ben malayang feature

When a member of the Silliman Board of Trustees asked me if I agreed to be nominated as president last year, I answered with only one phrase, and that is: I can never say no to Silliman.”

From his involvements with the United Nations, World Bank and Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the last thing people would expect was for Dr. Ben Malayang III to become Silliman’s 12th president.

Malayang’s deep voice probed into this, saying, “I do not think I said yes because of the prestige of being the president. What is it? It’s not economic or monetary in nature; that did not enter into consideration. In fact, in terms of the costs to you emotionally and psychologically, this could probably be more costly because people tend to be intimate here.

“I guess I’d really just like to put it this way: the allure of coming to Silliman, and being able to serve in Silliman was strong enough that I had no problem saying no.”

He recounted that he once said to his friends that the most dangerous people in the world are those that are very competent but have no character. They smiled in agreement, and then he added, “The most unstable people are those that are competent, have character but are without faith.”

“This triad of competence, character and faith anchors what distinguishes a Sillimanian. We may not be the best around, but we are the best in the fusion of all three. For me, that is the reaffirmation of what I have always understood Silliman’s value have been to me.”

He looked at the H.R. Ocampo-like painting on the President’s Office, and said, “I had to make a major choice when I went to UP Dilliman for college. I qualified for nuclear engineering but I chose philosophy. It was very liberating for me at the time.”

“I always wanted to tinker with the Filipino thought and non-filipino thought so I tried to do a senior paper on the application of entropy as a law of thermodynamics, explaining that chaos in Philippine society will eventually lead to non-chaos,” he added with a laugh. “People might not be interested in that, but the exercise of getting into the research was exciting.”

Buying water from bottles

A former DENR undersecretary of both environment and research, and field operations and programs, Malayang also became dean of the School of Environmental Science and Management in University of the Philippines Los Baños years later.

He also became the international adviser on the national capacity self-assessment program of the royal government of Cambodia. And until now, he is the presidential appointee representing environmental science in the national committee on bio-safety in the Philippines.

When it comes to his life-long passion for the environment, he explained, “I once made a statement in the 70s that someday we might buy water from Coca-cola bottles. People thought it was ridiculous then, but it’s happening now. I did not lose the sense that the God of creation continues to reveal himself in the world of creation. And I really associated the environment as the reality of the God that I believe in.”

Reading “Silent Spring” at 8

“When I was about eight, my family hosted two of the first Peace Corps volunteers—one African American, one Caucasian. They were friends, and this was during civil rights movement in the US. We listened to the radio, and got engaged in this discourse that was larger than Oroquieta,” he reminisced, his fingers tapping lightly on the table.

“But what was most important was that each of them was given a trunk of books. Since they were more interested in interacting with the locals, those books stayed there for my brother and I to consume and read.

“It was only later I realized how important that was. I first read “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson in 1962, a year after it had been published. I was this third-grader already reading it in far-off Mindanao!” he exclaimed.

“My focus then was on three things: my home, my school and my church. I became a Demolay at 13, but even then, reading to me created a sense of who I am that, in my view, distinguished me from the others. I certainly try to convey my continuing excitement for learning to my children.”

“They’re all grown up now, and the most discomforting thing to me is that I’m losing the ability to impose my thoughts on them,” he said with a chuckle. “But I can’t treat them as pupils anymore. They’re like colleagues. They have really assumed their own trains of thought that there is hardly any agreement anymore in the family. And it’s unnerving.”

Malayang added, “I remember when my youngest son, RJ, was around six years old, and I asked him about his Sunday school. RJ said that they talked about Noah and how he built the boat and saved the animals when the flood came.

“I asked him, ‘what if the flood had to come because he cut all those trees to build the boat?’ He just stared at me and said, ‘I’ll ask my teacher.’ I told RJ, ‘No, it’s okay. Just think about what if.’”