Many in the university, especially those in the English department where he taught for most of his adult life, are already familiar with his deep, baritone voice tinged with an unmistakable American accent. Jose Dalisay, Jr. needs a few introductions these days: a former vice president of UP, a Palanca Hall of Famer with some 30 books to his name, and currently a professor emeritus of English and creative writing at the UP College of Arts and Letters.

But in 1971, Butch, as he is more well-known by, was just an engineering freshman dabbling in writing as a reporter for the Collegian. Fresh out of the Philippine Science High School, where his schoolmate there, Francis Sontillano, had just been killed two months before in a protest against the Marcos regime, Dalisay was becoming more and more involved in the anti-dictatorship struggle. Then the barricades started to rise.

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Can you recall the motive forces behind the Diliman Commune?

The Diliman Commune was the culmination—perhaps one high point among many—of the long season of political awakening and protest that we now call the First Quarter Storm. The oil price increase—just ten centavos per liter, if I recall correctly—was only the spark that lit the fuse.

I think both sides were gearing up for this confrontation. As Marcos himself would later claim, he “allowed” the Commune to happen because it strengthened his reasons or pretexts for imposing Martial Law.

How would you describe the general atmosphere in UP back then, especially with regard to the Marcos government?

We students were full of revolutionary fervor; just two months before, on December 10, 1970, Francis Sontillano—my schoolmate at the Philippine Science High School—had been killed in a march in downtown Manila; I was there. I remember working at the Trialogue—a room in Vinzons Hall that we used as an HQ—making up posters to protest his killing.

I was a freshman but already a Collegian reporter when the Commune began. I was there on University Avenue when the police and military massed near where the gas station and the mall now stand, and when negotiations failed, they stormed into the campus, and we ran, only to regroup later and reinforce the barricades.

I don’t think it was just Malacañang we felt we were up against—it was part of it, but there were many other and larger “-isms” to fight: imperialism, feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism. There was a deep mistrust of the military and the police, which were seen as forces of repression. And this was a year and a half before Martial Law.

In light of the termination of the UP-DND Accord, what, for you, is the most salient lesson we can pick up from the spirit of the Diliman Commune?

I’m afraid that unless more sober and truly patriotic minds prevail, that level of mistrust will return. ●

A transcript of the interview was first published online on February 3, 2021.