Agaaaahhh!! The Fall of the Atenean!

Ok, This comes as a shocker to me, but I've just read the most insulting article in my life!

The article is from a free of charge magazine called "HK Magazine". Its in english, and caters to the native English speaking residents of HK, usually expatriates from developed western countries. I've been an avid reader, and I usually pick up a new copy every Friday. They always come out with interesting articles, but one of this week's article infuriates me to no end.

I love my alma mater, and I love the way I was taught and educated in a liberal arts university. I wear my university credentials like a badge, and although I admit there are some lousy major courses that may have stemmed up during the "experimental" periods where the university is introducing new courses into its curriculum, I let it pass by. Besides, the Atenean education is not about extreme specialization, but the idea of a well rounded, man-for-others outlook and education in life.

Thus to my dismay, I found an article that refers explicitly to my university, and am extremely vexed. Take a look at a chip of the whole article:

Escalator Land
Twenty years after the Mid-Levels Escalator's "Eureka!" moment, our favorite walkway has its own subculture.

Snaking its way through Central is one of the city's most idiosyncratic landmarks. The Mid-Levels Escalator is a tourist attraction, local convenience, and fertile center of a phenomenon that has come to be known as "escalator culture."
Around it, cafes, bars, restaurants, nightclubs, boutiques, wine merchants, serviced apartments, and a fetish shop, have sprung like mushrooms. But its the fascinating characters that ride the moving staircase down in the morning and backup at night that give it life.

[...]

Domestic Helper
Esperanza has a PhD in Child Psychology from Ateneo de Manila University, financed by her absent mother, who also worked in Hong Kong. She has a husband and two teenaged children back in the Philippines, who education she finances, and whom she sees for approximately five days a year on her annual holiday. She is paying to build a house in her home town, which her relatives have managed to put into their own names. Her employers, whom she's been with for eight years, dont know any of this because they've never asked.
Best seen:4pm
Personal Hero: Virgin Mary

I'm sorry to say, but this is a bad way to write an article, especially one that puts a University's name into a stereotype. Unless I have simply blanked out for the past few years, I do not think any university deserves to have their name placed in an article on a foreign magazine that does not seem to know anything about the universities in the Philippines. We know that there is rivalry between Ateneo and La Salle, that the State University is known for its politically inclined and sometimes violent students, but all these are treated as a joke. They may be true, but this doesn't apply to all instances, or maybe even in general. It could be that a few isolated cases has lead to these impressions, but we take it in humor. For a foreign magazine to put stereotyping like that... Well, that's why I'm writing this entry. I'm PISSED.

I do not know about the state of things at Ateneo right now, maybe it has degraded. But it sores me to death that my alma mater is placed in a strange light, for all english speaking expatriates in Hong Kong to see. The next time I get an job interview with an expatriate and mention my alma mater, I will be forever wondering if the interviewer has read this article and think that I may not necessarily be up for the job I'm applying for because I'm from Ateneo de Manila University.

This infuriates me to no end. Someone please stop me from launching a rocket to the author of this article.

PISSED!