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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Sunday, August 25, 2024

entry arrow9:00 AM | Reminiscences of a Former Ms. Silliman Inside Man

The current online storm that has broken over the handling of Ms. Silliman 2024—which, as of this writing, has yet to get to coronation night—might puzzle some Dumagueteños, especially the newly arrived to our quaint shores, who might think this is just some small campus beauty pageant that is as negligible as other similar pageants—so why the incessant buzz about it, even from supposedly sophisticated individuals who should know better? This column is a chance to understand why there is a hullabaloo.

Our new friends aside, all the rest of Dumaguete would know why for many Ms. Silliman stands just outside that usual category of “beauty pageant,” and why no one compares it to similar enterprises like Miss Dumaguete or Miss Negros Oriental [or your dozens of town or barangay pageants sprinkled all over the island]. For many Ms. Silliman is uniquely its own thing, an erstwhile celebration of “campus beauty” that is also the epitome of “school spirit”—and “smarts.” There is a reason why it is fondly referred to as a “quiz bowl disguised as a beauty pageant,” which is often said in jest whenever uttered in protest when a more beautiful candidate once again ends up first runner-up to the one who sparkled the most in the Q & A and who bags the crown. It also has a unique history, and a magnificent list of winners—including Palanca Hall-of-Famer Elsa Martinez Coscolluela!—that has made it one of the central events that define the Silliman University Founders Day celebration every August. [Now, it also takes being a Dumagueteño to know how ultimately central Founders Day is to the life of the small city; it is so significantly Dumaguete, it’s even bigger than all the rest of the usual local festivals and holidays. ] Ms. Silliman’s reputation as a unique signifier of Silliman excellence is so entrenched in the Dumaguete cultural mindset that its crowning every year becomes something everyone looks out for.

Truth to tell, I had been so happily out-of-touch with what has been going on with Ms. Silliman this year. I’d been sick for most of mid-August, and had no real strength to navigate the exasperations of people on social media. But as soon as I recuperated and faced the current shenanigans of Facebook, I could not help but feel immediately overwhelmed with all the gossips and pushbacks centering on the current organization handling the annual show. A lot of allegations have been thrown and the landscape has become a total mudbath—all of which I have no real desire for recounting, although I did laugh when the Ms. Silliman pubmats came out and made the case for what not to do if you don’t want your event to look tacky.

But the one thing that caught my eye though was their first poster for coronation night, and I couldn’t believe it. Whoever approved that poster has a complete misunderstanding of what Ms. Silliman is all about. The taste level was already suspect to begin with, but to pose these Silliman women like girls in a harem was also something else.

Also the theme emblazoned on the poster: “A reminiscence of bravery and pioneering advocacies to shape the future.” What in tarnation does that mean? It is a tagline so contradictory and convoluted, it is virtually empty of meaning. For those alumni who used to be proud of “Silliman English,” this is the epitaph.

As a Sillimanian, I felt violated. Because if you are a Sillimanian, there are many enduring traditions that do help define your memories of campus life—dorm life, cultural immersion, a love or hate relationship with cafeteria food, classroom shenanigans, intramural madness, campus publication glory, Founders Day fever—but there is only one that ever feels gilded for many: the Ms. Silliman Pageant.

I’ve served in various capacities in Ms. Silliman pageants of yore, both as a student organizer and then as a faculty adviser. Today, I may no longer believe in pageants as a cultural institution and have actively turned my back on all forms of participation [including judging], but there is one thing about the Ms. Silliman Pageant that gives me pause: the fact that it has served as an earnest laboratory for creativity and event-organizing for a large swathe of the student population—student leaders and creatives who work tirelessly for barely any recompense to hone their skills in whatever it is they’ve showed promise in. That they do this for one of the oldest pageants in the world—it is older than even the Miss Universe—is something still compelling for me. I no longer believe in pageants, yes—but I believe somehow still in Ms. Silliman.

Plus there’s the nostalgia. I was the head scriptwriter for the 50th Ms. Silliman Pageant in 1997, with Michael Ocampo as Chairman, which without doubt was the biggest gamechanger in the pageant’s history, and necessitated the move from the gymnasium to the Macias Sports Complex. The controversy of including a swimwear portion aside, the marketing for that pageant was mind-blowing, it actually galvanized not just the campus but the entire city; hence, there will always be two eras of Ms. Silliman: pre-1997 and post-1997.

I was also the one who later on advocated to separate the talent portion from the coronation night, and to add it to the pre-pageant instead. [I just had enough of coronation nights that lasted until 2 AM because the talent portions ran too long.]

In the 2000s, when I was adviser to the pageant, I wrote an entire history of the Ms. Silliman Pageant to preface the new guidelines we wrote, which we intended to be the pageant bible for future Ms. Silliman Committees to use. I wrote about how it started as a student morale booster and popularity contest instigated by the campus paper in the post-World War II years, which is why the runners-up are called the Miss Cover Girl and the Miss Headline Girl.

I wrote about why the Pan Hellenic Society invented the pre-pageant, to set the pageant apart with its insistence on the intelligence, and articulation, of the candidates. [This is why many people refer to Ms. Silliman as a “quiz bee” disguised as a beauty pageant, and why speech always seem to trump beauty in the final consideration.]

I wrote about why it lost the word “beauty” from the complete title, and why it became “Ms.” instead of “Miss.” [This was Nursing Dean Ma. Teresita Sy-Sinda’s idea—to curb the inherent sexism that is couched in the suggestion of a “miss.” She was the Honorary Chair of the 50th iteration of the pageant, and insisted on this—hence that usage for many years, until this edict has somewhat been forgotten in recent iterations.]

And, finally, I wrote about why the advocacy angle had to be inculcated—because the new guidelines were made in a time when there was a huge push to relegate the pageant to the dustbin of history. It was because, with feminism resurgent everywhere, many people really began questioning the concept of a Ms. Silliman to be outdated—and to be honest, it really is.

The new guidelines we wrote followed a Ms. Silliman Pageant controversy that erupted over cheating allegations [the final question in the pre-pageant was leaked to a favored candidate and that candidate was so incensed by that act she told everyone], and another pageant where only three candidates vied for the crown, rendering all as title-holder and runners-up at once. [The College of Nursing’s Ma. Teresita Sy-Sinda, who had been the pageant’s honorary chair a few years back, reacted to what was happening by banning all her students from joining the pageant for many years, and some college deans followed her suit. We even briefly flirted with the idea of opening the competition to candidates fielded by campus organizations, because we could not get candidates from the colleges and units anymore. I remember being so desperate I begged the Graduate School, which never usually fielded candidates, to join—and I succeeded on that count! The pageant was really dying at that time, hence the need for the guidelines.

Moses Joshua Atega had an alternative ready should Ms. Silliman cease to exist: the Silliman University Campus Goodwill Ambassador, which pitted both men and women, and was designed to compete with similar winners from other schools. The whole enterprise lasted for one year, with Gabriel Enriquez winning in 2003, and begat one other competition from St. Paul University. [Plans to do a Campus Goodwill Ambassador pageant at the Negros Oriental State University, Foundation University, and other schools faltered—hence the final derby fielding all these campus winners did not materialize.]

In my strict version of the advocacy thing in the guidelines we wrote sometime in the mid-2000s, I even wanted the candidates to propose an entire calendar of activities for her chosen advocacy, para dili pang-pageant lang.

Whatever happened to that pageant bible? If it’s lost, is this why the new Ms. Silliman organizing committee seems to be lost on what to do?

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