(Editor’s Note: In light of the renewed debate on campus about what politicization in the context of the university really means, The GUIDON is presenting a short historiography on this very matter. This work documents the major developments in campus politics since the rebirth of the collegiate political party system with Partido Agila’s founding in 2003, and contextualizes these recent developments within the greater history of Ateneo student politics. This is the first of three parts.)

Part 2: Crisis and transformation

Part 3: Breaking the stalemate

“This campaign is founded on the view that the Sanggunian is an institution in crisis,” former Sanggunian Presidential Candidate Bian Villanueva’s platform boldly declared. “[It] is time to return to the very tenets of Democracy upon which a representative institution such as our own student government was founded.”

Villanueva, who nominally ran as an independent candidate but remains a full-pledged member of the newest political party on campus, the Christian Union for Socialist and Democratic Advancement (Crusada), was contextualizing one of his party’s main goals.

Part of his party’s vision statement reads, “Crusada yearns for a mode of student political engagement that encourages dialogue as well as antagonisms between different principles and value systems beyond conventional consensual and majoritarian political practices.” It seems that for Villanueva, these ‘conventional practices’ constitute a large part of the crisis that he says has gripped campus politics.

At the moment, Crusada is one of the three main political formations in the Loyola Schools (LS)—the other two being IsaBuhay IsaGawa – Agila (IBIG-Agila) and the Alliance of Student Leaders (ASL). An analysis of Crusada’s past statements and various party documents makes it clear that the union’s establishment partially stems from the dissatisfaction many members of the community had with IBIG-Agila, ASL and the other preceding political formations on campus.

And there is one word Crusada and its allies seem to have appropriated as a battle cry: politicization. By all indications, this word helped bring about two months ago a Sanggunian General Elections that was one of the most exciting in recent memory.

‘Radicals’ vs. ‘Moderates’

Perhaps the last period in Atenean history that saw the most impassioned debates on campus were the often heated battles between the ‘Radicals’ and the ‘Moderates’ of the Atenean leftist scene back in the ‘60s to the ‘70s. The Radicals were aligned with the national democrats, belonging to such groups as Kabataang Makabayan and Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan. Some of the Radicals, such as celebrated poet-warrior Eman Lacaba (AB Hum ‘70) and moderate-turned-radical former Student Council President Edgar Jopson (BS ME ‘70), eventually joined the underground resistance movement of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

The Moderates, on the other hand, were not as well organized as the Radicals at that time—both in the Ateneo and nationally—with temporary alliances coming and going every now and then. A lot of the Moderates were protégés of Jesuit social democrats and democratic socialists. The Atenean Radicals and Moderates often faced each other in different spaces—in The GUIDON, in the student elections, on the streets.

While IBIG-Agila and ASL were born as original Atenean political formations of the 21st century, it isn’t exactly the same for Crusada, as it comes from the moderate Atenean leftist tradition of the 1970s. The Moderates survived in the Ateneo much longer than the Radicals; in fact, many Ateneans from this tradition now figure prominently in the national arena, such as Risa Hontiveros (AB SoS ‘87) of Akbayan, a social democratic national party.

Crusada, as a self-avowed social democratic student party, is allied with Akbayan ideologically and politically. In fact, before the recent Sanggunian elections, Crusada met with Hontiveros for an experience-sharing session—Hontiveros being a Sanggunian officer herself during her college days. Hontiveros expressed support for the electoral bids of Crusada members during the said session.

The national democratic tradition in the Ateneo, meanwhile, now lives on mostly through some faculty members. There is hardly a visible national democratic student group in school at the moment, with the last ‘successful’ attempts at establishing such coming in the forms of the Kabataan Party-list Ateneo Chapter and the Eman Lacaba Artists’ Collective. However, these two groups never really gained prominence and were quite short-lived, vanishing completely by 2009 after a short period of activity.

The ‘P’ word

Politicization can mean different things to a lot of people. This was shown to be a fact recently, with last election’s candidates’ divergent opinions on what this word exactly means.

In the Sanggu Bantay Halalan Facebook Group, for example, the Top Four candidates had different interpretations of the term when asked by former Assembly President Ross Tugade (II MA PoS).

For the eventual winner of the elections and ASL-aligned candidate Drew Copuyoc, “politicization simply means making Ateneans care about their student government.”

He explains that “politicizing the students” means enlightening them on the functions and roles of the Sanggunian, “so that they can be more involved in what [the Sanggunian does] and what [it] should be doing.”

Villanueva, on the other hand, speaks of politicization in the Atenean context by emphasizing the Sanggunian’s “democratic and representative nature, more so than its bureaucratic, governmental nature.”

He also takes national issues into consideration by pushing for a “policy of political education [that will open] avenues of discourse and engagement for the student body.”

For Misha Solano, Ibig-Agila’s standard-bearer in the last elections, politicization in the context of the Sanggunian is “getting as many members of the student body to voice out their concerns, thoughts and ideas, [be] it regarding policy changes, stands, decision-making or any other activity that [the Sanggunian] is involved in.”

IBIG and Agila

But it was a different picture for IBIG-Agila more than eight years ago, when it was just plain Partido Agila and enjoyed the status of being the sole student party on campus. Partido Agila was founded in 2003 by Ramon Cualoping III (AB Comm ‘04) and Osmond Ong (BS CTM ‘04).

In an old Partido Agila recruitment advertisement dated January 2007, the party explained some of its core beliefs. “Partido Agila envisions an Ateneo Student Body of men and women for others,” the document reads. “The Party believes that the Sanggunian is a mechanism for change and formation in the Ateneo… [and envisions] the Sanggunian as a means to help in the creation of an atmosphere… where the Atenean will use his talents for the benefit of the Philippine society.

There was hardly anything to foretell the advent of a debate on politicization at this point, but by the time Partido Agila merged with the newly formed IsaBuhay IsaGawa on Decemeber 2007, many stakeholders had already recognized that changes were badly needed, specifically reforms to the political party system on campus.

IBIG was founded sometime during the latter part of 2007 by a small group of independents, including former Sanggunian President Gio Tingson (AB Philo ‘10) and former Sanggunian Vice President Jauro Castro (AB PoS ‘10). “We were really planning to create our own party, and during that time, pahulog na ‘yung Agila (Agila was about to fall). It was their twilight years,” Tingson explained in a February 2010 interview with The GUIDON. “So what we did [was]… our party IBIG partnered with Agila.”

With this merger, IBIG’s fundamental emphasis on theory and praxis (as signified by its name) was combined with Partido Agila’s ‘Nation Notion,’ a term the said party used to frequently employ to refer to their nationalist ideals.

These changes reenergized Agila, and served as motivations for the IBIG-Agila party leadership to engage its rival Partido Ignacio in dialogue, in part to address the apparent weaknesses of the political party system on campus.

In this regard, former IBIG-Agila Chairperson Diega Villaluna (AB PoS ‘08) called for a signing of a covenant between the two parties last December 2007. This covenant was supposed to “ensure a strong and healthy party system that competes on a principle- and ideology-based level, and not on a level of ‘trapo politics.’” The covenant was controversial for being unilaterally drafted by IBIG-Agila prior to any meetings with Partido Ignacio.

To be continued.