Luis V. Teodoro, a longtime journalism professor and staunch advocate of pro-people press, died late Monday evening. He was 81.
His stepdaughter, Sibyl Jade Peña, announced his passing in a Facebook post.
Teodoro was a champion for advocacy journalism throughout his career. “[W]hen we speak of the alternative press we are also speaking of the progressive tradition, a press whose history goes back more than a hundred years, because the alternative press and the progressive and critical are one and the same,” he wrote in a commentary for Bulatlat in 2001.
Teodoro would live on to carry the progressive and critical alternative press legacy he talked about.
In 2014, he became the founding chairperson of the Alternative Media Network (Altermidya), a network of independent and progressive media outfits, institutions, and individuals. He was also a member of the board of Bulatlat, an alternative news outlet that covers stories from the perspective of marginalized sectors. In these news outlets, Teodoro wrote about press freedom and commented on pressing issues of the day, among others.
Before that, he also wrote and edited for the Philippine Collegian, the official student publication of UP Diliman. During his time in the publication, the members had rallied against the intervention of the publication’s Faculty Adviser Francisco Arcellana in their releases.
His works at the publication consisted of art commentaries and some literary works. In his first article published in the Collegian on August 16, 1961 entitled “Union of Form and Matter,” he wrote about how art is a matter of execution: “It is not what the writer says, but how he says it, that really matters." By the end of this article, Teodoro contemplated the existence of campus writers with a hopeful conclusion that these writers still exist, despite their silence.
For his part, he never stopped being a loud campus writer. He even played a great part in helping other writers be as loud as they can be as a professor and dean at the UP College of Mass Communications (CMC).
He was the dean from 1994 to 2000 after heading its journalism department. It was under his term that the Department of Journalism and the Department of Communication Research of the college were hailed as Commission on Higher Education Centers of Excellence.
As the CMC dean, Teodoro chaired the Collegian Board of Judges (BOJ), the body that selected the publication’s editor-in-chief. In 1996, Teodoro presided over a controversial editorial examination that led to the BOJ-selected editor, Richard Gappi, being rejected by the UP administration due to a technicality. Exam second-placer Voltaire Veneracion was instead installed as editor.
In 1997, Teodoro had to deal with challenges versus the BOJ-selected editor-in-chief, Lourdes Gordolan, over her alleged dual citizenship. Gordolan went on to serve as the Collegian editor-in-chief despite protests about her eligibility.
His students and colleagues remember him fondly. “As educator, editor, and journalist, Dean Teodoro was pivotal in fostering academic excellence in our discipline, upholding integrity in the practice of media, and defending our freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly,” CMC wrote in a post.
The stories and condolences of the lives Teodoro has touched are proof of how his legacy will continue to live on. With his passing only comes a greater resolve for the alternative press to continue building on what Teodoro has started.
CMC will hold a tribute for Teodoro tomorrow evening. His remains lie at the Loyola Memorial Chapels. ●
