Light in Diliman

A hostile delegation of leftist students called on Carlos P. Romulo just after he became president of the University of the Philippines two years ago. "Are you going to the left or to the right?" they demanded. "I'm going forward," said Romulo. With the drive that made him a brigadier general under Douglas MacArthur, the first Asian President of the United Nations General Assembly (in 1949-50), Philippine Foreign Minister and twice ambassador to Washington, Romulo is pushing the Philippine national university forward faster than ever before.

Books for Fuel. For most of its 56-year history, the school was housed in a jumble of buildings in downtown Manila. U.S. airmen bombed them during World War II, and between bombings Manila's Japanese occupiers burned many of the library's 160,000 books for fuel. In 1948 the university made a clean break by moving to a sprawling new 1,125-acre campus on the outskirts of Manila.

The neighborhood is called Diliman, which in Tagalog means darkness, and when Romulo took over, the school was living up to the name. His first task was to persuade the Manila Electric Co. to put in $25,000 worth of outdoor lighting equipment. Since then, 37 modern, low-lying buildings have gone up.

For funds, Romulo put the bite on sugar barons, who contributed $250,000 after he bluntly reminded them of the favors he did for the industry while negotiating the Philippine sugar quota when he was ambassador to Washington. Lobbying in the Philippine Congress, Romulo got extra money for scholarships, fellowships, better facilities for research and graduate study, raises for the faculty.

Big U.S. foundations also opened their pocketbooks. Ford and Rockefeller gave almost $ 11 million to finance curriculum improvements, schools of public administration, medicine, and an International Rice Research Institute, which is studying 8,000 varieties of rice. Last week, on a fund-raising trip to the U.S., Romulo clinched a $5,000,000 loan from the World Bank for his agricultural college.

Diplomas in Tagalog. If the university's funds were low when Romulo took over, so was its morale. The salary raises squelched some faculty grumbling, and Romulo named a batch of 18 faculty committees to give the faction-ridden teachers a sense of responsible participation in the administration. He was equally tactful toward the young rebels in the student body of 18,000, shamed them into abandoning a demonstration against Visiting Prince Akihito of Japan by offering to help with the picket signs it the students promised to keep their protest dignified. Philippine nationalists, who opposed Romulo as a "brown American" because of his close ties with the U.S., became his supporters after he encouraged the study of national history and literature, offered to print diplomas in Tagalog instead of English if a student requested it (only 20 out of 1,500 graduates did).

Once, years ago, at a party in Texas, Romulo, who is 5 ft. 4 in. tall, found himself in a group composed entirely of six-footers. Someone asked him how he felt. "Like a dime among nickels," was his spunky reply. He does not feel dwarfed by his tough new job, either. At 65, he considers it "the best assignment I ever had," and wants to make the University of the Philippines "the anchor of democratic faith in this part of the world."

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