Our Shared Responsibility Too

Faculty General Assembly
June 5, 2006

Fr. Joel Tabora, S.J.

When our senior alumni come back to the Ateneo, they often comment on the new face of the campus. There's Xavier Hall which covers the old gym, and the University Church of Christ the King built in front of the new Jesuit residence. There is engineering-laboratory building and, of course, this Arrupe building. What they don't immediately see is the new high school campus. When they do, they are usually very pleased – especially with its new version of the school's major icon, the Four Pillars.

Buildings, of course, are very external and very dramatic; they are important, but not the essential of university life. Last week, one of our alumni told me there was a discussion in one of the alumni yahoo groups on why the Ateneo continues to invest in buildings when it isn't investing in the improvement of instruction. The impression given was that Ateneo education is deteriorating seriously, and the Ateneo community is doing nothing about it but building new buildings. It is an impression that should concern all of us. It may come from an experience of one of our graduates who was unable to pass a professional exam. Or from a student whose English leaves much to be desired. The alumni relish recalling their own days at the Ateneo when their Jesuit mentors drilled them in flat A's and “t-h”-es that are essential to good spoken English, and enforced an atmosphere of learning through jug and post. They wonder why today it is not the same at the Ateneo.

I am glad that in reporting this yahoo discussion to me, he also reported that one of our administrators and faculty members engaged the complaining alumnus. He told him that this year the Ateneo de Naga accountancy graduates placed second nationwide in the category of 51-99 examinees. I presume he told him of continuing national dominance of our graduates in 3-D animation, of highest performance of our education graduates in the local LET exams, and of the recognition our student entrepreneurs have been garnering in national competitions. I know he told him that there is no higher educational institution in Bikol that surpasses Ateneo de Naga in its academic quality. Our PAASCU accreditation confirms that objectively. To date, no other institution in Bikol has matched our Level III status. This, as we all know, is not just a matter of ordering that a building be built and finding funding for it, but of ongoing painstaking investment in academic improvement. Painstaking, because improving instruction requires years of personal and financial investment in intellectual stretching and advanced learning to complete MA, MS and PhD degrees; it means developing an atmosphere of professionalism in teaching where teaching behavior proceeds from the internalized imperatives of being a good teacher; it means acquiring the “Ateneo brand” of instruction, the fundamental attitudes and competencies of Ignatian pedagogy and cura personalis; it means acquiring and using skills of classroom presentation and management; it means learning to give students timely feedback on what they have learned and what they have not yet learned; it means presence to students in and outside of the classroom, it means being able to animate them to learn about and discuss topics which stretch their horizons and enable them to perform well in their disciplines. It means regularly coming together in faculty assemblies such as this to see what more can be done to improve instruction.

We have no reason to rest on our laurels. If 35% of our accountancy graduates landed us in second place nationwide, we have seriously to ask ourselves why the other 65 percent didn't make it. If 9 students or 38 percent of our ECE graduates passed the ECE Board exams, we have to ask ourselves what happened to the other 15 graduates or 62% – even if the national average passing rate is only 23 percent. We have to ask ourselves why it is so difficult for companies which require operators who can handle themselves competently in English to find employable personnel. All this belongs to our shared responsibility for competent delivery of instruction. I believe you know as well as I that while it may be too much to say, as our alumnus in the yahoo group says, that we have not invested anything in improving instruction at AdNU, it is also true that there is still much room for improvement in our instruction.

But today I would like to focus on another area of responsibility – one that is just as important, even if more difficult to talk about. In the Profile of our Graduate we speak of producing graduates who are competent, conscientious, committed to change, and Christ centered. In this profile, the first “c”, competence, is handled theoretically by our academic courses – by our professional and technical courses in engineering, in psychology, in programming, in classroom management, in educational measurement. But the question must also be answered: in our curriculum, what are the courses that help make our students competent persons? What helps makes them become not just competent nurses, nor just competent psychologists, nor just competent entrepreneurs, but competent human beings? What is it that we must give to our students so that they will be persons of lofty desires, with the psychic and physical energy to pursue them, and the intelligence, stamina and street-smartness to translate them into genuine achievements? What is the best way to teach so that we draw out of our students – often totally wrapped up in their confined world of struggling, if not already dysfunctional, families – a genuine sensitivity for persons and social groups beyond themselves and their immediate families? How do we work with our students so that when they marry they do not batter their wives nor cuckold their husbands nor smother their children, but are able to truly grow in love and life as their children grow in life and love? What can we do to help our students appreciate material things without seeking their identity in them, or worse, becoming overwhelmed by them? What can we recommend so that our graduates communicate with their friends in truth, stand by them in hardship, celebrate with them in joy, and appreciate them as among the choicest of God's blessings? What can we do so that our students continue to question, to read, to innovate, to create? What can we do so that our students in life genuinely love and serve others? and habitually search to do what is right?

Truly, our responsibility is not only the first “c”, but even in the first “c” – if competence is also to be applied to persons or human beings – there is much more there in responsibility than we often appreciate. What we include in our profile is essential for the human person, but beyond the academically measurable; sometimes, great, measured academic achievement alone is worthless for, if not inimical to, person and society. Indeed, what we intend and promise, the good person of Christian integrity, is described also in the three other “c's” of our profile – conscientiousness, commitment to change, and Christ centeredness. We seek to form people who will use their knowledge and abilities according to the dictates of properly-formed conscience. We seek to form people who reject the general poverty of Bikol, its quiet and pious culture of resignation and long-suffering, and who are committed in life to work to change this. We seek to form people whose religiosity is envigorated by the Holy Spirit of a divine Father revealing his love for us absolutely in his son, Jesus Christ; we seek to form people who have encountered God in their Ateneo experience and are willing to live according to the power and imperative of that encounter.

For this reason, our teaching must always be imbued with the desire not only to teach but to form our students. We teach not only to impact on ignorance, but to impact on freedom. We teach not only to affect careers, but to affect lives. We teach not only because we love, but because they too are called to love. In our understanding of our mission towards integral human development even the calculus class or the physics class or the business management class cannot be divorced from the imperative to form the freedom of our students. Every encounter the student has of us giving, sharing, demanding, understanding, advising in freedom and love contributes to their ability to give, share, understand, advise and serve in freedom and love.

At the end of the last academic year I went to the student offices at Xavier Hall to try to solve the space problem of the Pillars. While doing this, I asked where the CLC met, And where the AtSCA met. Basically I learned from Bu Almoneda and later from Ringo Badilla that these organizations were at best dormant at the Ateneo de Naga. I was told that there never was an AtSCA at Ateneo de Naga. I was told that no one had joined the ACLC in the past years. I was saddened to hear this, since these are two organizations students in Jesuit schools normally are populated by the best, the most idealistic and the brightest of students, from whose ranks would come many of our active student leaders, who would then move on to be outstanding leaders of their companies, their professions, their communities, our country, and our Church. I have since learned that there was a time in our Ateneo when the AtSCA was alive and that in fact there is a small group of CLCers on campus. Yet the questions may still be raised: even if the ACLC exists in our university, how does it impact on the student community? the university community? the local communities, the Church and the nation? What is its vision an mission? How does it seek to impact on its members and on its community? And who guides and directs and inspires this activity? The question that I ask of ACLC can be asked of all the 41 or so recognized organizations that we have on campus, including the varsity teams, the band, and the Supreme Student Government. It is an important question. On the tertiary level, while the formative impact of classroom interaction cannot be denied, it is arguable that the extra-curricular and co-curricular activities have more formative impact on a student than the classroom. If one is an active member of a debating society, the debating activity can build the skills necessary to establish and defend propositions; but it can also form disciplines of listening, of analysis, of clear presentation, of persuasion; it can build attitudes of self-assertion and leadership and respect for truth. If one is a member of a religious organization, one is using one's freedom and free time to help the organization succeed; one is being formed in life-affecting habits of prayer, sensitivity to one's neighbor, and service for the Kingdom. In this context, it might be necessary for us, who share the responsibility for formation of students into the four c's of our Profile of the Graduate, to re-examine the body of extra- and co-curricular activities of the university to see how we might contribute to their becoming more positively formative. Certainly if a student organization, year in and year out, is plagued by internal strife and unproductive quarrels resembling the strife and quarrels in circles of national government, it is a problem that must be addressed, lest we become co-responsible for forming the students in the image and likeness of our present national leaders. If our best student leaders believe that elections are best won by deft manipulation of technicalities, and election disputes are best solved by recourse to the civil or criminal courts, then I believe we have failed in delivering to the students key values of Christian leadership that we owe them as their formators.

I certainly have no easy solutions to this challenge. I know everyone is busy with the academic side of our mission. But the formative side seems today to be calling urgently for our attention. I don't know what your experience is. While I understand the urgency of having new earners in our students' families, I have yet to meet the students who at graduation are angry at the poverty which besets their families and communities, angry at the corruption in local and national politics, angry at the unreliability of our electoral systems, angry at the killings of people who think other than the entrenched establishment thinks, so angry that they are passionate about doing something with their lives to change things. I hope we are not graduating students who through their education here have learned that resignation is the best way of survival, a Makati job is the optimum way of poverty alleviation, and that labor exploitation, environmental destruction, fraudulent accounting, and selling one's soul and body to the interests of the established are the most expedient ways of personal advancement in our society.

So how do we impact on our students – in such a way that when these students make their crucial decisions in life they recall a lesson learned in our classrooms, a crucial conversation with a mentor under an acacia tree, a key-value imbibed in one of our extra-curricular activities? This is certainly not an easy question. But as it is raised, it is a happy thing that in our community today Ignatian spirituality seems to be taking firmer root. Last Friday, in Bacacay, 16 dormers finished eight-day directed retreats; meanwhile, our system of recollections for students is also described as “Ignatian,” and efforts are being exerted yet to realistically improve its Ignatian character. Last year, from among our ranks here in the colleges, 2 finished 30-day retreats, 18 finished 8-day retreats and 89 finished 5-day retreats; in the colleges, there were almost as many staff members who made the 5-day retreats as faculty members. The retreats, hopefully, bring all their participants to a deeper and more intimate encounter with our Lord. But one question we might ask today is how the apparent upsurge in Ignatian spirituality might be preserved and matured so that it impacts not only on the personal lives of our retreatants, but on the life of the school, especially in the challenge to provide formation to our students. How can the enhanced spiritual lives of our faculty and staff members so influence students that they themselves appreciate the importance of friendship with the Lord, of being absolutely and unconditionally loved by him and being invited by him to help further establish his Kingdom of love here in Bikol, in our midst? How does the experience of the mercy and compassion of God affect the judgments and attitude of our students – especially those quick to judge and quick to condemn? How does the drive to get a high-paying job in a prestigious company square with discipleship under a King who moves, inspires and reigns in poverty, insults and humiliation? How does the conversation with the crucified Christ on the Cross turned towards us in love square with the drive towards success, by hook or by crook, through means legal or lethal, through measures sinless or shameless? How does the sensitivity to the Risen Lord affect the substance of one's consciousness – as merely a peripheral glow, or as the awesome light of one's being? Either Light, or darkness. Either Christ is alive. Or he is dead. Either he is present in my life, or truly absent. Either he is the void, or he is the rich colors of the flowers, the majesty of the old trees, the dramatic colors of the sunrise, the drama of the earthquake, the peace of mountain lakes, the rush of cascading falls, the sparkle in the eye of youth, the peace in the face of the aged, the energy in the zeal of the disciple, the unending depth of our desire for wholeness, for wellness, for reconciliation, for goodness, for love, for joy.

I think you will agree with me. We desire more for our students than just getting them to pass our exams – or the exams that others give. And to deliver to them this “more,” this “magis,” we have to be more, we have to give more, we have to share more of ourselves with our students. As friends in the Lord.

It is in this context that I have appointed Ms. Janet Badilla as of the beginning of this month to be the Deputy Academic Vice President to fill the vacuum created by the resignation of Mr. Angelo Joshua “Anjo” Llorin. I never thought that I would ever ask her to leave the Office of the Personnel Director for which she has done so much and so well. But I believe the urgent challenges we now face together towards a systematization of Ignatian spirituality on campus and towards greater formation of our students both through their core curriculum courses as well as through our campus liturgy, our campus prayer, our retreats, our recollections, our follow up on retreats, our promotion of lived Ignatian spirituality, our extra-curricular and co-curricular activities, our honing of student, local and national leaders justifies this appointment. It is an appointment I request all of you to support.

Of course the job she left of Director for Personnel with its awesome responsibilities also needs a replacement. I am happy that Mr. Jun Santiago declared himself willing to accept the challenge. I ask you all also to support him.

After my talk I have asked both of them to say a few words to you as to how they view their new responsibilities.

Times are difficult. Enrollment is significantly weaker this year than in previous years, especially in first year. Overall, as of last Saturday, we are some 1,200 students short of our budget projections. This seems to be the case not only in our region but throughout the country – except for premier Manila schools. With enrollment down, we shall have to further tighten our belts without letting up on our teaching efficiency. We shall have to find more creative ways to deliver our education and our formation. We shall have to partner with private sector to make education possible for those who are willing to work part time for it. As the mission comes ultimately from God, we are confident the Lord will give us the means to do our work – the health, the camaraderie, the companionship, the friendship, the joy, and the love. If God is for us, who can be against us? If God is with us, we have nothing to fear.

God is with us. He is in your hearts. He is in your service.

Have a grace-filled year.