Decades after they first rallied for truth in the halls of Diliman, the University of the Philippines’ fiercest campus radicals reunited — not just to remember, but to reignite.
They were the voices that defied silence, the pens that pierced dictatorship. And last Saturday, they came home.
In a rare gathering of campus firebrands turned nation builders, UP President Angelo Jimenez welcomed back the 1980s vanguard of student activism and campus journalism who made history with every headline and protest chant. September 13 marked the reunion of Philippine Collegian and the University Student Council alumni, many of whom now serve in key roles across the university and the public sector.
Jimenez paid tribute to “these beautifully stubborn idealists” who shaped UP’s political and cultural landscape during a turbulent decade. He also recalled his own beginnings as a Collegian feature writer working under editor Boying Pimentel, whose book launch served as the evening’s centerpiece. “Boying interviewed me for the job,” Jimenez shared, “in a cluttered backroom of the Jingle magazine press in Cubao.”
His speech wove nostalgia with urgency, invoking the memory of student leader Lean Alejandro and teasing a long-awaited biography by Alejandro’s contemporaries: political historian Jojo Abinales, human rights lawyer JV Bautista, and journalist Bobby Coloma. “They literally are the ABCs who revolved around Lean’s orbit,” Jimenez quipped, urging them to finish the book while he’s still in office.
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