BASKING UNDER THE HIGH-NOON SUN OF HARDCORE DELUSION

Trinity University of Asia (TUA) is now levitating under the magical spell of the Commission on Higher Education’s make-believe power after the former has been granted an autonomous status by the latter. Hubris is the most appropriate term for the spirit that has possessed TUA since the official proclamation was issued. A certain type of delusion has overpowered the leadership of the university in the belief that TUA now is in league with the illustrious Ateneo and De La Salle. What a horrendous hallucination! The most appalling disorder of TUA is its utter failure to face the reality that what it can only solidly boast of is the momentary achievements of its College of Nursing—the St. Luke’s College of Nursing—which was founded generations ago when Trinity was not even yet in swaddling clothes.

The irony of the present circumstances is that TUA is in a state of unequalled “high” despite the hard reality that it cannot actually lay a solid claim to an array of distinguished honest-to-goodness scholars from among its stockpile of “doctored” degree holders. Ateneo’s and De La Salle’s doctorate degree holders are authentic scholars who have produced academic outputs of high scholarly worth published in notable scholarly journals, local and international. Ateneo’s and De La Salle’s academic scholars have read papers and lectured in prominent conferences and forums, local and international.

But the present situation of TUA is still salvageable given the condition that it will soon wake up to reality. Face-to-face with reality, it can soberly locate itself right at the place where it can start off: the call to challenge genuine scholars and the guts to weed out incompetence in its faculty ranks.

Short of romanticizing the past, TUA could have been standing tall right at this point in time in a state of genuine greatness would it still have the authentic scholars of the more or less recent gone-by era—luminaries that it unfortunately failed to acknowledge when they still walked the corridors of its campus: The University-of-Paris-educated biologist, Dr. Rey de la Paz; the biologist ,Prof. Valentin Berdera; the University-of-Marburg-educated development economist, Dr Jun Camat; the journalist, Carlos Bueno; and the scholar of Comparative Literature, Prof. Alona Ureta- Guevarra. Those were the days, my friends, I thought they’d never end. Those were the days when we could have been genuinely prouder than basking now under the high-noon sun of hardcore delusion.

© Ruel F. Pepa, 17 April 2010