News & Blog

On its 40th anniversary, the UP Sandigan para sa Mag-aaral at Sambayanan (SAMASA) Alumni Association celebrates activism as a positive force for change. Among its ranks are the late charismatic student leader Lean Alejandro, Senator Francis Pangilinan, Cong. Kit Belmonte, veteran journalist Malou Mangahas, National Privacy Commissioner Raymond Liboro, UP Chancellor Fidel Nemenzo, VP Robredo Spokesperson Barry Gutierrez, artist Toym Leon Imao, and countless student activists who are now leaders in diverse fields from business, non-governmental organizations, academe, and government. 

SAMASA was a major student political party and alliance at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman which was formally established in its first Congress on July 24-25, 1981. 

SAMASA began as a College of Arts and Letters student party in 1979 and it triumphantly fielded candidates in the first University Student Council election in 1980 (where it swept all the seats) before it was formally established as a party alliance. 

SAMASA was born amidst the resistance against the Marcos dictatorship. When Martial Law was declared in 1972, student councils and school publications were outlawed along with other democratic institutions. In 1980, after nearly a decade of struggle to uphold student rights and welfare, the first student council election was held at the UP. SAMASA fielded the young Malou Mangahas (now a veteran and multi-awarded journalist) as its standard bearer. She was elected as the first woman chairperson of the UP student council together with SAMASA’s entire slate of councilors. 

For the next 20 years, thirteen (13) more chairpersons that ran under the SAMASA banner won with landslide victory, as well as many of its councilors and college representatives. 

SAMASA Chair Atty. Susan Villanueva fondly recalled her college years in UP and how SAMASA made her college years “truly meaningful.” Through SAMASA, she felt privileged “to meet folks from all walks of life who represented the very best of our generation, who were young, committed, and full of hope for the country.” This commitment she observed, has grown beyond UP as “we continue to work together to do whatever we can to make things better!” Truly, the camaraderie formed under SAMASA helped the members discover themselves and their courage, nurtured by deepest friendships as they entrust their lives and safety with fellow activists. 

To pursue this commitment, many joined the broad anti-dictatorship movement outside of UP and became leaders of multi-sectoral and sectoral people’s organizations.To resist the brutal repression of the Marcos dictatorship, some members of SAMASA went underground. Some made the ultimate sacrifice in the anti-dictatorship struggle. Still many, decided to pursue their activism in their respective fields with the full realization that activism – the desire to change things for the better- can be expressed in many ways. After the 1986 People Power revolution, many SAMASA alumni pursued its own brand of activism outside the confines of the university carrying with them the creativity, the passion, and audacity to be catalyst of change that SAMASA imbued among its members. 

Rolando de la Cruz, a former SAMASA student leader and an outstanding UP Alumnus pointed out in an article that “There were those who left the country for various reasons, and yet many of them whom I know continue to contribute to the welfare of this nation in diverse ways. Those who remained in mainstream Philippine society eventually entered politics or became servants of the people in government in other capacities. Others went to the private sector, trying to effect changes in their fields of interests and endeavors – lawyers, educators, artists, writers, filmmakers, corporate people, NGO workers, IT professionals, founders of companies, creators of ideas, and what have you!” 

Under its leadership training program, de la Cruz proudly recalled how SAMASA molded its leaders and members to fight for the causes they believe in. They were trained the crucial skills “to communicate ideas, rally others to effect changes in society.” During large gatherings and even room-to-room spiels, de la Cruz said student leaders and members were honed “to write speeches fast and deliver them with some impact, campaign for various issues without reservation nor shame, and organize other people so that they could also act in society.” The campaigns “spurred by SAMASA and its affiliate organizations,” helped de la Cruz find his “love for the art, teaching and creative writing.” In was in SAMASA, de la Cruz acknowledged where he “learned the value of critical thinking, and of making every single day worth living, for it must be spent effecting improvements – no matter how little – in the lives of others in one’s milieu.” 

For many outsiders, UP is seen as a hotbed of activism and communism. However, as Atty. Raffy Aquino a former SAMASA student leader, succinctly described the truth, “UP is, by design, the ideological center of the Philippine political elite. It is in UP that the future managers and drivers of the Philippine state are educated and trained, where the future policymakers and decision makers of the country are schooled on how things are to be preserved, how order is to be maintained, and how the people are to be kept in line. In this sense, it is in UP that the social system replicates and perpetuates itself, in all its inequity and inhumanity, with all its fractures, irrationalities, and anachronisms.” 

It is in this atmosphere that SAMASA instilled among its members the “vision of service to the people” and the “commitment to serve the country during and after the Marcos dictatorship.”

It was in SAMASA where he “learned the complex ills of our society,” de la Cruz recalled. Aquino pointed out that “While so obviously reactionary in its institutional intentions, UP also managed to serve as nursery for the second wave of Filipino activism, of the inheritors of the legacy left by the first generation of activists that forged a new nation and led it against Spain. From these halls emerged the rebels and revolutionaries of the modern age, the greatest dissenters and the most accomplished radical scholars this country has ever seen. And if UP has produced generations of political leaders and bureaucrats dedicated to defending the status quo, it has also sent out to the world generations of activists dedicated to assailing that status quo and taking it down.” 

While activism is now being maligned by the powers that be, Aquino simply defined activism as “the habit of trying to change things in society through social action.” In a forum organized by SAMASA, Aquino enumerated five (5) important implications of activism in his speech. These are the qualities that SAMASA activists strive to uphold: 

FIRST: The activist is not an occasional adventurer. His activism is habitual, sustained, disciplined, and purposeful. He keeps at it despite reversals and defeats, and he does not rest upon victories but constantly learns from them and builds upon them. The activist is not the socialite or the politician who attend rallies only to be televised, or to secure for themselves some short-term political advantage. The activist is in it for the long haul. SECOND: The activist is outward looking. He looks to his neighbors, to his community, to his people and the society they live in. He realizes that the affirmation of his own humanity ultimately depends on his taking part in building a society that would allow everyone else the same affirmation. The person who is consumed by angst over his floundering career or his failed marriage will have no time to look outward, will have no energy to help uplift the human condition, and will probably never become an activist; and society will probably never have any use for him either. 

THIRD: The activist acts. He does not simply wring his hands in anguish over corruption in government and rising unemployment, and he does not simply offer novenas for the Supreme Court to strike down the Anti-Cybercrime Law. He writes, he teaches and lectures, he emails, tweets, and shares in FB, he attends meetings, joins organizations and forms organizations, and in general, actually intervenes in social reality. And because such social action is most potent if undertaken by many people moving in the same direction at the same time, the true activist is almost always an organized activist. FOURTH: The activist is instinctively normative, forward-looking, modernist, and progressive, dedicated to moving things in society from what they are to what they ought to be. A person who is committed to the preservation of existing social structures, no matter how moribund, is a reactionary, and a reactionary can never be a true activist. 

FIFTH: In seeking to change society, the true activist has no choice but to try to understand the nature of his society, its afflictions, the roots of these afflictions that often lie deep in history, the strengths and weaknesses of his people and their culture, and the experiences of other societies, other cultures, other histories. Then he will have to define what human society should be in the future, figure out what he wants for his people generations from now. And finally he will have to clarify his activism’s line of march, and define his route from what is to what may be. 

What this means is that the true activist should also be an observer and a philosopher, a theorist and a thinker. And if he is not yet these, he strives to be so by reading, listening, studying, and learning. To be sure, the activist should never lose the capacity to be outraged by what is outrageous, but as important as the fires of emotion is the certitude that one is on the right side of history – and this certitude is attainable only through intellectual struggle. Passionate buffoons will never make good activists. 

Let’s all be activists to change our world for the better! #celebrateactivism 

(Nona Andaya-Castillo)

---

Sources:
– Rolando de la Cruz. UP Diliman Student Council Chairpersons (1913 to present).
– Wikipedia Entry on UP Diliman University Student Council
– “Notes on Activism” by Raffy Aquino