Tribute to Dean Corazon B. Lamug

I learned about the sudden death of Dr. Lamug yesterday morning from friends back home. I received two text messages and an email while in the middle of reading an article on Sarah Palin and the reality of the political mind. The news was, to say the least, shocking. For a moment I could not concentrate on my reading. For hours, I could not get myself into rewriting a fragment of my research proposal. How could anyone so energetic and brimming with life pass on so suddenly? I knew through my friend, Wengki, who was Dr. Lamug’s advisee and who lived with her for a semester, how health conscious and fit the former dean of the UPLB College of Arts and Sciences was.


Dr. Lamug, UPLB professor of sociology and president of the Philippine Sociological Society, died while swimming off the shores of Coron, Palawan. I am informed that she was on a weekend educational trip with a colleague and students of her graduate class. That she died so suddenly is distressing, but the fact that she died while in action was – as one of her former students would say – characteristic of her.


Dr. Lamug was such an important figure during my early years of teaching in the University of the Philippines at Los Banos. She was a social scientist par excellence, a formidable administrator, and a good person. In solidarity with her students and colleagues in UPLB, I wish to pay tribute to her in this blog.


Dr. Lamug was two-term dean of the UPLB College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) – arguably the ideopolis of UP Los Banos and whose founding in 1972 was instrumental to UPLB’s transformation from a highly specialized agriculture and forestry campus to a comprehensive autonomous/constituent university of the UP System. During these terms (2000-2003 and 2003-2006), I served as instructor then assistant professor in the Department of Humanities – one of the nine units of CAS. Having been under her leadership, I knew Dr. Lamug as a formidable administrator. Like any right-thinking leader, she demanded competence and professionalism from her faculty.


I remember sitting in an ad hoc committee where I together with our department head had to present a proposal for the refurbishing of the speech laboratory. There she pointed out the proposal’s limitations and weaknesses and reminded us to do better in our “homework” during our next meeting.


I also recall that during one of the college-level meetings on the revitalization of the General Education Program, she had some of the sharpest and most cutting comments on the humanities course proposals. I had to defend the proposal for SPCM 1 (Speech Communication) and though it had the mark of approval from discipline experts, it still was subjected to what I perceived then as a scathing scrutiny from the dean. Later, I realized that that very stressful meticulousness was a preparation for more caustic comments in the university level deliberations.


Of course, I could not forget how she, as a member of the UPLB technical panel for the humanities and social sciences, “lambasted” the research proposal I submitted for possible university funding. That was a year after she gave me a warm hug for getting a university teaching award (This reminds me that one is really only as good as his last performance). She minced no words, described my proposal as “sketchy” (a word that would haunt me in the weeks that followed), and reminded me of the exacting research standards that UPLB is known for. The revised proposal was later approved by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research but when the university administration changed guards it was cut from the list of proposals for funding.


The proposed research might never have seen the light of day in UPLB but it was to transform into something else. Parts of the “botched” revised research proposal were crucial to my application for study overseas. I reworked my proposal and submitted it as part of my application for admission to a PhD program at NUS. And while I was waiting for the results of my application, Dean Lamug so kindly recommended that I apply for the Ford Foundation Scholarship Grant. The grant allowed successful applicants to study in universities of their choice and I was one of two people from the Department whom Dean Lamug identified as potential applicants.  But before I completed my application for a Ford scholarship grant, I received an email from NUS informing me of my admission to the university under a research scholarship.


I decided to accept the NUS offer and informed Dr. Lamug of my decision. She was very encouraging and did not question my decision to resign from the university. Her advice was most heartening and forward-looking: “Immerse yourself in NUS's research and publication culture.” She knew then that should I decide to return to the university or to pursue a career in the academia, a considerable research and publication experience would be most indispensable.


I knew her mostly from our moments of professional interaction. They were significant moments as their consequences were crucial to my development as a young academic. When I think about this, I recognize that beneath what I perceived as Dean Lamug’s tough and stern façade was actually a caring and nurturing person.