Administration concedes that some character-building activities may have been building something else
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Academic Excellence Institution Discovers Gap Between Its Brand and Its Practices
MANILA — Ateneo de Manila University announced an internal review of its student athlete programme this week following the deaths of two varsity basketball players and demands from over 160 faculty members that management clarify what exactly the institution means when it uses the phrase character-building to describe training regimens that, in the assessment of the professors, have been building something incompatible with continued attendance at the institution.
University president Fr. Eduardo Heneral said the administration is taking the matter with the utmost seriousness and has formed a committee, a subcommittee, a task force reporting to the subcommittee, and a wellness audit team to review findings from all three before presenting them to a board that will commission an independent report to be reviewed by the committee. Fr. Heneral said he expects initial findings within sixty days, adding that the process is thorough, which everyone in the room agreed was not a synonym for fast.
Faculty Statement Raises Fundamental Questions
The statement from 160 Ateneo professors, released Tuesday and signed by faculty from the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and law school, asked management to explain the specific definition of character being built, the metrics used to assess successful construction, the safety protocols in place during the building process, the identity of the architect, and whether the programme had ever been evaluated by anyone who was not also running it. The statement described the deaths as devastating and said the institution’s silence since the initial incident had itself communicated something, the content of which the professors said they did not believe management intended but that the university should examine regardless.
Alumni groups split along lines that observers said tracked more closely to athletic versus academic alumni than to any principled position about institutional accountability, a split that several professors noted in their statement was itself a form of data about what the university had been building and in whom. The athletic alumni’s statement called for privacy and process. The broader alumni statement called for transparency and accountability. The administration called for patience, which it received in approximately the quantity it deserved.
National Bureau of Investigation Obtains Video Evidence
The National Bureau of Investigation confirmed it has obtained video footage from the site where the students were last seen and has formed a task force to investigate. The NBI declined to describe the contents of the footage, citing ongoing investigation protocols, and scheduled a full briefing for the following week. Police confirmed they had conducted initial interviews. The Palace said it had ordered a thorough investigation and would not allow the case to be swept under the rug, which analysts noted is the standard assurance given at the beginning of any case, the subsequent sweeping of which under any rug is the standard conclusion.
The Commission on Higher Education, which accredits universities and oversees student welfare standards, confirmed that its guidelines on student athlete safety exist, that compliance is self-reported, and that audits of self-reporting are conducted periodically on a schedule the commission described as ‘risk-based,’ which in practice means complaints-triggered. The University Athletic Association of the Philippines said it would await investigation findings before reviewing its own protocols, a sequencing of accountability that advocates described as backwards. The FIBA Southeast Asia development office offered condolences and said nothing further, which was, under the circumstances, the only accurate thing to say.
The University’s Actual Record
Ateneo de Manila is, by most educational measures, one of the Philippines’ strongest institutions: high board exam pass rates, strong research output, a faculty whose collective credentials are among the finest in Southeast Asian higher education. The professors who signed the statement said exactly this, and said it matters precisely because it raises the question of how an institution of this quality permitted conditions that resulted in these deaths, and what that gap reveals about the distance between the values a university espouses and the practices it permits when the practices are attached to athletic prestige and institutional reputation and winning and the things that winning produces.
Fr. Heneral said the university is committed to learning from this moment. A professor who signed the statement, reached by phone, said she hoped the institution would learn from this moment, but that she has been at Ateneo for twenty-two years and has seen the gap between what the university says it will learn and what it actually changes, and that she signed the statement because she is tired of the gap, and because two young men are dead, and because in an institution dedicated to forming the whole person, it is reasonable to ask what happens when the formation goes wrong, and to expect an answer that is not a committee.
The Flag, Continued
The ceremony at Kawit ended as it always ends: the flag at full mast, the anthem’s final note held one beat longer than written, the crowd dispersing into the June heat toward jeepneys, tricycles, and the traffic that was there before independence and will be there after. A group of students from a Manila public school had come by bus, three hours each way, to see the place where it began. Their teacher, a young woman who teaches Araling Panlipunan and earns a salary the government has twice promised to raise and twice not quite raised to the promised level, had organised the trip herself and was now organising the students back onto the bus with the practiced efficiency of someone who does more with less by disposition. Asked what she told her students about independence, she said she tells them it is real and it is work and the two things are not in contradiction. She said she tells them that every generation inherits a country that is not finished and is not supposed to be finished, and that the ones who made it so far did not do it so future generations could stop. She did not think this was quotable. The flag agreed with her anyway, which is all a flag can do, and today, in Kawit, it was enough.
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SOURCE: Satirical Journalism