In the week after the nth iteration of “The Great UP Run,” I found myself asking: What’s so great about it? Sure, this may be just a matter of branding, and brands don’t always have to make sense. But as any decent adman would know, a brand can only be as good as the service or product they’re selling. Add to that, it’s a habit of any University of the Philippines student, any “Iskolar ng Bayan,” to inquire into things: We simply don’t exempt ourselves from meaning what we say. In fact, I would argue that as Iskolars ng Bayan, we even relish what we mean. So, what’s so great about this run, and why associate a run with UP?

This comes to me with a bit of urgency. Early in August, a segment of the Diliman community was triggered (in the online sense of the word) when posts of runners running during the UP College Admission Tests (Upcat) circulated. Weeks prior, banners announcing that runners and bikers were not allowed in the premises during the Upcat weekend had been put up. Of course, the UP online community had to take this to the court of netizens, and the issue grew to touch upon bigger spheres.

For more than two years now, since the pandemic restrictions encouraged outdoor/open-air activities, the campus grounds have been occupied by persons not from UP, picnicking with their barkada, families complete with their dogs and cats, and, of course, their big, bulky cars parked by the sidewalks, making the campus an above-average sunbathing area. It’s not just the fresh air and the trees, it’s the fact that you’re in UP Diliman—the last bastion of admin-sanctioned public nudity, sundials and sunflowers, and freewheeling young love—that makes the picnic truly one of a kind. 

And now, with these “great UP runs,” the invitation becomes clear for runners, running groups, their corporate cohorts, and just about everyone else to come and occupy space on campus as much as they want to. Maybe it’s that which makes these runs so “great.”

In response to this recent uptick in foot and car traffic on campus, The Philippine Collegian’s John Gabriel Bumatay came out with a piece last May, titled “As UP Loses Public Ground, its Community Faces a Dilemma.” The Collegian promptly re-shared this piece on social media when the runners ran around during the Upcat. 

Bumatay framed the situation by borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of microfascism, saying that the UP community’s “turn[ing] on one another” may be how the community members have “in [their] desire for power, order, and organization” learned to “internalize and reproduce oppressive structures in small but pervasive ways.”  The piece proceeds to challenge students “to reimagine how they take up space, not only physically but also politically and collectively.” And, in doing so, it urges students to “foster an environment that allocates spaces for those who need them.” 

To be sure, before Bumatay makes this reading, he rightly grounds the analysis on the UP community’s long history of fighting for the rights of minorities, on the ongoing gentrification of spaces inside UP, and on the question of UP’s land being public and/or private ground. Truly, more than an issue of following the rules set by the management or not, this is a quandary in the ways we take up space, physical and otherwise.

To me, this reading is interesting as it is difficult to accept. I may even call it a misreading, partly because I don’t think it’s so fascistic to want to move around freely on campus, partly because I don’t think the solution the article calls for is actually a response to the problem of welcoming too many runners and their cars and motorcycles on campus. I say this because some drivers on campus are simply rude and stupid, and because petty crimes are also on the rise in Diliman. 

The article is great, don’t get me wrong. But I do feel the reading that we’re being “microfascists” for feeling inconvenienced gives a free pass to certain powerful players, especially to individual duty-bearers outside and within UP. Like the recent floods caused by the twin problems of unusually heavy rains and the corruption of public officials and their conspirators, I don’t see any reason to blame myself for the wrong that looms over too many lives.

I grew up passing through UP Diliman almost every day on my way to the other university on Katipunan Avenue. I remember that in those days, there was regular heavy traffic whenever our school bus entered the flimsy Ylanan Gate (once upon a time, via a left-turn traffic light on Commonwealth Avenue), and an even longer line whenever we exited to CP Garcia from the Velasquez gate near NIGS. Unabashedly burgis, I used to think that we Ateneans should be given an easy time passing through UP because we paid bigger taxes. I will submit that I was literally a microfascist back then, at just 10 years old and 4’10”.

These days, that’s no longer the case. Whenever I think of spaces in the university, I remember the drunk-driving incident late in the 1990s when a car driven by a student ran over and killed another student waiting at the shed in front of the Sampaguita dorm. Also that time in 2008 when the gigantic tree in front of Palma Hall Annex fell on some students walking on the sidewalk. One of them pushed another to safety; I hope they are still friends to this day. An article published by Tinig ng Plaridel in December 2023 mentioned that from September to December in that year, there were 23 road crashes and accidents on campus. 

But also, I remember the debates and clashes between groups in the mid-2000s, during the terms of UP presidents Emerlinda R. Roman and Alfredo Pascual and Philippine Presidents Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Benigno Aquino III, on what to do with UP’s land and how to remedy the allegedly dwindling funds for education. Through a load of paperwork and playing deaf to the cries of the UP community, particularly of students, these presidents each somehow allowed Ayala Corp. to rent parcels of UP’s land for the capitalists to put up malls and call centers.

Then came the successive fires that took down the Casaa food center, the Alumni Center and its duckpin bowling lanes, the Faculty Center, and finally, the Shopping Center. Robina Gokongwei’s patronage of the UP men’s basketball team led to her company having first dibs on DiliMall—or “Not a Mall” in Bisaya—standing where the Shopping Center once was.

Talk of space remains alive to this day, with PBBM himself mentioning in his State of the Nation Address in July the opening of government-owned track ovals for all runners, including the one in UP. Just weeks ago, UP president Jijil Jimenez also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Budget and Management for the latter to put up a building on campus, occupying over 3,000 square meters on the lot near Commonwealth—very reminiscent of then UP president Edgardo Angara’s deals with the Commission on Higher Education for a place in UP. 

And one recent Friday, a helicopter landed on the “golfing grounds” near the College of Media and Communication. In it was Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla, who claimed that he needed to fly to get to his appointments that day. This was the man to blame, if there should be anyone to blame, for calling off classes one Tuesday when there was hardly any rain.

Notably, except for the president without a college degree, all the major players in these conflicts for space are but a few old UP graduates making thousands of seemingly small decisions for the entire community. Last Saturday, videos circulated online of the campus lagoon turning back into an actual lagoon, as it did in 2009 during “Ondoy,” as it probably was a hundred years ago.

Talk of UP’s spaces has always been like that for me—almost abstract, like a blur, not unlike the stuff we think about while running, with UP being too many things for too many of us. This running trend will fizzle out the way trends do. In fact, the downtrend has already begun. But the crowds in UP have always been some sort of barometer, a test to the community, asking us: Who and why are we, really? 

Me, I was part of the “UP Running Community” Facebook group until I was not. The admin kicked me out when I posted the UP Diliman Council’s statement calling on the Senate to proceed forthwith with Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial with the caption, “FYI.”

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