The Fighting Maroons

The fighting maroons.

Aggressive blobs of color have been known to represent the University of the Philippines (UP) in the University Athletic Association of the Philippine’s basketball games, and for the last two decades have failed. But the term does not only apply to the university’s ballers—it speaks as well to the spirit of activism present in UP since its early years. The color Maroon, according to the Manila Bulletin was chosen “to represent the fight for freedom,” honoring the Jamaican tribe that resisted English colonization for more than a hundred years.

In the same manner, throughout its 100 years the “Iskolars ng Bayan” have risen up to defend the freedom of the people, from their own rights in the university against tuition fees, to national issues like the ousting of a dictator, and even to protest against neocolonial bills enacted by the United States.

History

The official website of UP purports that the student protest movement was stirred on Dec. 15, 1917, when UP instructor and Committee on the University Day celebration member was arrested by the police in Manila. A year after, Manuel Burgos of the Manila times called the first Filipino UP President Ignacio Villamor (1915-1920) incompetent, inciting Carlos P. Romulo and Jose Romero to lead the first student protest march.

The Philippine Collegian (Collegian), official student publication of UP Diliman, wrote that the National Civil League was formed in 1925 and became one of the first activist organizations in UP. Eight years after, former Collegian editor-in-chief Wenceslao Vinzons founded the Young Philippines Party which addressed issues like labor reform. Jan. 18 of that same year the students protested the passing of the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act, which maintained the US military and naval bases long after Philippine independence.

An alleged fight with Pres. Elpidio Quirino led to the resignation of UP Pres. Bienvenido M. Gonzales on March 20, 1951. Nine days after, UP students marched from Diliman to Malacañang to petition Quirino to reconsider the resignation. While the audience was granted, they failed in their protest.

UP students were more successful in the 1960s to the 1970s, when students became increasingly politicized under the presence of Martial Law. While Jose Marie Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines, said “there was mass apathy among the students,” he nevertheless alerted youth to issues in the corrupt system, like the tuition increase and the Vietnam war. Prof. Luis Teodoro, Sison’s friend and fellow student activist, said the discourse that followed was never tame, with students like Sison wanting to dismantle the “hegemonic order” of the “semicolonial and semi-feudal society,” versus the prevailing intellectual atmosphere in UP which Sison said reflected mainly dominant ideology, anti-communist and conservative liberal.

In 1957, from Dec. 16 to 17, the UP students held a motorcade around Quezon City protesting their lack of a president. Despite having no permit, they were allowed to hold their “peaceful and spontaneous” strike.

In 1959, Sison and his friends organized another activist student organization, the Student Cultural Association of the UP (SCAUP), which aimed to spark campus debate over ideologies, to continue the unfinished national democratic revolution in 1896, and to study and practice Marxism and Leninism in the context of the history of the country.

Two years later, the SCAUP led 5,000 students, the first significant mass action, against the House of Representative’s Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities (CAFA), which Teodoro said “could not abide any kind of deviation from the dominant ideas sanctioned by the semi-colonial and semi-feudal regime, among them support for parity rights and the feudal order, and for anything American, including, perhaps specially, imperialism.” At the time, the Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities (CAFA) was staging witchhunts against editors of the Collegian and the Philippine Social Sciences and Humanities Review, and carrying out “loyalty checks” on UP professors.

In 1962, 20 years after Vinzon’s death, the structure formerly known as the Student Union was renamed Vinzons Hall to honor the student leader who went on to become among other things the youngest member of the 1935 Constitutional Convention, a bar topnotcher, a governor and a war hero. In 1964 another youth activist organization, the Kabataang Makabayan (KM) or “Patriotic Youth” was founded, and since then became the youth arm of the National Democratic Front. While the Collegian purports Sison to be the founder, Bulatlat cites that KM-UP was actually established by Bonifacio “Boni” Ilagan in 1965.

By 1968, former student protester Carlos P. Romulo was now president. He declared the schoolyear to be the “Year of Enlightened Activism”, as he considered the university nothing without student activism and faculty dissent. That same year, two demonstrations took place. The first was at the end of the July, opposing the Second Philippine Civil Action Group Bill. The second that took place 16 days later was a massive demonstration against the US and Philippine special relations where UP students from KM and SCAUP were injured. The incident was thought to “might well be the first violent student demonstration in Manila.”

But it was nothing compared to the massive protests in 1970, now known as the First Quarter Storm , which ran from January to March. During those months, hundreds were hurt, students were killed (four in the Battle of Mendiola alone), and 300 were arrested. Ilagan, president of the FQS as well, said it was “the manifestation of the students’ rebellion against the Establishment.”

It was followed by the Diliman Commune a year later, where for nine days in February, a “Republic of Diliman” was declared, stressing issues on human rights, academic freedom and freedom of speech.

Today

After martial law, the UP students have persisted in championing their rights and the rights of the oppressed, from the increase in tuition fees to the eviction of vendors in Philcoa and to the current raging ZTE-NBN scandal. Yet Sison and Ilagan both observe that the student activism isn’t as fervent as it used to be.

Ilagan cited several reasons for why the masses in rallies now no longer match the numbers in the 70s. One is the success of US’s anti-communist dogma. Prof. Johnathan Beller of The Pratt Institute names globalization as another cause, the commodity culture “manipulating people into passivity and docility.”

“On the campus, the UP students are confronted by the worship of the neoliberal dogma, the depreciation of national liberation and people’s democracy and the drive to commercialize and privatize the UP. On the national scene, they are confronted by the imperialist plunder and the puppetry, corruption, mendacity and cruelty of the US-directed Arroyo regime,” says Sison, summarizing the challenges the UP activists face.

Based on the history, however, there’s proof that the spirit of the maroon scholars to endlessly fight against corruption won’t ever quit.