‘When President Jijil takes over on February 9, I do hope he picks up on where PDLC leaves off regarding a project dear to my heart — the establishment of a second PGH within or close to the Diliman campus.’
IN less than a month the presidency of Atty. Danilo L. Concepcion, the 21st president of the University of the Philippines system, will come to an end.
I’ve known UP presidents since Salvador P. Lopez, who I confronted once at the Faculty Center when I was still a UP Elementary school student and a firebrand reactionary (ha-ha). I was closest to Edgardo J. Angara during whose term I was part of the UP Debating Team and news editor of the Philippine Collegian, while PDLC was an upperclassman at Law school who married the much-sought-after Gaby Roldan and made her FLOTUP.
Incoming president Atty. Angelo Jimenez is also a good friend —which makes me realize that I am at that age when many UP units are headed by people who I know or grew up with. Which means I am old, ha-ha.
The coming end of the Concepcion presidency and the beginning of the Jimenez era has gotten me rethinking about a few ideas I have shared before on the office of UP President.
The most prominent one has to do with the experience of two past presidents who have chosen to be confined at the Philippine General Hospital when health issues arose — and that is that UP should grant all past presidents the benefit of free health care at PGH.
Especially for those presidents who chose to remain in the academe and never sought to earn a king’s ransom in the private sector, such a benefit would be a great way of saying “thank you” for services rendered for the rest of their lives. (Of course, the past presidents who could afford it may pass up on the benefit if they so wished.)
Now, this isn’t asking much, is it?
A more controversial idea was to provide past presidents with on-campus housing, again for the rest of their lives, and again something they could pass up on. I am aware that there remains a backlog on housing units for qualified faculty members but remembering how great it was to live on campus when my father and mother were awarded a house in Area 2 where we stayed for 17 years, I could only suspect that one or two former presidents would love to remain within the campus they so loved long after they had stepped down from office.
When President Jijil takes over on February 9, I do hope he picks up on where PDLC leaves off regarding a project dear to my heart — the establishment of a second PGH within or close to the Diliman campus.
This is a project long overdue, a common topic of discussion over our family dinner table in the 1970s and even into the 1980s. For many reasons, that project has never gotten off the ground and when the pandemic struck in early 2020 all I could think of was that if we had that hospital up and running, we could have had an additional 100-200 beds to serve those in need.
Will it suffer a better fate under Atty. Jimenez? I do hope so!
Le roi es mort; vive Le roi!
Thank you PDLC; good luck, Jijil!
