Marawi crisis and the challenge of higher education
By Eduardo C. Tadem – @inquirerdotnet
July 03, 2017

(Editor’s note: The writer is a professorial lecturer of Asian studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman and president of Freedom from Debt Coalition. )

I lived in Marawi City for one school year in 1966 as a college freshman at Mindanao State University (MSU).

MSU was then in its infant stage and had just had its first batch of graduates. Through competitive exams, the students were selected from the best and brightest from high schools all over Mindanao — three-fourths of whom were scholars enjoying free tuition, board and lodging, and books.
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The university was meant to be a model of cultural and social integration — Christians and Muslims studying together in harmony and united by the common goal of attaining higher education under the aegis of a paternalistic state. Under its 1961 charter, it was “to integrate the national minorities into our body politic … and into the mainstream of national life.”

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