This speech was delivered by UA&P President Dr. Winston Conrad B. Padojinog during the 27th UA&P Graduation Rites held at the PICC on August 21, 2022.
Congressman Roman Romulo, Representative of the Lone District of Pasig; Ambassador Joey Cuisia, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of UA&P Foundation; Members of the Board; the Management and Operations Committees; the administration, deans, and executive directors; benefactors; graduates of Batch 2022; parents and distinguished guests; ladies and gentlemen, greetings!
Finally, after two years, we are celebrating our graduation ceremonies in person here at the PICC. The graduates of batches 2020 and 2021 could only aspire to experience these solemn ceremonies.
More than two long years have passed, and if we want to know how far we have traveled, we need to look back. While we can look at the past with a sigh of relief, we still keep those poignant memories of the lockdowns and how we struggled to overcome one challenge after another. We practically learned on the fly: no one had the experience nor the knowledge of dealing with a prolonged lockdown. It was like fixing and pitching the sails of a moving galleon while everything around you was a ranging storm. However, we have made it here today together and have gained a lot of wisdom and experience as individuals and as an institution. Indeed, we have travelled very far.
What have we acquired or developed? For one, resilience. Today’s graduation attests to that. Your personal challenges and concerns—no doubt amplified by the lockdown —must have made you say at one point that you want to give up, but you did not. Second is generosity. Despite your own concerns, you and your fellow UA&P Dragons found the heart to either establish or support initiatives that were meant to assist your schoolmates, their families, the UA&P personnel, and even people outside the University who lost their livelihoods and even their loved ones. At times, the conflict from within and without disposes us to also extend it to others. But understanding and patience prevailed knowing well that the best way for us to get out of the rut is not to work at it alone but always with others. Then, there is your passion and commitment. You were forced to study in the confines of your home, but it did not prevent you from reaching far and wide.
We are proud of our UA&P students and teams who, during the prolonged lockdowns, competed and won in prominent online international competitions—case studies, researches, debates—besting even the top schools like Harvard, Stanford, and NUS. We also performed excellently in the 2020/2021 bar exams, achieving 100% passing rate. In the CPA board exam, we achieved passing rate well above national average rate. Well, it is true: we are the best university on Pearl Drive.
All these demonstrate that we can flourish in periods of adversity. Unlike in the past, however, when we used to draw from past knowledge and experience to thrive, now our mindset is the key to coping with the present and future challenges. The future will remain uncertain and disruptive: job knowledge and skills will continue to evolve, digitization will disrupt and bring about new business models, and global aging will exert pressure on our service sector, especially the health sector. A possible global recession or stagflation also looms on the horizon. We should learn to expect the unexpected but always ready to catch life’s curve balls. We in UA&P tried our best to prepare you for these possibilities. In addition to the specialized knowledge you acquired from your degrees, your integral UA&P journey has helped you acquire the important 4Cs of the new future: communication, collaboration, creative thinking, and competence. I am confident you are ready for the new future.
Hence, I would like to pose a new challenge to you, graduates. Observe the physical world—the structures, the people around you—and the virtual world afforded to you by your smart phones. What values do you learn from and practice in both worlds? Do these environments encourage you to be and to do better? By engaging with others, do you promote unity and see unity among us?
We need to transmit this spirit of unity, which we practiced in UA&P so well during the pandemic, to wherever we find ourselves in. Mind you, we adopted this motto of Unitas or unity when we became a university in 2005, and it has nothing to do with some political slogan. This concept of unity that we promote involves primarily the initiative to foster genuine dialogue with others as we journey in life to seek and discover the truth and to pursue the good. We know, however, that not all communication channels are conducive for genuine dialogue with other people, especially when anonymity and duplicity are tolerated. We witnessed during the height of the last political exercise how the social media platforms have become venues for lying, name-calling, and shaming. “Unfriending” became a thing. Even my friends – at our age! – did that. Social activism can be an instrument of progress and even prosperity, but it may not always spell unity and the peace it brings. Dialogue, however, can help usher in these aspirations.
As long as there is a community of persons, dialogue will always be necessary. It is essential to promoting and preserving peace and prosperity, most especially when there is growing diversity. You, our graduates, must have the courage to dialogue amid diversity. How do we do it? Let me borrow these three pieces of advice from Pope Francis: First, respect our and others’ identity; second, have the courage to accept differences; and third, be sincere in our intentions.
First, respecting our own identity as persons involves knowing who we are—unique individuals with inherent dignity. One does not have to be a Christian or a Roman Catholic to know and to live the universal and fundamental values that emanate from our nature as human persons, such as respect and caring for other individuals, and to observe the rights that come with our being human: the right to life, to education, to freedom of opinion and expression, etc. Hence, when we dialogue with others, we relate to them with respect and listen to what they have to say even if our beliefs differ, even if they challenge our own convictions shaped not only by reason but also by faith.
Second, have the courage to accept differences: unity is not uniformity. There is a way to transcend and work in or around these differences that you see between you and your family members, or between you and the person you are dealing with, if both of you want to seek the truth and pursue the good with freedom and personal responsibility. I am sure you like your teachers in theology, Christian anthropology, philosophy, and ethics even if there were times when some of you did not fully agree with them. You might have given the right answers during your exams on these subjects (otherwise, you wouldn’t be here) but did so without accepting those answers to be true. Discovering the truth is a journey that you and I alone must take with the accompaniment of other people who might be different from us. But it is up to each one of us to see it through.
Last, we need to be sincere in our intentions. To demonstrate genuine charity through our words and actions is to give testament to our Christian identity. Without having to sit around a conference table, our kind words and sincere friendships become instruments of dialogue despite our differences. We should strive to freely serve everyone – whether or not we agree with them – without discrimination and to exert the best we can to be positive agents of change in society. We are not satisfied with just avoiding evil; we have to do good to everyone around us. Here our knowledge of our professions, our new mindset, and our evolving skillsets acquired from UA&P will all combine to find the best means to serve society.
This is our challenge to you. Take courage to dialogue and promote unity amid diversity while respecting our own identity and that of others and serving everyone with charity. The unity that genuine dialogue espouses is direly needed now as we move forward in this highly interconnected yet polarized world.
To end, I congratulate everyone in this ceremony: the graduates and their parents and loved ones, the faculty, the administrative staff, and our benefactors.
To you, our graduates and alumni present here and in social media witnessing this event, when you look back to your college days, remember also your alma mater. UA&P needs your support in carrying out its mission. Unitas!#
Banner photo by Pexels from Pixabay.
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