Editorial: Honor, Excellence, and Now, Service

THERE is a particular kind of debt that comes with a state- funded education. Every Iskolar ng Bayan - every scholar of the people - sits in a lecture hall sustained, in some measure, by a nation of ordinary Filipinos whose own children will likely never set foot on the university’s campuses themselves. This is the quiet arithmetic behind the word "Service": it is not a slogan, but a form of repayment. And nowhere in the Philippines is that debt more visible, or more consequential, than at the University of the Philippines.

Service to humanity is the wider, older impulse - the doctor who treats a stranger, the volunteer who rebuilds after a typhoon, the teacher who stays after class for a struggling student. It asks nothing of citizenship or geography; it is simply what it looks like to take another person's wellbeing seriously. Service to the country is not a separate, competing loyalty. It is what that same impulse looks like when it is channeled through the particular, imperfect, still-consolidating collective a person happens to belong to — in this case, a republic still working out questions of inequality, historical memory, and institutional trust. The nation, in other words, is simply where the average Filipino's need for a doctor, a teacher, or a rebuilt home is most concentrated and most within reach.

UP has always tried to educate its students toward that fuller circle - humanity, yes, but with the country as the nearest and most urgent place to practice it. Its graduates are found staffing rural health units in Mindanao and negotiating trade agreements in Geneva, drafting the Constitution and organizing labor unions, teaching in barrio schools and running multinational hospitals abroad. The university's founding purpose - to produce not just professionals but a class of Filipinos equipped to lead a nation newly emerging from colonial rule - was always the same purpose extended outward: prepare people whose competence could serve anyone, anywhere, and then give them enough reason to direct much of it home.

For over a century, UP's motto asked only for ‘Honor and Excellence’. It was a fitting motto for an institution built to prove that Filipinos could match the intellectual rigor of any colonial power's universities. But it was, by the university's own recent admission, incomplete.

In May 2024, at the instance of our Guest Speaker, UP President Angelo A. Jimenez, the University formally added a third word to its seal, unveiling the new motto: Honor, Excellence, Service. Announcing the change himself, Atty. Jimenez wrote that this was the university's reason for being - service to the nation, plain and simple. The change was not cosmetic. In his 2023 turnover speech as incoming president, Jimenez had already argued that honor and excellence, on their own, were not enough - that skill and distinction mean little without genuine compassion for one's fellow Filipinos. “Our guiding principle must be service to our people and to humanity at large… Honor and excellence inhere in the individual, but service looks beyond the individual and locates him or her in our nation and society. It reminds all of us that a UP education has been paid for by the sweat and the sacrifice of our people, and that every UP graduate has a lifelong responsibility to pay back that debt through service to society,” he said.

Jimenez has since described the new motto as something closer to a vow than a rebrand: service, he has said, is UP's true calling, a sacred commitment made by every member of the community the moment they step onto campus. The framing matters. Service, in this telling, is not an elective activity for the civic- minded few - it is the price of admission.

UP's new motto can be seen as exemplified by the life of the man who proposed it. Angelo Azura Jimenez, Datu Mankalagan to his Manobo family and Jijil to his friends, is notably the first Mindanaoan to hold the office and the first student regent ever to later become UP President. He has described himself as someone who spent decades on the receiving end of the public education system. Coming of age under the shadow of martial rule, he learned that even under adverse circumstances, there was much that could be done through learning and collective action. As a student leader, he felt and understood that in the heart of every Isko and Iska a spark can be lit, the desire to serve and to make a difference in the lives of the people. That beyond talent, the true hallmark of a UP native is “the service gene that seems to have been coded into our DNA.”

He spent much of his early career as a labor attaché in Japan, Kuwait, and Iraq, work that put him on the front lines of protecting Filipino migrant workers during regional crises. As the University’s 22nd President, he believes that Jimenez believes that the Philippines’ premier state university must be a hub for transformational change and that this is best done by engaging communities and helping solve real-world problems. His vision is for UP to become a global university that asks the consequential questions of the time and, acting locally, strives to address the serious issues confronting the country and the world.

Skeptics are right to note that a word added to a logo changes nothing on its own. Service must show up in curricula that expose students to communities beyond their own, in scholarships that keep working-class Filipinos from dropping out, in research agendas that answer to public health and food security rather than only to publication counts, and in graduates who choose to practice law, medicine, and engineering where the need is greatest, not only where the pay is best.

But mottoes are not nothing, either. They are public promises, and public promises can be held to account. UP has now told the entire country, in three words stamped on its official seal, what it believes its own excellence is for. That is a standard the university has invited the public to measure it against — in Diliman and in Iloilo, in Baguio and in Cebu, in every classroom where an Iskolar ng Bayan is being formed.

The obligation, though, does not rest with UP alone. A university this dependent on public funding, this central to the country's professional and civic life, cannot fulfill a motto by itself. It needs a citizenry and a government willing to invest in it - in scholarships that let a fisherman's daughter compete on equal footing with a senator's son, in research budgets that do not shrink the moment a crisis passes, in the basic premise that a nation still busy building itself despite decades of trying needs an institution unafraid to produce both its harshest critics and its most capable public servants.

Honor and excellence brought UP this far. Service is the harder promise — the one that asks not what the university has achieved, but whom it has actually helped. It deserves, from every Filipino who believes in what UP represents, more than applause. It deserves support.