Universities for all the people
ANTONIO P. CONTRERAS
THE Kabataang Barangay held its reunion inside the campus of the University of the Philippines Diliman, where UP president Danilo Concepcion was seen not only attending but also flashing the victory sign that is associated with this Marcos-era youth organization. The reactions from within UP reveal the problem with the dominant thinking that prevails in the state university.
It is not in the fact that protesting voices were raised. After all, UP would not be UP if there are no protests.
The problem is in what is evoked by these dissenting voices, many of whom excoriated Concepcion for failing to live up to what UP stands for. It is in the suggestion that there is only one political voice that UP should celebrate, and anyone who believes otherwise has no place in it.
Technically, no one owns UP except the people. After all, people’s monies are used to fund its operations and the salaries paid to its faculty and staff. Taxes are used to enable its students the free tertiary education which is accorded to them by virtue of a law passed by Congress, ironically under a president many of them hate.
As such, UP must balance its role as a nurturer of critical thinking with the reality that it must also be an open ground for the flourishing of different voices, including the unpopular and inconvenient. In this instance, what was palpable was the noisier objections to providing a space to an inconvenient narrative, that of the Kabataang Barangay simply because it is one that is symbolic of the Marcos regime. The air of exclusion was strong enough for president Concepcion to publicly issue an apology, and to assure his constituents that UP under his watch “will never forget the dark period of our country during the martial law years.”
Indeed, one can question Concepcion’s insensitivity in attending a social gathering of an organization identified with that period. He justified his presence as an opportunity for him to be with “old-time friends [he]had not seen for decades.” Concepcion can be faulted for privileging his desire to be with friends, over the symbolic hatred which is widely held by his constituents towards the regime which the occasion where he found time to be with them represents. He appeals to be forgiven for showing his humanity, for momentarily forgetting an evil that his friends reminded many at UP and he had unknowingly embraced, even if only for a brief moment.
What is, however, more discomforting is the fact that the outrage that we often see erupting at UP, among its constituents, either individually in their social media posts and public discourses, or collectively through the manifestos and statements of student organizations and even of its university council, appear to be solely focused on one partisan agenda. This agenda targets the Marcosian narrative which many in UP now see as being embodied by President Duterte.
Absent from UP’s critical thinking landscape is an articulation of outrage against election fraud. There is also very little scholarship, both in student inquiries and faculty scholarly endeavors, of critically inquiring into the other hidden or distorted narratives that need to be revealed or rewritten. Much focus is given on the continuing demonization of martial law and Marcos, and now of Duterte, even as there is scant attention given on inquiring into the Aquino and Cojuangco sides of our nation’s stories. For a university that is supposed to celebrate critical thinking, there is much value given to adhering to one particular angle of our history, even as those who attempt to raise contrarian views are readily dismissed as loyalists, apologists and historical revisionists.
It appears that Marcos-hating and Duterte-bashing have been elevated into the academically fashionable, a comfort zone for those seeking tenure and acceptance among their peers.
This is a behavior that is not confined to UP alone, but also prevails in other universities. What is most disturbing is that political partisanship is now effectively masked by pretensions towards some academic standards of objectivity and professionalism, and of upholding the tenets of a particular discipline, or of a particular university ethos. Partisanship is now justified by appeals to some higher mission of serving the people, or of being men for others, or of doing it for God and country. What is effectively lost is the authenticity that one expects from scholars who have to be fair in exposing the evils and flaws of the past and present, and of allowing contradictory voices to flourish without being labeled as simply a lone, lost, revisionist voice.
The roots of the hypocrisy lie in painting a particular ethical rubric for every member of academe to adhere to, which anyone who abandons or violates it must suffer the consequence of being labeled and shamed, and like president Concepcion, be forced to apologize.
When fellow academic David Yap and I exposed the anomalous straight line associated with Robredo’s votes, the very first people who attacked us were not the trolls, but the so-called data scientists from the top universities of the country. We were accused of betraying our disciplines and of violating their standards. My detractors demanded that I be censured, even fired, by my university for shaming it, and for acting in ways that are inconsistent with its ethical and moral standards.
Universities like UP must once and for all realize that to be considered as a refuge for critical thinking, it must also provide a safe ground for those who think and inquire differently, and enable all kinds of voices. To be critical requires nurturing, supporting and even funding spaces to articulate not only voices contrarian to Marcos and Duterte, but also those that are contrarian to such voices.
In order to achieve this, there is a need for universities to develop a kind of self-reflexivity where they critically look into their own existence, and their own policies and practices.
Although we can critically engage, we should not demonize and shame simply because of symbolic association to problematic periods in our history like martial law, or of holding problematic and controversial views. After all, many in UP and other universities harbor an ideology that is in the same family of political justification used by Pol Pot that led to the genocide in Cambodia.
Similarly, university leaders and administrators cannot lead in condemning human rights violations, when in the same breath they miss the point that faculty rights are also human rights, and that insisting on an early retirement contrary to law is a human rights violation because it is a form of age discrimination.
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