-away the better commercial success than Ateneo - we have 19 campuses nationwide, Ateneo has a mere handful - it is Ateneo that has claimed the highest rock in the country's academic circles. We are somewhere down below, on a lower rock, in the shadow of that big rock where the Lion King rests and roars and stares with bored eyes at the moon.

That La Salle has added a Law School is welcome news. The institution must produce lawyers who will someday lead the country. We must at some point produce a President or Prime Minister of the Philippines. We must graduate people who will someday have major roles in the country's nation-building.

Asian academics must become aware that we are not just a Computer Science School, or an engineering school, or an accounting, marketing, advertising or salesmanship school or a finishing school for call-center employees. They must perceive us as present and future leaders of the country.

Someday, we will retake the glory from our fierce rival. We are capable of doing that, I know, because we did it in the past. Not too long ago Asian academics - in fact, academics around the world - thought of La Salle as one of the top two schools in the country, along with the University of the Philippines. We did it before, we can do it again.

It's just sad that as we start the countdown to our centennial celebrations in June, 2011 we are playing second fiddle to the school that is making fun of the way we use the English language.

They also make fun of us in Latin.

His school looks like a Home Depot

"No wonder Paul is depressed," my daughter Natasha exclaimed, "his school looks like a Home Depot!"

Natasha was in the car when I took Paul to his then new school in Las Vegas in 2007 - the Forbuss Elementary School - shortly after our family's move from New Jersey to Nevada. From the red brick and ivy school buildings in New Jersey to the ground-hugging school building in Las Vegas that looked more like a light-industrial pre-fab building.

But no, Paul was not depressed because his school looked like Home Depot. He missed the friends he had left behind in New Jersey and vowed never to forgive me for moving him away from his friends.

I did not like the house in Jersey even though our family received a lot of congratulatory winks for having restored that all-brick English Tudor house and its 100% gleaming hardwood floors. It was an old house, built in 1931, and my repair and maintenance bills each year were atrociously high. The property tax was way too much - New Jersey has some of the highest property tax rates in the country.

Some who visited the house commented that we had a nice house but people had to drive through hell (Newark, New Jersey) to get to it.

I had retired and didn't want to pay the high maintenance expenses and the property tax. I knew, however, that I would be abandoning that slice of heaven - from son Paul's perspective. South Orange, New Jersey is made up of professionals, business people, educators, artists, actors, writers, government officials and the like. Their children are some of the most cosmopolitan and smartest in the country.

A few of those were kids Paul was growing up with.

We snatched Paul away from that environment and placed him right smack in the Las Vegas desert, where people have no sense of neighborhood. People in Vegas come from everywhere. None of us know our next-door neighbors. We don't know their backgrounds, whether they are good or bad people, whether they have good personal histories, whether they've ever been arrested, whether they are registered sex offenders, whether they are running from a criminal record in their previous home towns. The net result is we are very stingy with the smiles we flash at our next-door neighbors.

Paul still blames me for bringing him to Las Vegas.

Not so much lately, because he belongs to a school "gang" and one senses that he has forged a deep friendship with his gang-mates. They are on the verge of graduating from elementary school and entering middle school - grades 6, 7 and 8 - and he and his friends have sworn to stay together at that next level.

Paulita wants to put Paul in a Catholic school next year but I don't think it's going to happen because Paul threatens to jump from the car if we do not enroll him at the middle school that all his friends will go to next school year, which starts in late August.

"Well, OK," Paulita bargains with Paul, "but you have to go to Komun on Saturdays for extra math and English training." Paul agrees.

I had no idea it was going to be like this. My plan all along was for our whole family to live my retirement years in the Philippines and for Paul to go to La Salle, or Xavier, or the International School and then eventually to La Salle, Xavier or U.P. Prep for high school. He would then be attending a top-notch school where children of the most prosperous and influential people in the country study.

It was not meant to be. Natasha, who is still in college in Los Angeles, is not as independent as Paulita and I had hoped she would be, so it looks like we're stuck in the U.S. for a while. This is why we moved to Las Vegas in 2007, when we could have moved to the Philippines after we sold our house in South Orange, New Jersey.

I love Las Vegas. The sun always shines in Vegas. It's impossible to be depressed in Vegas. There are so many things to do if you're retired. There are the casinos, the shows, the dance academies, the people who come from all over the world to play and cavort. There are the beautiful people who descend on the Wynn, the Palms, the Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, City Center's Aria and the other 5-star hotel-casinos on the Strip. There is the constant stream of out-of-town visitors who call you to say that they will be visiting Vegas and they'd like to get together with you.

But Paul is too young to appreciate all the fun places and activities here. And he knows how to exact revenge on me for uprooting him from South Orange. He reminds me from time to time that it was because of me that he was forced to abandon his New Jersey friends. He's got me by the balls.

He decides what schools he will go to from now on. He has the final word on the subject. I sometimes wonder if Paul is a prototype for American kids, that the kids born in the U.S. in the future will all be like Paul. I wonder if kids will all feel that they must make the decisions that will affect their lives and not their parents, who may not have their interests in mind.

This may be an important logical development because parents here in the U.S. have often made decisions - divorce, separation, new surroundings, new digs - that impact their children's lives greatly without consulting their children. Future American children may be rebelling and telling their parents that from now on they will make the important decisions that affect their lives and demand that their parents set aside money to sustain them at the place of their choice.

I have not had a bloody-nose nightmare with such a scenario, but it may be just a matter of time before I do.

I cannot, for example, convince Paul that if he spends four years in the Philippines he will go to one of the country's best schools and learn so much more than he would if he stays on track to attend one of the public high schools in Las Vegas. The Clark County school system in Nevada has never had pretensions, but now that tax receipts are down and school boards and local governments are all scrambling to plug huge budgetary gaps, the situation has gotten worse for public school students in Vegas.

Paul doesn't care about the quality of education, he has decided that I will not separate him from his friends again. Not ever.

I did not know, when I was planning my retirement, that retirement could be as complicated as mine. I had an inkling, because I still have a daughter in college and an 11-year-old son. But I did not know it was going to be this difficult.

It's time for Plan B. Paulita and I are now convinced that Paul must attend high school in the Philippines. The quality of high school education at La Salle, Xavier, U.P. Prep - over that of Las Vegas high schools, or many of the high schools in America - is the main reason. But there's also the cultural advantage of growing up in a society where kids appreciate what their parents do for them, where kids still say "opo" when they talk to their elders, where kids look to their parents as gods.

I will know over the next three years if Paul's aversion to living in the Philippines and his phobia for losing contact with his friends will mellow enough to allow for his academic expatriation to the Philippines.

If he gets a girl friend by eighth grade, then all bets will be off.