By Herman M. Lagon

There is a different kind of silence settling across many campuses lately. Not the calm silence before classes start. Not the sleepy quiet of libraries during finals week. This one feels heavier somehow. Election season comes, filing deadlines pass and suddenly everybody realizes there are barely enough students willing to run. Some councils end up incomplete. Others quietly disappear before they even begin.

A student once joked online that looking for candidates for student government now feels harder than finding groupmates who actually contribute. People reacted with laughing emojis at first. Then the comments slowed down. The joke landed a little too close to home.

Older professors and former student leaders notice the shift immediately because they remember campuses differently. There was a time when students argued loudly about almost everything — tuition hikes, corruption, curfews, national politics, academic freedom. Forums overflowed. Student papers were thick enough to fold under your arm. Councils sometimes felt like miniature parliaments where debates stretched until evening and everybody went home equally tired and irritated. It was not always pretty. Student politics could be messy, dramatic and exhausting. But students believed showing up mattered. Schools were not just places to survive quizzes and collect diplomas. They were spaces where young people learned to question, negotiate, organize, and occasionally fail in public without disappearing completely afterward.

That culture did not appear out of nowhere. Our collective history carries traces of it everywhere. During the dictatorship years, many student activists were barely older than today’s sophomores. Some lost scholarships. Some stopped schooling entirely. Others never made it home. Looking back now, it is easy to flatten those stories into anniversary slogans and social media graphics every September. But behind those names were ordinary young people with worried parents, unfinished assignments, barkada problems, and ordinary fears. They simply reached a point where pretending everything was normal felt heavier than speaking up. Many freedoms students casually enjoy today were protected by people once dismissed as too noisy, too idealistic, or too stubborn for their own good.

Still, students today are carrying a different kind of exhaustion. One works in a milk tea shop after class just to cover transportation expenses. Another edits reels for small businesses at midnight because allowance money no longer stretches far enough. Some spend more time commuting than sleeping. Others sit quietly through lectures while mentally computing whether they can still afford next semester’s miscellaneous fees. The pressure just keeps stacking itself. Rising prices. Side jobs. Family expectations. Mental health struggles. Online noise. At some point, leadership starts feeling less like service and more like one more unpaid responsibility a tired student has to survive.

That is why calling students lazy misses the point completely. Most still care. Maybe not always loudly, but they do. One sees it after typhoons when students organize donation drives faster than institutions sometimes can. One sees it in campus journalists staying awake late into the night fact-checking claims while juggling deadlines and exams. One sees it when student organizations quietly hold mental health sessions because classmates have started disappearing from classrooms and group chats without explanation. The concern never really disappeared. What weakened is the belief that formal student institutions can still change anything meaningful.

And honestly, part of that distrust came from disappointment too. Students notice when leadership becomes performative. They see when councils care more about polished pubmats, photo opportunities and carefully worded captions than actual student concerns. They know when somebody runs because they genuinely want to help and when somebody simply wants another line on a résumé. Young people are sharper observers than adults sometimes give them credit for. They can sense insincerity quickly.

Still, removing student voices altogether creates another problem. Maybe a quieter one, but still dangerous. Campuses without active participation slowly become spaces where decisions move mostly in one direction — from the top downward. Tuition issues, welfare concerns, academic policies, disciplinary rules, and campus security measures continue affecting students whether they participate or not. The difference is that discussions become narrower when students stop entering the conversation. Schools may continue functioning technically, but something important disappears once students stop feeling invited into decisions affecting their own lives.

The strange part is that schools constantly advertise leadership, collaboration, communication, adaptability, and critical thinking as essential skills, yet many of those are learned precisely inside organizations, publications and student councils. Employers quietly know this too. Some hiring managers would rather deal with a graduate who survived the chaos of student leadership than someone with flawless grades but no experience handling actual people. Organizing events, resolving conflicts, writing statements under pressure, handling criticism, speaking before hostile crowds — none of those lessons fit neatly inside multiple-choice exams.

Student activism today also exists inside a far rougher online environment. One careless sentence. One cropped screenshot. One post stripped of context. Suddenly a student becomes the center of ridicule far beyond campus walls. Some get mocked. Others get labeled too quickly. With online harassment and red-tagging hanging quietly in the background, many students choose silence not because they stopped caring, but because staying quiet sometimes feels safer than becoming tomorrow’s trending issue.

And yet activism has simply changed shape. Not everybody joins rallies now. Some students organize relief drives after disasters. Others tutor struggling classmates, create educational content online, write articles, organize support groups, or quietly volunteer in communities nobody talks about. Some challenge injustice through research, journalism, art, or difficult conversations held in small rooms after class. Student representation was never supposed to demand identical politics from everybody. It only asks students not to surrender completely to indifference.

A former student leader once told me something I never really forgot. He said the hardest part of leadership was not criticism from administrators. It was watching students slowly stop believing leaders were listening at all. That observation cuts both ways. Representation weakens when students disengage, yes. But it also weakens when leaders stop sounding like ordinary students and start sounding like press releases.

What feels dangerous now is how disengagement is slowly being mistaken for maturity. Some people act as if caring deeply about issues is embarrassing, dramatic or impractical. But history rarely improves because people stayed detached. Democracies usually weaken quietly first. Students stop voting. Organizations fade. Forums grow emptier every year. Discussions disappear. Eventually, people convince themselves participation never mattered anyway.

And silence, once it becomes routine, spreads faster than expected.

What makes this heavier is that education remains deeply tied to family survival. Many students are not studying only for themselves. Entire households quietly pin their hopes on one diploma. One graduation can change the direction of a family. That is why student spaces matter beyond campus politics. They shape how young people understand empathy, responsibility, accountability, and citizenship long before they enter workplaces or public office.

Maybe genuine student representation was never really about producing future politicians or campus celebrities. Maybe its value is simpler than that. It reminds students that their voice still matters while they are young, uncertain, exhausted, and still figuring life out. It reminds them that participation is messy, frustrating, imperfect, and still necessary anyway.

Because once people fully believe their voice changes nothing, silence stops being temporary. It becomes habit.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world that is grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views herewith do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with./WDJ