Cesar Virata (left) served as finance minister and prime minister to President Marcos under martial law.
The irony of ironies.
The UP community was left in shock when the Board of Regents approved during its meeting in April 2013 the renaming of the UP College of Business Administration (CBA) to the Cesar EA Virata School of Business. We were shocked not only because the decision came from nowhere but, more significantly, because CBA will from then on be named after former President Marcos's top lapdog and last prime minister under the martial law regime, described by the Board as one who "has served UP, the Philippine government and the country for many years and with clear distinction."
In justification of his approved proposal, CBA Dean Ben Paul Gutierrez claims that a signature campaign endorsed by some members of the faculty was conducted during and after a college assembly in August 2012. When asked however by the School of Business Student Council (SBSC) in June 2013, Dean Gutierrez consistently and successfully avoided giving any explanation at all to students as to why Virata should in any way be honored by the college. The dean simply claims that there was no objection to the proposal.
Frustrated, the SBSC decided to undertake its own method of consulting the students. Here, there is no surprise: Out of 346 respondents, 337 (97%) disapproved of the renaming while only 9 (3%) approved. Of the 337, 90 (21%) proposed to change the new name to "UP School of Business" while 246 (76%) demanded the reversion of VSB to CBA.Where, then, is Dean Gutierrez' cited lack of objection?
Setting aside the fact that the naming of any public building or institution after a living person is null and void for violating Section 1 of R.A. No. 1059, Virata's name has no place of honor in UP. In case the Board has forgotten: Cesar Virata was nothing but a failure in governance. Under Virata as first finance minister and then prime minister, the martial law economy massively declined and the debt-driven development strategy left us with $28 billion in foreign debts, mostly channeled to the private pockets of Marcos cronies. The result was widespread poverty - poverty that we cannot solve until today.
Worse, Virata was the willing poster boy of sham democracy under the dictatorship. As prime minister of the fake Batasang Pambansa, Virata provided the necessary international appearance of democratic rule to allow the Marcos regime to continuously contract debt and receive aid to fund the lifestyles of our leaders. This, Virata did, while the rest of the regime arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, and murdered dissentients, many of whom came before us as Iskolars ng Bayan and were in fact classmates, batchmates, orgmates, brods, and sisses of the present members of the Board of Regents. While today we enjoy the freedom to join and form student organizations and elect student councils, this freedom was denied by Marcos and Virata to UP students under martial law. Thus, the student movement was forced to operate underground and any student activity noticed by the police forces was punished in the name of Marcos and Virata.
Both a failure in governance and an accomplice to a regime that systematically killed UP students and the UP student movement, Virata is not one who should be honored by CBA or the University. This transmogrification of Virata into a hero is not only historical revisionism but a spit on the graves of UP's martyr student-leaders.
Uphold the decision of 97% of CBA!
Revert VSB to CBA!
