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UNIVERSITY Rector Fr. Rolando V. de la Rosa, O.P. has lamented the erosion of correct conscience amid today’s fashion of invoking freedom of choice and freedom of conscience to justify self-interest and individualism.

Delivering this year’s Jose Rizal Lecture of the Philippine Center of the International PEN (Poets and Playwrights, Essayists and Novelists) at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, De la Rosa warned that the loss of conscience has resulted in moral confusion and, in the case of government, corruption and buck-passing. (Read text of lecture)

Referring to the “fertilizer scandal” hearings in the Senate where former agriculture undersecretary Jocelyn Bolante is being grilled for disbursing more than P700 million during the 2004 election to non-agriculture legislative districts, the Rector said “the main actor... keeps saying: ‘My conscience is clean.’” He added that those pushing for constitutional change to perpetuate themselves in power “also claim that they are doing that ‘in conscience.’” Ditto with supporters and opponents of House Bill 5043, the Reproductive Health Care Bill.

The word conscience, has, perhaps, never been as popular as it is today in the Philippines. On newspapers, radio, and television, people mouth it as though it were synonymous with integrity, honesty, and credibility. Protagonists on both sides of the recent impeachment issue in Congress had invoked their consciences as they justified their votes. The main actor in the ongoing show in the Senate entitled “Fertilizer Scam” keeps saying: “My conscience is clean”. Those who are pushing for a Con-Ass to amend the constitution also claim that they are doing that “in conscience”.

A CHRISTMAS in exile.

This was how Thomasian whistleblower Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada sees his Christmas this year, nine months after emerging as star witness in the botched $329-billion National Broadband Network (NBN) deal between the government and Chinese firm ZTE.

Still under the care of the La Salle Brothers in Greenhills, San Juan, Lozada said he and his family may have to eat their noche buena in a “sanctuary with security personnel.”

THOMASIAN whistleblower Rodolfo Noel “Jun” Lozada has denied Internet rumors that he had a number of business deals with UST and received millions of kickbacks from overpriced computers installed in the University as well as the construction of the multi-deck carpark.

“No. (I) never had any deal with UST,” Lozada told the Varsitarian.

MORE Filipino high school students from the Middle East are taking the University of Santo Tomas Entrance Test (Ustet) underscoring the University’s “good public image” among Filipinos outside the country, the director of the Office for Admissions (OFAD) said.

UST began administering entrance exams abroad in 2004, and since then the number of examinees and testing centers have increased significantly, said OFAD Director Mecheline Zonia Manalastas.

TEACHING is a vocation that is not only nourished inside the academe.

This was the response of UST Faculty Union President Gil Gamilla to the statement of Rector Fr. Rolando de la Rosa O.P., who said during the Rector’s Report last Nov. 7 that faculty promotions should continue to be based on merit.

Gamilla, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, said there are two ways for a faculty member to be promoted: by obtaining the required “meritorious points” or by earning a post-graduate degree.

THE COMPREHENSIVE Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) is not a thing of the past and should continue, even for a century, because it is the funding – not the program itself – that had expired, a Thomasian alumna said in a forum last month.

“According to the Constitution, (CARP) is a continuing (program under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law). CARP could only be changed through charter change,” Elvie Baladad, a 1973 AB Political Science graduate, said in the forum “Usapang Tomasino 6: Rinepormang Reporma,” last Nov. 28 at the Civil Law Moot Court.