The Faculty Center was already up when I graduated from UP in 1969. It did not impress me a bit -- the architectural plan. With four floors and each one having long hallways with doors to every faculty's office, I thought I was like a motel room, reserving too much privacy and irrelevant to a thinking and socially-committed institution's character. I studied philosophy there sometime in the 90's and one subject was assigned to a room of a professor who had several, as in, several paintings of nude breasted woman. Then he had a couch inside where he said, he would sleep or rest now and then. I almost puked at the lack of sensitivity to women's concerns at that time. I reported his office to the chairman of the department who right away moved our class to his office.
In the 60's I have heard of professors who had had students, female, as their special companions inside. I pitied the wives of these professors but it was only later on when I had read many feminist writings already. At that time, professors having dalliances with their students seemed to be just one of those things.
Eventually, a greater event happened which shocked me out of my own ignorance of gender issues, and which led me to go to Europe to deepen my studies of the feminist movement. I need not mention the details here but the architectural plan of FC has something to do with it.
Hence, if anyone is thinking of doing another architectural design of FC, please make it a departmentally communal undertaking, not individualistic at all. Also, have skylights so that it would reduce the use of electricity. UP has great fresh air, and so the offices need not have air-con at all except during summer. Perhaps cubicles of instructors and professors inside one big room could lessen temptations to take advantage of female or male students sexually.
Then that sculpture of the muses in front of FC could be transferred to the sunken garden where there is a lake -- as the muses are all in the nude. Students who pass by that sculptural piece now could be cringing in shame or disgust at seeing nudity in the grounds when they should have full concentration on the lectures of their professors, on writing their term papers, how to pass their exams, and how to recite in class to respond to their teacher's questions, among others.
Also, may I suggest that the streets of UP be named after inventors, philosophers and artists, instead of politicians, without denigrating their contributions to our society. I just think that an academic community should be reminded that there had been a lot of beautiful minds that had existed and enhanced the life of intellectuals.
May the UP students awake to the realities now.
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