administrators seem to take for granted this fundamental truth. Then again, perhaps to these supposedly enlightened minds, a prodigiously edited journal or a spirited poetry reading, or even a student who wins a national literary prize do not exactly sound as prestigious as a champion basketball team. (They will question budget proposals for an extra computer for an office publication run almost entirely by three typewriters, but they will have no qualms sending the entire basketball squad to Hong Kong for vacation.) Under your term, Thomasian campus literature thrived. We, the members of the Thomasian Writers’ Guild, were one solid force—more Lord of the Flies than Dead Poets’ Society , though. That was a time when students and professional writers from other universities came to our poetry readings. And we held them in the most picturesque of venues—for instance, in that small park ringed by age-old bamboo, which, after the school’s recent face-lift, now only exists in memory. But those were exhilarating times—I remember one lambanog -fueled colleague (he was from Batangas) literally setting himself ablaze onstage while reciting heartbroken verses, and those guests from UP, who stunned us with brave caterwauls of liberated sexuality and enlightened politics. Those little events opened us to the multitude of possibilities of expression beyond our tiny Sylvia Plath-stained cubicles. And the fact that the dean herself bothered to attend these events was joyous affirmation of all our efforts. See? You seem to have upset the natural order of things. We were supposed to operate under cult-like secrecy—clandestine poetry readings, like illegal dance raves, or underground race clubs, and all other adolescent pursuits made more thrilling by their fugitive nature. But to be graced by the presence of her royal deanship? That was like organizing Woodstock and having Richard Nixon
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