THE AURA STORY

“Welcome to your future!”

Mondriaan Aura College! The name evokes academic excellence, the desire for freedom, the drive to never-ending success, and a truly liberating education.

Born out of a need to sustain those ideals, Dr. Edgar Geniza together with an equally idealistic group of pioneering faculty members met to strategize an exodus, this time to a new college that will ensure the realization of their vision.

It was 1991, and a combination of natural and legal disasters befell Dean Geniza. He was just reeling from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo when the owners of the building where their College is at the time leasing broke the news that they want to take over the College. His was a realization that good faith is not enough; it must also be combined with legalities. Two years… they have two years to leave the College they thought they own.

In the middle of a drizzling rain, two friends met and over coffee, listed down their options – to fight it out legally and rage against the dying of the light or to go away without looking back. The first option seems very tempting and attractive. The legal battle could drag on for years. Meanwhile the College would suffer and together with it their precious reputations as educators. The latter means they will start from scratch all over again. They have to be born all over again. They have to reinvent the wheel so to speak.

In June 1993, with fourteen faculty members and 88 students, a new College was born. It was not prophesied by seers, nor greeted with choirs, nor heralded by trumpets, on the contrary. Its birth seems insignificant, and a lot of analysts predicted its doom shortly.

But destiny thought of another path, that of persistence, that of being able to sustain itself doggedly, interminably, like the waves of the sea, like the seasons of our lives. With that 88 students, the seed germinated and blossomed that Mondriaan Aura College can lay claim as the fastest growing College in terms of population peaking at 2,000.

Sixteen years later, it has a graduate school, a College of Engineering, a College of Nursing and an average student population of 1,500 warm bodies.

Mondriaan Aura College! A College with a strange name, and a stranger beginning. The first is supposed to stand for the rambled names of the children of its Founding Chairperson Dr. Aurora Geniza, and the second, from her name. Coincidentally, Mondriaan is also a painter and education reformer whose famous painting is “LIBERATION” and “AURA” – also stands for soul and dawn, and “AURORA” for light.