Old San Carlos is certainly getting a makeover: a refreshing change of colors (goodbye battle tank green, hello mellow yellow), chic landscaping, elegant street furniture, classy covered walks, air-con toilets, and lots of new buildings sprouting.
Our school heads must be sleeping with construction helmets on for just a few days after they broke the champagne on the new Law and Business School Building at the Main Campus, they were back to spadework, this time to bury a time capsule during the groundbreaking ceremonies of the Gokongwei School of Engineering, which will rise very soon beside the three-year old CAFA building in Talamban Campus.
Whose school? Good thing, Engineering guys got a big-hearted Filipino-Chinese donor to build their new home. Otherwise, it could be another tongue-twisting German name again. If you’re still clueless, check out the newly planted signs announcing old and new names of most school buildings, halls, gardens, and even walkways.
Seems someone’s tasked to put a name tag on every thing in the campus, like they used to do in botanical gardens. But for good reason, for ours, after all, is the age of branding and short memory.
At least now, freshmen won’t be lost with those signs, which, more than help ease pedestrian traffic in campus, were also supposed to lead even old timers to a trip down memory lane, to the stories of people who built this great university: Rahmann, Bustos, Bunzel, Szmutko, Jaschik, Konnig, Buchcick, Hoerdermann, Krieger, Kemmerer, to name a few.
No, we’re not really turning into little Berlin. Those names were supposed to remind us who’s in this school’s hall of fame. If there were lots of Europeans there, it wasn’t their fault. After all, was it in small town Steyl in 19th century Holland that the SVD mission began? And was it the German President who personally came to inaugurate the Bunzel Building in 1963?
Our German priest administrators did a good job to convince their government and some private donors back home to fund the first building boom in USC in the 60s. Those old buildings in every campus prove how fast our school grew during those times. And it seems that’s happening again now, though we’re not yet passing the hat to friends abroad.
Old San Carlos is certainly getting a makeover: a refreshing change of colors (goodbye battle tank green, hello mellow yellow), chic landscaping, elegant street furniture, classy covered walks, air-con toilets, and lots of new buildings sprouting.
No, we’re not really turning into little Berlin. Those names were supposed to remind us who’s in this school’s hall of fame. If there were lots of Europeans there, it wasn’t their fault. After all, was it in small town Steyl in 19th century Holland that the SVD mission began? And was it the German President who personally came to inaugurate the Bunzel Building in 1963? 