Welcome Remarks by Fr Jett Villarin SJ during the Special Academic Convocation

WELCOME REMARKS BY FR JOSE RAMON T VILLARIN SJ
Special Academic Convocation
Conferment of 2012 Traditional University Awards
19 July 2012



Good afternoon.  Last year, at about the same time, it was NU we were playing with; this year, it is UST. Why on earth do we schedule this convocation during these play times?  I think it is a test to see where our priorities truly lie.  So if I see you getting text updates on the scores, I will know where your heart’s treasure is.

The truth is, most Ateneans have their heart in the Ateneo, whether they are in the UAAP games or outside.  I have been a joyful witness of the loyalty and love Ateneans bear for their alma mater.  The other truth is that the Ateneo de Manila finds its heart when it offers itself in service to others, ad majorem Dei gloriam.  

Thus, by inference, if Ateneans have their heart in the Ateneo and the Ateneo has its heart in serving others, then Ateneans find their heart’s treasure when they are serving others, amdg.

This is why we hold events such as this convocation today.  The Lux in Domino, the Bukas Palad, and the Tanglaw ng Lahi help us locate our heart once more.  And so we are grateful, for instance, to our first awardee, who has served government and the private sector by working quietly and selflessly and effectively, “putting the country and our people before his own interests.”  



We thank and bless our second awardee, who has tirelessly served the Church the people of God through education development, inter-faith understanding and peace-building.  

We give recognition to our third awardee, whose groundbreaking scholarship has opened up a new path of understanding our past and thus a new way of empowering ourselves as a people. 

These are the people on whom we bestow our highest Awards. We celebrate their lives and we bless them for helping us locate where our heart’s treasure may be found.  As I welcome our honored guests to the Ateneo, so I welcome you all to this year's Special Convocation; so I welcome you to what heartens you, to what quickens your spirit, and to what treasure we might find in the lives we honor today.



Acceptance speech by Reynaldo C. Ileto for the Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi. Ateneo convocation, July 19, 2012

University President, Fr. Jett Villarin, members of the Ateneo community, distinguished guests, my dear family and friends. My first encounter with the Ateneo was 58 years ago, in 1954, when I sat for the entrance tests to get into the Ateneo Grade School. I did miserably and failed that examination. I would have to study somewhere else, it seemed. My mother, however, was undaunted by this shocking setback. She went over to the office of the headmaster to plead my case. She narrated how I was born with water in my head (I was a hydrocephalic baby) and that I was prone to fits of anxiety, which explained my failure in the entrance tests. “But Rey is really a bright boy,” she argued, suggesting perhaps that the water in my head had transmogrified into brain matter, and lots of it.

The Headmaster, Fr. Aureo Nepomuceno, was moved by my mother’s pleas. This was perhaps the best speech she had ever given in her life, for she was by nature shy and reticent. Where Mother Mary and Teodora Alonso had failed in convincing the authorities to spare their sons, Olga Clemeña got this Jesuit father to repeal the death sentence, even though I had to repeat Grade 2. By the following year, 1955, I was among the first batch of students to move from Padre Faura to this campus in Loyola Heights.

It was right here, then, in the Ateneo Grade School that my intellectual formation began. For 13 years the Ateneo grade school, high school, and college were to shaped me, for better or for worse, into what I would later become—a scholar and teacher. After graduation in 1967, I left for Cornell University and 10 years later, PhD in hand, I joined the Ateneo faculty out of an emotional decision I made at Father Horacio de la Costa’s funeral. Just two months into my Ateneo career, however, Father de la Costa’s ghost could not prevent the denizens of the University of the Philippines History Department from spiriting me away to Diliman. And I never looked back.

My teaching career began at the UP in 1977; it ended at the National University of Singapore just three weeks ago, on June 30. How fortuitous, indeed, that at the end of my long journey in the academe, I am back to where it all started—the Ateneo Grade School. (And to mark my return I am wearing this blue barong tagalog.)

This is a time to reflect upon origins: to remember how my generally-positive intellectual trajectory began with abject failure in an entrance test; to memorialize the valiant oration of a mother who knew at heart that the test results did not reflect what was inside her son’s head; and to gratefully acknowledge the wisdom and mercy of a Jesuit headmaster who could easily have brushed this aside as a desperate mother’s ranting. If he had said No, go away, I would not be up here now.

Like a typical historian who squeezes every drop of meaning from one event or one document, let me ask:  Who was I apart from what was represented by the stark figure, the 1954 entrance test result that sealed my fate as undeserving of the Ateneo? What was really in my loób—my actual thoughts, sentiments and potential? If there is a gut feeling that has consistently plagued my existence as a student and as a scholar, it is disgruntlement that human beings are constantly misrepresented, willfully or absent-mindedly. They are put into neat little boxes, assigned labels, grossly simplifying or even negating what is really in their minds and hearts.

Why, just yesterday I read in a GMA News announcement of this event that [Ileto’s] “‘history from below’ has ‘represent(ed) nationalist thinking focused on people’s everyday lives, their rhythms of change and local knowledges.’” Yes, indeed, but I can’t help wondering why my thoughts on history are reduced to “nationalist thinking.” Why I am elsewhere in the article labeled a “nationalist historian.”  And why did I myself assign the label “nationalist” to my persona in the interview?

The crux of the answer, I think, can be found in an extended reading of my mother’s story: Her appeal to Father Nepomuceno that Rey is much more in reality than what the test result, or the label “nationalist,” or even what he thinks he is, might insinuate. Let Rey reveal his true self, she argued, by admitting him into the Ateneo; let him find his way and speak. To let people speak and to listen: That is the very spirit--a feminine one inherited from my mother--in which I have practiced “history from below.”

The Ateneo has listened; it has understood and has responded by calling me to this convocation to present me with the Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi. Fr Nepomuceno’s spirit is alive and well, and I am deeply grateful for that.

Not only is the Ateneo Grade School a meaningful venue for this award conferment. In the audience also are some of the individuals who have accompanied me at various stage throughout my journey.  I would like to gratefully acknowledge the presence here of my brothers and sisters, my kumpadres, kumadres, staunch friends, former Ateneo teachers and classmates, and a number of colleagues and former students from the University of the Philippines, De la Salle University and the National University of Singapore. You are all a part of me somehow, and deserve to be included in this award. And there are many others who should be sharing in this event but cannot be physically present, including my four children, their spouses, and some close friends who live in Japan, Australia and Singapore and cannot make the trip here. Finally, let us not forget my late wife Loolee Carandang, who would have been with me onstage to receive the award hadn’t she passed away three years ago.

To all of you, then, but especially to the Ateneo University under the helm of Father Villarin: Marami pong salamat!

More pictures here