So long, Prof Ingles

The sad news of the passing of Raul Rafael Ingles came as the Inquirer was in the thick of preparations for its 28th anniversary. He was 84.

I owe him more than prayers. He was not just my professor at the College of Mass Communication (CMC) back when it was a new institute at the University of the Philippines (UP). He was also my boss. He asked me to be his student assistant the semester I was trying (in vain) to write my undergrad thesis. There was no one as cool, calm and collected as the man. To this day I doubt I was of any use to him. But he kept me on the payroll for a few months and taught me by example how to be self-assured and more organized.

Not a few of us in the Inquirer newsroom consider him among our favorite mentors. He was and always will be Prof Ingles to us. I deliberately omitted the period there because you might be misled into reading it as “Professor Ingles,” although he was in fact a professor for 20 years at  UPCMC, which named him its first professor emeritus.

The shortened title is both a sign of respect and a term of endearment for a man who always carried himself, well, professorially. There was nothing unruly about Prof Ingles. He always came to class looking clean and put-together.

“He was not the firebrand that many UP professors were known to be,” recalls contributing editor Linda Bolido. “He was soft-spoken and mild-mannered. His disposition was always pleasant, his demeanor unruffled by the obtuseness or the illusions of grandeur of his students.”

Bolido and I belonged to the same extremely lucky batch that had Raul Ingles in feature writing class and Armando J. Malay in news writing. No two teachers could be more unlike each other. As I’d said before, Prof Ingles was the lamb to Dean Malay’s lion. Ingles spoke gently and deliberately; Malay had a booming voice that reverberated in the classroom. Ingles was the romantic poet; Malay the swarthy, bombastic newspaperman.

“Many in our class did not understand why the self-effacing Prof Ingles was teaching feature writing,” recalls Bolido. “Some do not even remember the semester with him. But I do. I wrote, as a class exercise, a story about the ghost of the lady in white, an enduring campus legend. To my surprise and eternal gratitude, he had it published in a university journal.”

My feature story on student activism appeared in the same publication, no doubt upon the same teacher’s instigation. One other story I submitted as a class requirement made it to the pages of the Philippine Free Press, a highly regarded weekly where the Prof was somehow involved.

That was the kind of teacher Ingles was. He didn’t just make us write all kinds of stories, he went out of his way so our work would see print. Of course it helped that he had an extensive network of friends due to his many creative pursuits outside of teaching, most of them related to journalism.

For one, he wrote a column called “50 years with the Times” in the premartial law Manila Times.

“One of my classmates, the irreverent Marvyn Benaning, used to describe Prof Ingles in jest as 50 years behind the times,” recalls Inquirer News editor Jun Engracia, who had taken the news editing class under Ingles.

“But Prof Ingles is as relevant today as he was four decades ago,” says Engracia. “Most of what I learned from him then are lessons still applied in today’s practice. In fact, no teacher has made a more lasting impact on me as a journalist. It is a privilege to have been his student.”

Engracia also talks about the time he reenrolled at UP after an absence of many years. Ingles was older, his eyeglasses thicker. When Engracia handed in his class card, Ingles took a good look at him, took a second look at his name and said, “Ang tagal mo na dito, hijo.” Ingles, it seems, never forgot a student.

And vice versa. “I can’t recall my thesis proposal for my MA in journalism but I remember my adviser,” says Social Media editor Fe Zamora. “Prof Ingles was my very patient mentor who, after two or three meetings, gently advised me to read Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama.”

Zamora has not completed her MA, “but every time I was at UP, I would visit Prof Ingles.” In fact, she asked about Ingles on the afternoon of Dec. 5 when she had a meeting with CMC Professor Neny Pernia. To her shock, Pernia said that Ingles had passed on just that morning.

Global Pinoy editor Monica Feria remembers Ingles as a quiet gentleman with a ready smile. “He seemed low on small talk but was engaging on futurist studies,” she says. “He always told us to stretch our imagination, to ask, ‘What if.’”

As for me, beside the learnings, I have another reason for never forgetting Prof Ingles. He took the time to send personal, carefully handwritten notes that made you think going into journalism wasn’t a mistake after all. He wrote me one when my dad died, assuring me that, as a daughter and a journalist, I had done my part in making my dad proud. He sent me another, to thank me for publishing a photo of his daughter who was awarded as an educator in the United States. And still another, a most moving one, after I had thanked him in print on World Teachers Day a few years ago.

In that short tribute to Prof Ingles I had said: “He was a gentleman of the first order. He moved without brashness, in measured steps, like poetry.” I stand by my words.