Tag: November 30, 2010

The Thomasian community is “on the right track” by starting its Quadricentennial celebrations with a spiritual retreat, living up to the ideals of founder Miguel de Benavides, O.P., Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales has said.

In the Quadricentennial Retreat (Q Retreat) attended by the faculty members, administrators, and support staff at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay last month, Rosales praised UST for preserving the fruits of the labor of Benavides, the third archbishop of Manila whose bequest of P1,500 worth of property and his personal library led to the foundation of the University of Santo Tomas in 1611.

A NUMBER of diplomats and a top businessman visited the University in the past two weeks to forge partnerships with the oldest university in Asia, barely two months before the grand Quadricentennial celebration in 2011.

United States Ambassador to the Philippines Harry K. Thomas Jr. went to UST last November 23 to talk about a “fruitful collaboration between UST and the United States of America.”

In a luncheon meeting with Rector Fr. Rolando de la Rosa, O.P., Thomas vowed to actively participate in the upcoming activities of UST.

“We are going to ask Father [De la Rosa] in what way he would like us to participate, then we will evaluate that and give a response,” Thomas said in an interview.

INTERNATIONAL public speaking organization Toastmasters Club (TMC) has revived its chapter in UST to “provide a good avenue for Thomasians where they can develop their skill to speak well and the confidence to speak up.”

Nine years after the demise of the first UST-TMC, which was established in 1995, the organization was relaunched last November 13 at the Beato Angelico Auditorium.

“I do not question the ability of Thomasians to speak well. But I feel that they need to speak up more,” said UST-TMC President Pia Tenedero, a professor from the Alfredo M. Velayo-College of Accountancy.

THIS one gets a thumbs down.

A number of doctors at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery are opposing a plan to require them to log on to a biometric “thumb-scanning” system to monitor absences and tardiness in class.

Although the system is not yet operational, physician-lecturers said the proposed system will be inconvenient.

The biometric system will require faculty members to personally “bundy in and bundy out” for their attendance by scanning their fingerprints on the machine.

Medicine Assistant Dean Dr. Emelita Tan-Gan said the office simply wanted to simplify the process. While Medicine does not have problems with the attendance of instructors, Gan said the dean’s office was having a hard time monitoring faculty members.

THE ACCOUNTING office has started charging students for breaking laboratory equipment at the start of every semester, catching some students by surprise.

This was to clean up the University’s books every semester, and because parents have been complaining of having to pay accumulated breakage fees before graduation, the Laboratory Equipment and Supplies Office (Leso) said.

Students interviewed by the Varsitarian wondered how the Leso computed the fees, since they often work together in groups during laboratory classes.

“I don’t know how they came up with individual breakage fees. Also, we were not informed about it prior to enrollment,” said Nursing junior Maricar Anastacio.

THE NUMBER of faculty members with graduate degrees increased to nearly three-quarters of UST’s teaching force in the last four years, while the rest still have to earn master’s degrees to comply with government standards, data from the Office of the Academic Affairs and Research showed.

In the first semester of the academic year, 515 faculty members still had to get master’s degrees, equivalent to 26.38 percent of the 1,945 total faculty population including the Graduate School, Medicine, Law, and the elementary, high school, and library departments.

THE PHILIPPINES may go the way of the United States — where a “contraceptive mentality” and abortion is rampant—if the “reproductive health” (RH) bill becomes law, lay experts and clergymen have said.

At the 17th Asia-Pacific Congress on Faith, Life and Family organized by Human Life International, Church leaders said they were preparing for a “head-on” collision with proponents of the population-control bill, which will set aside billions in state funds for contraceptives.

The head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), Tandag Bishop Nereo Odchimar, told reporters the fight against the RH bill was an uphill battle with the growing number of lawmakers supporting it.

THE COLLEGE Fine Arts and Design (CFAD) will be implementing new academic policies for its Advertising Arts program, including the mandatory on-the-job-training (OJT) for junior students and a revamp of major subjects.

Starting next school year, subjects such as “costume and fashion design,” “package design” and “life painting” will no longer be regular subjects, instead they will be offered as elective courses, while a new subject called “figure drawing” will be included in the curriculum, the Varsitarian learned in a forum titled “Cross PolyNation” last November 10 and 11 at the Beato Angelico Building.

THE INSTALLATION of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras inside the campus may have lessened the number of petty crimes in the University.

In the first semester of the academic year, the security office recorded 22 such cases, compared with 39 and 31 in the first semester of school years 2008 and 2009, respectively.

“Majority of the crime incidents happened outside the campus,” security chief Joseph Badinas said.

Based on security office records, España Boulevard was the haven of pickpockets, who prey on students by joining crowds crossing the street. On Dapitan Street, “snatchers” were usually aboard motorcycles, grabbing mobile phones and other valuable items from people on the sidewalk.

WITH the passing of the University’s first writer-in-residence, former Faculty of Arts and Letters Dean Ophelia-Alcantara Dimalanta, the administration has raised the prospect of reviving the Center for Creative Writing and Studies (CCWS), of which Dimalanta was the inaugural—and ironically enough, the closing—director.

The revival should be supported and encouraged if only to provide a fitting tribute to Dimalanta and sublime writers like her that constitute the Parnassus of Thomasian letters.

The reconstitution of the Center will also ensure the sure coming of the next generation of Thomasian men and women of letters.