The other National Library

By Felipe Salvosa II



Is it possible for the Filipino nation to trace its emergence to one library? 

If, as a scientist once said, "A great library contains the diary of the human race," then the library of Asia’s oldest existing university, Santo Tomas, starts the firsthand account of how the Philippines came to being and who the Filipino really is.

It is but natural for the Dominican-run University of Santo Tomas (UST) to bring out the most valuable among its collection of 12,000 or so rare books in time for its 400th founding anniversary next year, but rather than exhibit them as curiosities like the Crown Jewels or even the Shroud of Turin, the "Pontifical" institution has decided to place the library, and itself in the process, in the context of the global forces that shaped history.

The result is Lumina Pandit: An Exhibit of Historical Treasures, the UST library’s multimillion-peso quadricentennial exhibition that speaks of "spreading the light."

400 years of history and rivalry

By Felipe Salvosa II

SANTO TOMAS is 400 years old.

Paeans and plaudits will surely be bestowed upon the “Pontifical” and the “Royal” university run by the Order of St. Dominic de Guzman, extolling its glorious history, boasting of its presidents, magistrates, clerics, and saints.

But the claim to antiquity aside, how did it manage to last this long, after two wars, three colonizers, and natural calamities?

The University of Santo Tomas was not, strictly speaking, the first university. The honor belongs to Universidad de San Ignacio, the college put up by the Jesuits on 1590. In Cebu, the order founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola opened the Colegio de San Ildefonso five years later. But the politics of the time led to the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish dominion in 1768, allowing UST to claim today the distinction of “oldest existing university,” not only in the Philippines but in Asia.