THE TAU MU HISTORY

Taken from “How To Get Into Mischief Without Really Trying”

By: Founding Father Brod. Atty Laurente C. Ilagan (deceased)

It was the First Semester of school year 1967-1968 at the Ateneo de

Davao Law School when 9 law students, who were barkadas anyway, conceived of
modernizing the traditional image of the Law School from the typically
provincial to the metropolitan setting. It was a time when the campus was a
drab scenario of serious schoolwork, serene library, classroom monotony and
occasional canteen camaraderie.

Being separate from the undergrads, the law school (of the matured and
the elderly, of post-graduate learning, of debaters and self-proclaimed
intellectuals) was totally regarded as a campus within a campus such that a
general feeling of isolation could not be helped. Whatever little excitement
attended the activities of the Law Council, as in elections of officers, meetings,
acquaintance parties, class dialogues and policy discussions, and the like, was
generally short-lived and inconsequential to the students’ sense of belonging.

It was in this atmosphere that a group of enterprising young men decided

to draw from their peers a sense of approval in their fraternizing, careful in the
thought that they are not just a bunch of juvenile misfits but would-be-lawyers
and community leaders (kuno).

With the experience of one frat man among them, Roger Fernandez, a
Utopia member coming as he did from Ateneo de Manila, the formulation of the
brotherhood evolved. Having selected the inspiration of St. Thomas More, the
English lawyer who opposed King Henry VIII’s reputation of papal authority, the
group’s quest for identity was suitably answered. And, with crude rudiments as
“Word of the Grand Archon is Law”, “Keep it to yourself (KITY)”, and “The
King’s good servant but God’s first”, Mon Alojipan, Bert Sarenas, Roger
Fernandez, Jess Albacite, Ben de Guzman, Rudy Raymundo, Rudy Ylaya, Ed
Dacanay and Larry Ilagan, on July 11, 1967, became the first ever Tau Mus in
the country.

So it came to pass that the license to openly commit mischief in the law
campus became institutionalized. The rest is history and the mischief goes on to
this very day.