The UP Community is walking the talk. Students, faculty members and non-academic personnel are backing the vendors occupying the former tennis court at the UP Shopping Center in Diliman and they have renewed their call for UP President Angelo “Jijil” Jimenez to transforming the 493-hectare campus into an economic enclave for plutocrats and big businessmen.
Early on Aug. 19, the “UPIsNotforSale” movement mobilized warm bodies to prevent the eviction of the vendors, many of whom survived for decades for catering to the needs of students, many of them dorm residents, and who have become friends with the people residing in Area 2, Area 1, Areas 11 and 14, Pook Dagohoy and Pook Ricarte and the thousands who live in the low-cost housing area and Krus-na-Ligas, an ancient community that is older than the Philippine Republic.
After his controversial inking of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and UP agreement on cooperation disguised as a compact to share “resources and expertise,” Jimenez is now gunning after the vendors and those who operate eateries patronized by boarders. It is the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) that wrote a letter to the vendors asking that they move out and promised “to assist them” in what is essentially a demolition and eviction operation.
There is no plan whatsoever to establish a “poor folk food hub” or a “flea market” in one area where the vendors can continue to ply their trade, and earn much-needed income; Jimenez doesn’t even consider establishing a regular foodfest in Diliman that features the best regional dishes to nourish the hungry and thirsty among his constituents and visitors. For the information of Jimenez, in one corner of the UP International Center, an enterprising Thai sold food from her motherland. It clicked. From the 1970s, there have been efforts to sweep away the “turon, “banana cue” and “balot and penoy” sellers from the campus but students resented the malicious effort to starve them after their PE classes and their weekly sessions with aspiring fascists of the UP ROTC.
From the time the Ayalas secured a long-term lease to what is now UP Technohub, successive UP administrations have commercialized the campus, and the recurrent justification for this has been the annual reduction of the UP budget, bulk of which is appropriated for the operations of the UP Philippine General Hospital (UP-PGH), as lawmakers compete for funds for their districts, especially a year before the local and national elections. Yes, they are building PGH Diliman but it means not only erecting a hospital but also training more doctors and nurses to serve the needs of patients afflicted with various types of diseases. Does the annual UP budget have any appropriation for an extension of the UP College of Medicine in Diliman?
One time, a UP president found it weird for someone to propose transforming part of the campus into a jatropha plantation and dumped the idea but another time, a UP president built a light rail system and erected elevated tracks, only for the trains running on rubber tires to be scrapped. The trains were supposed to ferry passengers from the academic circle to UP Technohub but the MRT-7 project scuppered it. However, Jimenez and his crew do not give a hoot to the plight of the Area 2 vendors, something strange from a man who considers himself a Manobo and who doesn’t care whether the military and police are murdering UP alumni in Mindanao.
Of course, Jimenez cannot consider vendors as UP’s cash cow. Big businessmen have more cash and they can have their names emblazoned on buildings, even if they really do not deserve it. And former UP president Danny Concepcion, tagged as the mastermind of UP commercialization, also reportedly holds office at the TVUP space on the 5th floor of the Student Union building while purportedly churning out strange videos on Philippine culture and history that doesn’t utilize the interactive character of the medium. Largely unoccupied, TVUP has been the subject of complaints by student organizations that pay for their use of their Student Union building, something unheard off when it was still the smaller Vinzons Hall and a beehive of activity. It is irrational for TVUP to operate separately from DZUP or the radio-TV facilities of the UP College of Mass Communication (UP CMC) at Plaridel Hall.
But then, we do not belong to the new caciques of UP Diliman, but we know that those who find collaborating with the military using the cloak of scholarship will always remind us of that famous quip by Dashiell Hammett: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” They may learn a thing or two from the UP School of Economics (UPSE), which created the Philippine Center for Economic Development (PCED), a research center that caters principally to the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) and other government agencies. Consultants are a dime a dozen at PCED, which also acts as a “brain trust” from which government recruits bureaucrats for NEDA, the Department of Finance (DOF), the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP.) Freelancing while teaching is rewarding for those neoliberals who oppose central planning but end up at NEDA.
