Is Miriam College in financial trouble? I heard this before. If so, they might close and sell the property back to Ateneo. Or buy back some land at the back for the High School expansion. I don't think Miriam would ever have need or use for it.

There are various ways to delay or even obviate the transfer depending on how large Ateneo wants to be. Get the dorms out of the campus (that is what Boston College did). As I mentioned, build one or 2 multi-level parking buildings near Katipunan so cars do not have to go inside. These could even be off-campus. I am afraid the seminaries have to stay because the students study at the Ateneo and the Loyola House of Studies. Four-or five-story college buildings could also be constructed down the hill between Loyola and San Jose seminaries. The views there should be spectacular. For the Grade School, I think it is about time they converted some of the one-story buildings into two stories. Also true for the High School. Just make the buildings safe especially for the grade school.

If there are enough Jesuits to spare, maybe an Ateneo de Canlubang or Ateneo de Sta. Rosa could be built in the future. Development is definitely going to be rapid along the South Expressway corridor. Of course, there is still the Ateneo de Iloilo to worry about.

BK, I will watch the football game on Sunday.

roger dodger, gee. catch ya there.

bluewing,

imagine singing down from alabang, down to makati go i ... bwahaha

the strip of land behind Bellarmine/EAPI and parallel to the high school road appears to consist of houses. i have never quite figured out where those residences connect to - are they part of a subdivision? if so, then there is no border between the high school and Miriam and you can't feasibly expand the high school in that direction. unless you build a tunnel constantly patrolled by the assistant principal for discipline and his evil minions, ha ha.

i don't claim to know the full story behind Miriam, but i do know that the Maryknoll order bailed out on the school, hence the name change and the secular administration in recent years. i am told by an alumna that the reason for their withdrawal was that the nuns realized it wasn't really their job to be teaching "rich brats" ha ha. Maryknoll is a missionary order that thrives in dangerous places - you may have have heard about them in Central America in the 1980s getting killed all over the place by right wing death squads. by comparison, the wilds of Loyola Heights probably weren't enough of a third-world hinterland by their standards.

the complication with Miriam is that like the Loyola campus, it's donated land from the Tuasons, with the usual conditions that accompany philanthropic gifts - including no commercial use of the property and reversion to the donors if the school is ever abandoned. as far as i understand it, no direct sale is possible to commercial buyers or adjoining schools seeking to expand - technically, it needs to be taken back by the Tuasons and then re-donated to Ateneo, and that's no sure thing. it will take all the Jesuits' powers of persuasion to smooth-talk the Tuasons into giving up the land for expansion.

on the subject of eliminating dorms - i'm sure the provincial students and alumni will lobby very hard against this. it's a bad signal to send to the rest of the country, really. it tells people that they'll need to live with relatives or rent commercial accommodations while they're studying in Manila. someday, when the pressure for space becomes more critical than it is now, Ateneo will need to ask itself some hard questions about whether it really ought to be in the business of providing student accommodation, but my feeling is that the decision will turn on how the Jesuits perceive their mission. do they intend Loyola to be a school that serves the whole country, or just those who happen to be living in the capital?

Maverick - regarding southern theory, open spaces and tisoy students. it might actually be messier than that. perhaps an equally good predictor of football prowess in schools of long standing in Manila might be European religious orders. that's how i'd explain UST's football success, and it's not south of the Pasig at all. Don Bosco, for that matter, is run by Italians, and the anomalous thing about it is that their boys aren't tisoy by a long shot. i am sure that if San Sebastian or Letran had bigger lawns they would have been contenders. but they chose to remain in cramped confines, so no green fields or football trophies for them.

i'm not saying the alternate theory is perfect. even within the European-clergy standard, La Salle and Ateneo are exceptions because while they do have their share of football success and their religious orders were founded by Europeans, they were run largely by the US-based clergy of those orders. Southridge technically qualifies (Opus Dei having been founded by a Spaniard) but i don't think it had a dominant presence of Spanish priests during its formative years. but it did have open space, a self-consciously prep school/British public school culture, and lots of sons of the south with time on their hands.

in the end, who really knows why some schools take to football and others don't? football culture is a delicate thing, probably more dependent on many mysterious and interrelated factors than we realize. having said that, i'm still hoping that the new Ateneo campus develops a passionate following for all the outdoor sports. it would be a shame to waste all that greenery if everyone's going to want to play basketball anyway.

I am familiar with the Maryknoll-Miriam turnover. I thought I read somewhere that Ateneo sold (donated?) a portion to Maryknoll.

I was thinking of the land beyond the HS football field adjacent to the Loyola Grand Villas. Who owns that vacant land?

Re the dorms, Ateneo would still help build dorms outside the campus. There is that building being constructed for women near the Shell gasoline station for example. Something like that. Or even a 10 storey building. Of course it might be kind of expensive but the alumni could help if this would stop the transfer of the HS and GS di ba?

Fr. Wallace Campbell passed away Dec. 15. A memorial mass will be celebrated by Fr. Kreutz on Saturday Feb5 5 pm at the college chapel. Calling all former ME and Math students of Fr. Campbell.

Peking Man,

Those houses belong to a small "subdivision" called Marymount, it is inside La Vista. The entrance to that subdivision is a little before Loyola Grand Villas along the main road of La Vista. My cousin used to live there when he was in High School. I was in grade school then, so on some days that my sundo was late, my cousin would walk me to their house just across the creek.

gee,

The dorms in Boston College are still on the BC campus on Chestnut Hill/Newton (which they affectionately call the Heights). A large number of the student population, though (mostly the upperclassmen and graduate students) stay in off-campus apartments.

Like Ateneo, Boston College also has a high school department. However, Boston College High School is located in an entirely separate part of town away from the Boston College (college) campus. While the college campus is located just outside the western edge of Boston, BC High is in the eastern part of Boston near an area called South Boston. South Boston is the bastion of the Irish-American community and locating BC High there makes more sense since it makes it easier for the Catholic families to send their boys to "Boston's Jesuit high school."


Peking Man,

Nice to banter with you again just like the old days. I agree with you completely that having European priests run your school may tend to make the boys take up football as a sport. I still remember playing against Don Bosco and their priest-coach was this very Italian priest who was yelling at his boys in a very animated Italian manner. The Don Bosco football culture was also exported to their technical institutes. The monsters in the old days were the boys from Don Bosco-Tondo who used to play in their bare feet. They supposedly practiced with coconuts (so the story went) and these boys were tough -- inner city tough.

In the case of Southridge, you are right. It had a very European orientation at its inception and this could have influenced the choice of sport. I seem to recall that the people running the school were bent on toughening up the boys and saw sports as a means to pass on what they considered to be manly traits. Aside from the availability of fields and the large presence of a tisoy community (that transferred from San Agustin), football made it possible for more students to participate while keeping costs low since all you needed was some space,goal posts and maybe someone to gut the grass every once in while (in the case of Southridge, students usually cut the grass or weeded the football field as part of the "hard labor" they did when they were being disciplined for some actual or imagined infraction). Football was a cost effective sport to have for a start-up school. Plus, because of all that wide open space and a steady breeze from Laaguna de Bay, it was just fun to run around.

The success of UST in collegiate football can probably be explained less by the Spanish influence but more by the huge numbers of students it had from the provinces (like Iloilo and Negros) and foreign countries. UST is a magnet for expatriate students from the Middle East. I seem to recall that they always had at least one or two Arab players on their squads and these guys were real monsters on offense, as I recall. These Arab guys also used to have their own football league that played on Sundays on the UST fields.

Paparazzi - thanks. mystery solved.

Gee - Ateneo-affiliated dorms along Katipunan sound like a workable solution. they could be Ateneo-owned (high rises are expensive though) or outsourced to contractors. i wonder though if the Cervini or Eliazo people are willing to give up their view and their swimming pool ha ha.

Maverick - yeah, Arab students and Indian too. and not just in UST - once in a while you'd get a foreign striker in the U-belt football teams who'd be scoring all the goals and be head and shoulders in skill above his teammates.

the mystery about football in the Philippines is, if it's so cost-effective to play because all you need is a big field and goalposts, how come the public schools in the provinces (that are not Negros and Iloilo) never really took to it? i suspect that you need someone really knowledgeable and dedicated to promoting the sport to keep the game alive at each school. someone along the lines of a Brother Oscariz.

looking back on it now, Brother Oscariz's obsessive and desperate campaign to promote football in the grade school seems touching, if somewhat tragic. the mad old Basque was tireless in pushing the sport, making sure everyone had a ball to play with at home and organizing "lightning football" tournaments during the lunch hour. Ateneans of a certain generation will never forget him yelling wild encouragement from the sidelines in broken Tagalog (sipa bola!).

that was the first clue that Brother Oscariz was doomed to fail in his great mission - he always needed to be yelling detailed and explicit instructions to his young players to kick the ball and where exactly to kick it. that's really mind-boggling when you think about it - "sipa bola!" is so fundamental to the game that you really have to do it instinctively, without being told. in the end, he managed to reach a small hard core of kids who went into the varsity teams (including you, BK? ) but was it enough to make Ateneo a "football school" whose students lived and breathed for the sport? probably not.

on the side, heard that Bro. Oscariz passed away recently. hey GG, did I get that right?

yup. played for him briefly much as i wished i was on the team longer (grades you know).

I guess if Ateneo wants to make inroads into higher education, it would very well have to let go of some of the formative baggage that it used to carry when it once started out as a prep school for the elite (aka. "man for others", "leaders of men", etc.) in much the same way that its counterparts abroad such as Georgetown, BC, etc. have done in order to transform themselves into modern universities.

In the present environment of globalization, easy flow of information through new media and the internet and growing materialism (this is not necessarily a bad quality), prospective students as early as their HS years are better-informed and more abstract in their thinking than the generations that came before them. Coming into college, they have a clear picture of what they want to get out of school and out of life and Ateneo is hard-pressed to meet these growing needs in order to continue attracting the best and brightest raw material.

Maybe in a few years, we'll see more buildings devoted to student research than recollections, more PhDs than SJs in the faculty, more juniors spending their semesters in foreign universities than in immersion and more copies of "Ateneo Business Review" being read than "Catcher in the Rye"(tama ba spelling?). But Ateneo will still carry the age-old tradition of having the most outstanding acheivers in almost any field study in its halls.

If trying to fit a growing student population in the middle of a bustling city is becoming too stressful, Ateneo's urban planners might want to take a look at some inner-urban-city schools like Columbia & U-Chicago (not Boston schools bec. Boston is itself one big campus=)) that have managed to grow its facilities (including a kindergarten) in crowded locations while maintaining a college atmosphere. Ateneo might even manage to fit in the GS and HS in the same way that NY Jesuit prep schools like St. Ignatius and Regis along tony Park Ave. have done. Then they can keep everyone in one location.

rabbaddal, i couldn't agree more. future ateneans are likely to be more worldly (in the best sense of the word) and their educations, as a result, will be more skewed to the scientific and technocratic side of things. the long-term trend towards lay faculty chosen for their specializations is going to ensure that.

i have, in fact, always harbored some doubt whether jesuit instructors - essentially a bunch of philosophy and theology majors - had any business teaching subjects for which any number of lay people might have been better qualified. (salaries to attract the best professors from the private sector were probably an issue though) i had no doubt the jesuits knew how to form character and make you an informed member of the church. they certainly had centuries of tradition going for them when they picked out classical readings for you, and i had great respect for their method of forming the mind through philosophy. but i did feel somewhat oppressed by the whole routine of retreats and reflection papers and buying into the whole ideology of the kind of society they thought was right. i didn't believe these activities were necessarily superior to the alternative of offering you more technical instruction or advanced reading. there was a certain smugness in the notion that a mind prepared in philosophy or theology plus a few units of specialization would be ready for anything. there were the inevitable complaints in most years when someone deemed to have been "good" was chosen valedictorian over someone with a demonstrably superior academic record - a sure sign the campus wasn't as meritocratic as it should have been.

i understand the move to emphasize the sciences in loyola to be a sign that the pendulum is moving in the other direction at last, and that the previous ideas of what made up a good traditional education are giving way. we're clearly in the midst of a radical shift in what jesuit leadership believes to be an essential education for modern times.

in this context, i would be deeply surprised if the new campus didn't try to blend the best of a new culture - wired, digitized, globalized, and grounded in empiricism - with the best of the old ways. if nothing else, a new campus represents a chance to break from the past. trying to replicate the old loyola culture in the new location would be a massive exercise in missing the point entirely.

Maverick - I was not exactly familiar with Boston College although I went there once to watch football vs. Army. It was my brother, a Jesuit priest who had his sabbatical at BC, who told me so.

Peking Man - re this donation restriction thing, from what I know, Ateneo donated the portion of land below Loyola House and San Jose to the poor but sold the portion below the HS to Loyola Grand Villas.

gee - i don't know the facts, but here are a few scenarios that might make those land transfers palatable to the donors:

1. the land below LHS and San Jose - donated to the poor and therefore an acceptable, non-commercial use of the land. squatting laws being what they are, it was probably going to be difficult to evict people anyway. legitimizing their stay might have been the right move.

this might also be the land where a lot of university employees live, so there's a possibility it's some sort of grant to long-serving staff. the area is also a long-time focus for Tulong Dunong activity, so the community links run pretty deep.

2. the land below the high school - perhaps Loyola Grand Villas has some connection to the Tuasons? i don't know. if the deal is effectively a buyback, then that's one sure way the donors won't object.


in any case, slopes are difficult to build on. the grade school's so-called "new building" is about as slopey as you can get and still build properly - they had to build a long covered walk downhill from the driveway to access it. the land beyond that is literally a cliff. you could kiss your football or softball goodbye if you ever lofted it over the fence.

the original grade school was entirely in that flat area where all the classroooms were low cinder-block wings. i have no idea what the place looks like now, but if they build medium-rise along the lines of those old wings, they'd probably buy a few more decades of open space because the wings form the perimeter of a large quadrangle and the concrete basketball courts, and it would look totally weird if you built in the middle of that. why deny the kids a place to run around and get dirty and sweaty during recess?

if the primary concern here is to "keep the tradition", then the ateneo should have kept the college (pati APS and law school na rin) exclusive to AGS and AHS-ers in the first place. but it were the case, then i doubt the university would have gone this far.

anyway, i'd rather have the college moved to the south instead of the kids' units.

Just my 2 cents worth. I certainly agree with an earlier post extolling the sense of community fostered by having all three campuses in one idyllic, sprawling compound. I remember following the progress of older cousins and siblings go through AGS, AHS, and the college envisioning myself taking the same proud steps through those same ranks.

The prospect of expansion/relocation disturbs me. I disapprove of how our grade school and high school population has ballooned since my years at Loyola Heights. Having 40 or so students per section and 10-11 sections per class already seemed like staggering numbers back then. I just can't fathom how quality ediucation can be dispensed to close than 1000 students per class. Even in my day, outstanding instructors were hard to come by (Pagsi, Ching Cheekee, Coralu to name a few). They all can't be teaching these kids.

I also want to respond to a sentiment frequently expressed in this forum of the need to respond to the demands of the educational marketplace, i.e. a more technical/pre-professional approach to university instruction. I do agree that certain universities have made headway in attracting very bright minds due to their claims of providing students with a "real world" perspective to their education (Come to our school and you'll be a very marketable accountant/programmer/manager/etc come graudation). DLSU has certainly positioned itself in this manner to HS seniors concerned of future job prospects in an unpredictable and somewhat dismal occupational landscape. But do we really want to emulate this prefab/pre-professional mode of instruction.

It may be my overly indulgent sense of idealism but I envision a university to be (cliche alert) a marketplace of ideas and not just a place where you get ideas for the marketplace. It is my humble opinion that a well-rounded exposure to the classics, philisophy, theology, the arts, and some science better prepares students to approach the working world with a broader, more humanizing perspective on what they seek to accomplish in their lives. Let us remain faithful to the ideals of self-discovery and experimentation while at university; let's keep the core curriculum.

So in summary: expansion - bad, core curriculum - good.

Ateneo in Alabang, are you serious?

A modern and progressive university does not have to be one that teaches nothing but trade skills, but neither should it stifle the growing need and demand for today's present crop of students to pursue their passion and achieve something tangible. For a typical above-average / outstanding upper-middle class HS senior interested in studying business, for example, nowadays, finding out what's going on in, say, National U of Singapore - including its sending of students to participate in international case competitions, attend year-long internships in the Silicon Valley, and work part-time in global investment banks - is only a couple of clicks away on a web browser. And it won't be long before these opportunities will be available to him / her through either creative financing or scholarships. Ateneo presently does lose some of its best prospects from its constituencies either through quality HS grads choosing to study abroad outright or present students transferring by their sophomore college year to universities in the US, UK, Singapore or Australia. This, and not DLSU or some other specialist university, will be Ateneo's biggest concern in the years to come because frankly, Ateneo greatest strength (like most other Jesuit universities worldwide) is its ability to attract high caliber students who will most likely be successful regardless of which school they attend. Take that away and Ateneo's stature as the alma mater for outstanding graduates would diminish.

Yet, money constraints aside, with the kind of facilities, faculty and curriculum we used to have, there was no way Ateneo could offer what NUS or even Georgetown had offered to its students. Until recent developments such as the new Gokongwei school and SEC complex was established and built, business and science depts had to share space in buildings not efficiently designed for their specializations. Faculty re-gurgitated info. from textbooks instead of sharing new research or innovative applications with bright and curious young minds because there were few places and time for them do do research or field work. Lack of group study areas hindered students' ability to work on big projects where they could apply what they learned to real life. And a rigid and inflexible curriculum meant that most of the learning happened in the classroom instead of encouraging students to explore the bigger world around them. Some students slackened off because learning became more of an ordeal than an enjoyable experience. How long can a school go on like this before prospective and current students start wondering whether they're really paying a lot of money for a good education or just to be part of a community?

Ateneo needs to develop the infrastructure and make adjustments to its core curriculum in order to meet this growing demand, or risk losing its attractiveness to the bright young talent that had made a good name out of it.

gee,

I think what happened at Boston College was that a majority of the dorms were built either on the sides of the main campus or on a separate part of the main campus. The old campus with the nice old buildings is free of dorms (I think). Perhaps, this is what your brother was alluding to.


gee and Peking Man,

It was earlier discussed that all the Loyola nds were donated by the Tuasons to the Jesuits. If it was donated with a clause saying that it would revert if the land was not used for educational purposes, then I wonder how the land was conveyed to the developers of LGV (and ultimately the lot owners). If we are correct about the reversion, then the land would have reverted to the Tuason family as soon as the Jesuits sold the land -- unless there was an express condition regarding this or if the sale was deemed to serve an educational purpose since the profits would have supported the school. Anyway, just asking.


Peking Man,

I think Ateneo can make a claim to being a football school. Even in the 80's, the school had a strong football following -- albeit a limited but very fanatical one. When the star players of both thhe Ateneo college and UP varsity teams come from the ranks of the Ateneo high school squad, you know that the football program was going in the right direction. In that sense, Bro. Oscariz did not labor in vain. Problem was that footballing interest lagged way behind basketball. Football was a far secong sport in Ateneo. But, that seemed to be the case with just about every school in the country.


rabbaddal,

I agree. Boston is one big college campus. I guess the closest comparison we have to this place back in the country is Dumaguete which seems to have grown out of Silliman University.

Cheers guys!

Wilson Lee Flores wrote about his Jesuit education in Sunday's Philippine Star Lifestyle Section. If you ask me and my ME 70 batchmates, many of us found the Philosophy and Theology courses very valuable because these taught us HOW to think. Back then we had double the units (credits) what the college is currently requiring. It is lamentable that Ateneo (and Jesuit universities abroad) has sharply reduced its core curriculum. To me, some of the courses (which replaced the core courses) could easily be learned later thru seminars, the internet, or in the graduate school. Or take them up in the summer while in college.

BK, I think there is a MICABA game today Jan. 24 6 pm vs. NU at BEG.

with all due respect to the philo/theo-accented core curriculum, which i went through and benefited greatly from - science and mathematics, taught in a certain way, help order your thinking just as well. you could even make an argument that the sciences are actually more relevant to a third-world country, because they encourage people to be grounded in hard, measurable facts and physical reality (which, by the way, philosophy teaches us to doubt). a sad byproduct of the "articulate atenean" legacy is that we often produce graduates who get by on confidence and being well-spoken, without necessarily having done the grunt work of proper research. an education like this naturally steers people to fields like law, and you have to wonder whether turning out a few more engineers might have been a better long-term investment.

in fact, the great academic traditions of the Jesuits have a strong grounding in the practical, "useful" sciences. they advised kings and emperors all over Europe and Asia on scientific issues. locally, they used to run the observatory that made weather forecasts for the colonial government. they were architects and land surveyors, agronomists and botanists, chemists and astronomers - as well as lawyers, philosophers and theologians. there was a good mix of trades involved here, all the specializations you could possibly ask for to develop the untamed new territories comming under the influence of the Jesuit missions.

over the years the Jesuits came to be known instead for running the schools that produced the best English speakers, the most complex thinkers, the writers with the most polished style. these were also the people who were the most likely to be paralyzed by reflection and thought and analysis when the situation really called for action, the people most likely to muddle through on the strength of their language skills.

i feel it's time to restore balance to this equation. by some historical aberration, we've had a few decades of being educated like quasi-seminarians by what a friend of mine calls the "guitar-strumming, sandal-wearing" type of Jesuit. i believe the pendulum has to swing to the hard sciences once more. you want to talk traditional education? nothing would be more traditional than being educated by the kind of Jesuits who could be running genetics programs or building irrigation systems or restoring old churches in their spare time.

I think it would be great if Ateneo would offer more degrees in the sciences and engineering in the future. Maybe that is why they are thinking of moving the HS and GS. We are already strong in IT, Math, and Chemistry. But for those who are taking up Management, Economics and the like, I would rather have philosophy and other core courses than certain subjects which could easily be learned elsewhere.

I guess it's safe to say that we'll always have a core curriculum because all Jesuit schools around the world are required to have a standard core of subjects, without exception. The thing is that while American Jesuit schools like Georgetown, Marquette and Fordham have kept their adherence to the core curricum to a minimum (and devoted the remainder of educational content to pragmatic or non-traditional methods), Ateneo traditionally stayed way above the minimum requirements and stuck to the old and outdated methods. Hence while Ateneo MGT students, for example, were busy practicing 3-sentence scripted stat problems at the back of a textbook chapter, their couterparts in Boston College were starting their own businesses, consulting to large companies for real projects and doing targeted career networking (instead of scattering their resumes all over the place). And somehow I got a strange feeling that all the rhetoric about making students see the greater meaning in everything was just an excuse not to innovate.

During the 90s, a lot of changes happened with the student population. The easier flow of information, greater affordability of graduate studies abroad, growing challenges of globalization and a growing desire for material affluence made future Ateneans more abstract in their thinking and more focused on what they wanted to get out of a college education even before they started college. They took the initiative to find their passion set their own goals and worked hard to accomplish them, and they were beginning to demand that their school be a place where they can cultivate their passion into real-life achievement instead of just simply telling them what to do. Then there were the real problems brought about by globalization which, as Mr. Gokongwei put it very clearly in his address to the Ateneo community, even articulate the Ateneans could not talk their way out of. The only way to solve them was to deal with them an not to talk, reason or wit their way out. So far Ateneans have responded well, not because there was some magic in Jesuit education, but mainly because most of them were very smart, ambitious and self-motivated to begin with - Ateneo has been a top feeder school to elite fact-based consulting firms like McKinsey, Bain, AT Kearney, etc. It would therefore be a waste to see this motivation go down the drain in an archaic system of learning.

Fortunately the school has gradually innovated its programs to meet this growing demand. As far as I know, JGSOM has been transforming itself into a "Pinoy Wharton" with initiatives such as semesters abroad, joining global case competitions and even setting up a small business laboratory where students can establish their own companies under the guidance of faculty and industry professionals. But this necessitated changes in the core curriculum - students now take 3 units of Philo a sem instead of 4, and a new building had to be built devoted to business learning. The School of Science has partnered with Sun to put up a Java development center where Computer Science students can develop practical Java applications that are usable in industry. These and more developments will help Ateneo continue to attract young, talented students that can only enrich its learning environment. But this will necessitate more construction and more adjustments to the core curriculum as other Jesuit schools have done.

I agree with you gee. Ateneo should offer more or strengthen its Engineering and Sciences courses. Our country could use more of engineers and scientists who are the best in their fields. We already have more than enough lawyers in this country.


P.S.

A Filipino is among the 8 finalists of the HP/Wall Street Journal's search for the Best Young Inventor in Asia. His research is about the treatment of allergies, I believe.

Much of these changes (at least for the Jesuit schools abroad), are geared more towards encouraging students to find their passion, and not to teach them a trade skill. Passion makes for a more enjoyable learing experience which will motivate students to work harder in order to excel. While some practical matters can arguably be learned at another time and place, the world is changing fast and even Ateneans have to contend with greater competition from graduates of NUS, SMU, IIT, Peking U and U of Malaya. And as opportunities are awarded more objectively and more abstractly, there will be a greater need to demostrate suitability and excellence earlier on.

It's not so much specialization but rather how students learn that will make difference in their lives. No matter what field a student may major in - humanities, the arts, natural sciences or business, it has to facilitate the cultivating of passion into real accomplishment. Yet, under the old structure, even a humanities student would have found it a bit of a stretch to cultivate his or her passion in Ateneo, relative to their peers in other universities worldwide. In time, the following generations of talented students might just decide to pack their bags and study college abroad - in universities where they can realize their passion, just like what some of them are doing right now.

let's try to predict specific consequences of a high school move out of loyola, shall we?

one thing which i think will happen over time is that ateneo high school graduates from the non-loyola campus will stop "acting like they own the place" once they land in loyola for college. there is a well-documented tendency to coast among the high school boys, many of whom find the college well within their comfort zones as freshmen, and therefore don't work as hard as they should.

mrs. tirona of the old history department was well aware of this failing, and made it a point to embarrass in class any ateneo high schooler who tried to bullshit his way without having read the material. we felt at the time that she really had a personal thing against us, but then we learned she came from an ateneo family herself - perhaps she encountered the smugness problem there at close quarters and from a young age? i can actually sort of sympathize with her point of view now.

i know there are other ways (including kicking people out for academic reasons) to address this problem that don't involve moving the high school out of loyola. having said that, there may not be enough professors out there who are willing to play bad cop to the point of pushing the boys enough to jolt them out of any undue sense of entitlement.

A guy who knows what to think and how to think can easily adapt in a changing environment. Don't get me wrong. I am not for the old core curriculum (heck we even had Rhetoric under Fr. Irwin at that time). I just don't want to see it further reduced. I talked sometime ago to a La Salle student and asked him how many units of Philosophy he was required to take. I think he said about 3 or 6 units. You could see the result hehe. Smart (Ateneo) is smarter and more innovative than Globe (La Salle). Or are Ateneans just smarter than La Sallians (Acet and Acet Reject and all that stuff). I heard though that UP incoming freshmen are the smartest (something about gene pools?) according to my friend who is a member of the board of trustees of Ateneo.

I admit, I did go elsewhere for an undergraduate education due to the restrictive curriculum the Ateneo furnishes its students. The limitation the Ateneo imposes on its undergrads in terms of electives is, to put it politely, embarrassing. There are glaring shortcomings to the current system (like having the first three year of your college years essentially mapped out for you by the department heads). But I still assert that a core curriculum is essential in providing a true liberal arts education.

Ideally, rudimentary skills such as English or Filipino composition/speech should have been mastered in the secondary level. But I think that we all have been in classrooms where either language has been thoroughly "re-imagined" by one of our less eloquent classmates. And so, I think that instruction in either of these languages should be taught at a respectable tertiary level.

Theology or Philosphy, pick your poison. Two semesters of either or both should be required. To go through college without having read The Republic, City of God, or The Prince -- you would suck in Jeopardy among other things. But seriously, the classics are called that for a reason.

History, Math, Science, a foreign language - why not?

One way to deal with the pre-professional vs the pseudo-intellectual debate is to give each movement their own place in the sun. Different colleges/schools within the university. Offer a variation of the core curriculum to students in the School of Management and the School of Arts and Sciences. (Is the university already structured this way?) Afterwards, let them complete their required credits for their majors while taking worthwhile electives like underwater basket weaving or indigenous urban pottery.

Can we replicate the university experience in other schools in Asia, Europe, or the US by making these changes? Probably not (this really is a question of resources -financial and intellectual). But I think it would be a step in the right direction.

On the expansion issue, where would this new campus end up anyway?

One phenomenon today's Ateneo has to contend with is that incoming students are a lot smarter, more abstract in thought and more materialistic in their orientation then those who came in the generations before them. Even somebody who graduated in the early 90s would find it difficult to relate to those who graduated since the late 90s to 2000s. After all, the rapid expansion of new media and globalization has only very recently exacted a greater influence on the outlook of the youth. I can't say how they compare to La Sallites, but I wouldn't be surprised if the hard-nosed reason for their success in life was because they were already highly intelligent, ambitious and motivated to begin with.

Hence, being taught how to think to the degree that Ateneo has ascribed to for decades is becoming less relevant to the current crop. Since most of them are already smart and focused, they do not need to - and do not want to - be taught how to think. They already know what they want and would rather spend precious (and expensive) tertiary education time aiming for a higher level of accomplishment in whatever it is they feel passionately about. That's why a lot of the first-world universities (including Jesuit schools) are reinventing themselves from being just another step after secondary education to environments that facilitate the pursuit of passion through the use of traditional and non-traditional means - faculty who are in the cutting edge of their fields, collaboration between faculty and students, interesting electives (as what hoyadoc mentioned), apprenticeships / co-ops, relevant student activities (as opposed to those who so nothing but organize movie premieres and parties), studies abroad, etc.

Yes, there will still be a need for a broad exposure to different subjects, but more for the purpose of giving students a different perspective rather than a tool to influence their thinking. And the core curriculum won't go away. Like I posted earlier, all Jesuit schools, without exception, have to adhere to a standard minimum core curriculum. I believe it's part of the Society's charter or something like that.

The core per se is not so much of a problem as how the core was delivered and balanced with the interests of the students. Even elite liberal arts colleges like Wellesley, Amherst and Holy Cross have adjusted their curricula to include non-traditional methods and programs to cater to specific interests of their students - all to make learning more fascinating, more enjoyable and more motivating. Holy Cross, for example, has pre medicine/dentistry and pre business programs, even if on paper it does not offer any majors. Students studying Eastern European culture would spend a semester or 2 in Prague or Warsaw, or natural science buffs would research with PhDs and get full academic credits for their experience when they get back. Until recent developments in Ateneo like the JGSOM, SOSE and others, Ateneans would have nothing but another day in class to look forward to, studying subjects that they felt they were spending too much time on. But none of these could ever have happened without new facilities, a slightly more flexible curriculum and faculty who challenged themselves to think out of the box for better ways to meet the students' needs.

let's place ateneo squarely in the context of what it really is - an elite education for a developing country. whether it's still an elite education in the context of the region or the world is another matter.

you could get by for most of the last century with a simple ateneo bachelor's degree because 1. most of the rest of the country couldn't provide anything comparable to an ateneo education and 2. there was an overflow of direct technology transfer from american jesuits which wasn't available anywhere else in southeast asia.

my father is rightfully proud of his economics degree from the postwar years, which opened all sorts of doors for him. he specifically remembers having to teach his multinational colleagues from around the region how to compute for IRR, how to determine cost of capital, how to optimize systems using the latest methods from operations research. these are subjects taught in any ordinary finance course today, but back then it was fresh and new, and it led him to understand that, for a brief window of a few decades, educated filipinos were among the first in line for new ideas and research. it annoys him now to hear singaporeans act like they discovered financial engineering or see how the thais have built up such good infrastructure. every time he learns of vietnam taking another step to being more competitive in the world, it just eats at him. he thinks it's a good thing that indonesia is still so messed up, because otherwise we'd be in last place. (and that was a few years ago - i'm not so sure the indonesians are in last place now)

we all know this story in one form or another. we've heard all the anecdotes of how thais learned agriculture from up los banos and how koreans gawked at the sight of elevators and escalators in manila's buildings and how chinese fled the communist revolution in droves for a better life in southeast asia, with the philippines a prime destination.

in this context, it's important to realize that first, the university used to have a good claim to being world class, and second, there were generations of ateneans before us who went through an experience that would be very alien to many of us - that of being confidently aware that they were among the best-educated people in asia.

when you've fallen this far behind, leaving things unchanged isn't really an option.

Schoolmates,

I'd like to share something with all of you. I, like of most of you will be if the planned move materializes, graduated from a now inexistent gradeschool.

Based on first hand experience, it's hard for me and my batchmates to connect with the campus now because the GS and HS departments are now located in Alabang and San Juan and especially because I finished my undergraduate degree in Loyola.

There's nothing tying me down to my original alma mater. The work education and back of the gym where as young boys, we settled our scores mano-y-mano are no longer there.

The new place feels like a conveyor belt grinding out graduates by the thousands yearly.

There are new buildings, but sadly, I feel the soul of the place is gone.

Don't allow this to happen.

Under today's circumstances, any entity - be it an institution or an individual - is taken within the context of the rest of the world. And this is espescially true for Ateneo because, as many already understand, its constituency is the elite - be it intellectual, economic or more often a combination of both. It is the very high concentration of this high-aiming and high-achieving demographic that has traditionally made Ateneo a very attractive place to study in, a place where the students themselves raise the bar and encourage each other to aim higher.

And it is the above that makes Ateneo particularly sensitive to global trends. They have access to high quality secondary education, global info. via the internet and media, parents and family members who are themselves high achievers and probably at some point in their lives been in touch with people from around the world. With the growing availability of new financial products and scholarships, foreign education is becoming more affordable to them and more and more of them are taking advantage of it.

Inevitably, Ateneo will be benchmarked with what the rest of the world has to offer because the kind of students that it targets will eventually have access to the rest of the world. It may not be losing students to DLSU, but it does lose a few very bright students here and there to the likes of NUS. It's not a matter of pride or the need to keep up with the good memories, but a practical matter of keeping it's biggest asset - its students.

And at least from my personal observation, while the overall economic condition of the Philippines may have something to do with how Ateneo stands with the rest of the world, part of it also had to do with a simple lack of incentive and motivation to innovate - like a monopoly in a protected market - that is, until global trends started turning up the heat. Then there were also the distorted priorities in the system that those in the inside who pushed (and are currently pushing) for change knew very well. The little improvements being implemented in the JGSOM and some of the other departments demonstrate that progress can happen if people can be made to want it to happen.

One of the most refreshing threads I've read through in a while, with intelligent arguments proposed and countered respectfully.

rabbaddal, interesting how you cite some of the students that AdMU has lost to a regional powerhouse like NUS. How did you come to know about these fairly recent developments?

Truth be told, students may not be the only thing that AdMU may soon "lose" to a place like NUS...

I recently attended the "Director's List" event for the SOSE. In this event, the top 2% of the ACET examinees were invited for a day of presentation/talks by the students, teachers and administrators. Basically, the intention was to entice the best to enrol in Ateneo.

During the dinner, Queena Lee-Chua gave a talk on why she chose Ateneo over UP and La Salle. However, it did not look like UP and La Salle were our competitors. She said (not verbatim), "I know that most of you seated at my table are thinking of going to NUS." These were graduating seniors who were to take up BS Mathematics.

I really felt that Ateneo was hard-pressed to give them an incentive to stay. I could not blame these graduating seniors. How could you turn down a full-scholarship at a reputable university like Singapore?

Ateneo must be able to compete with universities like NUS to prevent losing the best students to other schools.


Victory_fils: Are you referring to the teachers moving on to NUS? I think there are some teachers from La Salle who are in NUS now. NUS seems to be interested in recruiting Filipino teachers who are experts in the social sciences.

I do not think AdMU has the resources to compete with a place like NUS at this point in time. This does not mean that AdMU should not set its benchmark high: To aim to compete at the regional level with giants in Asia like NUS is a good goal.

In the same token, NUS also sets its goals high -- for example, they are aiming to make the new Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP) as the Harvard JFK of Asia (and it already has ties with Harvard JFK and several other US policy schools). But let's be realistic: A place like NUS has the backing of the Singapore government, allowing a place like LKYSPP to raise USD100 million in funds in about a year -- and that's only for the new policy school, that doesn't include all the other schools in NUS. In comparison, the largest windfall AdMU ever received was the USD4 million or so that was donated by John Gokongwei to the School of Management.

It will take a serious amount of commitment from both the private and public sectors in the Philippines to match this kind of resource base. True, what matters in the end in terms of education and training is the quality of teachers and students and how they interact, not the resources per se. But a good resource base often helps determine the kind of quality teachers and students an educational institution can attract and/or retain.

I personally know two teachers from the Ateneo JGSOM who are now taking their Ph.D.s at NUS (one of whom was a former student of mine). And let's just say that I have some personal experience as to how aggressive NUS can be in recruiting former AdMU teachers who went on to take their Ph.D.s in the US.

does anyone know if ateneo has a permanent "endowment" that fund managers help to expand every year? i get the feeling the ateneo funding process is driven largely by getting alumni to make sizeable donations during their class jubilee years. there is certainly a large role played by private gifts of capital, but what is being done on the operating expenses side? how much does tuition actually cover and how much must be made up for with fund-raising? is ateneo obliged to disclose how its funds are managed to any regulator? are its fund managers benchmarked by any performance standards?

Yes, AdMU does have an endowment.

Good questions you ask there, but those who are privy to such details probably won't be revealing them in a public forum like atenista.net anytime soon.

Maybe corner a faculty member who's part of the Budget Committee, or get someone from the Board of Trustees drunk and get them talking.

I am totally against the idea of relocating the hs and the gs in order to make space for the college! The mere thought of doing so brings anger into my stressed soul. For the love of G*d, control the student population by imposing limits upon each batch! If it would make admission into the Ateneo even more stringent, so be it - so long as our campus doesnt get torn apart!

My thoughts exactly! Ateneo de Manila probably has the biggest grade school and high school program in the country today. Gosh, the high school now has 15 sections! During the 80s, we only had 9. I would impose a halt in population growth. Why the drive to keep on increasing the student poplation? I hope that money is not the primary driver.

It's almost a mathematical certainty that the student population would rise. The "universe" (i.e., the entire population) itself is expanding, so that would be the main driver of a growing student population. It's a phenomenon that has been brought to bear on the entire educational system itself -- the Ateneo included.

Second -- and this would be more observable as Ateneo alumni would themselves experience it -- is that Ateneans themselves grow up, get married, have kids -- kids that they would want to send to the Ateneo, too. Naturally. But assuming each alumnus fathers two sons, and assuming a High School graduating class of 40 per section (times 8 sections back in the '80s), that's already 640 little Ateneans at any given time -- all offspring of just one batch!

This is, of course, a simplification, but the point is that, inevitably, the Ateneo would have to keep on expanding its facilities to meet that growth -- and if it maintains the same standards for admission. Given a larger base and the same admission rate (say, 30% or 40% of a given pool of applicants -- I don't know the exact rate, but there would be), naturally, the Grade School and High School would have to make more and more room for them.

What the Ateneo might consider is raise the bar even higher -- if it hasn't already done so. Talagang "the best of the best" na lang ang makakapasok. That way, the strain on the faculty and facilities would not be so pronounced, and the schools can really focus their attention on the young'uns with the quality of education the Ateneo is famous for.

I think that, eventually, Ateneo has to adopt this philosophy. It just cannot keep on expanding the Loyola campus. The question is WHEN should they stop expanding. My opinion is NOW. If Ateneo wants to expand, then it should find a new location, preferably in the southen part of the metropolis. That is the growth area which is untapped by the school.

a "best of the best" appoach does not reflect the three main realities that drive the admissions process. first, alumni will produce stupid kids - more than you realize. second, alumni will lobby. and third, alumni will withhold their money if they are displeased.

there is no way you can keep the school artificially small - far below the natural historical growth rate of stupid alumni children - and expect to survive. you need to grow fairly in step with the growth of your natural constituency, and if it means cutting a few corners along the way, so be it. it's a greater-good type of decision. schools make it all the time.

Oh, here and there.

A few of them who are now at NUS got featured in the newspapers. But it's not so much those who transfer but rather those who opt to forgo Ateneo and just begin their college studies abroad, some of whom I've met in NY studying in colleges like Columbia, Sarah Lawrence (Cris Villonco transferred there after a year in Ateneo) and Mt. Saint Vincent.

Kaw naman, 'lam mo na ngang parati akong naghahang-out with the undergrads.

This is very interesting indeed.

Sabagay...

More like a "Pinoy NUS."

I agree with you about the three realities. But to imply that the Ateneo has to expand to keep its alumni happy (by accepting their marginal sons), have to disagree with you on that.

Since the Ateneo is considered the best of the best, I don't think survival will ever be an issue. The Ateneo will always be here to stay. Even my La Salle friends are sending their kids to Ateneo! Heck, even the wife of current coach of the Archers considered enrolling her son in the Ateneo!

Just wanted to do the plug-in for Wharton.

Baliktad yata ang mundo! A CSB alumni singing the praise of Wharton ahead of Victory. Bwahahaha!

Columbia does not have an undergrad program in business. For US college students who want to major in business, the preference is usually Wharton, BC, NYU, MIT or Babson and the likes.