By ANDREA JOYCE LUCAS

The time is 11:15 a.m. The professor asks us if there are any questions. A few awkward seconds, no one speaks up, others close their notebooks and laptops, and then the class is dismissed. I can’t help but feel a growing suspicion that questions are being skirted over. Everyone has already decided to leave the room and get lunch.

A university is supposedly a place where ideas old and new clash, where ideologies are tested under fire. But even in UP, the premier state university in the country, forms of anti-intellectualism have crept into our halls of learning, preserving the status quo and perpetuating the hegemony that benefits from it. For an institution known for its radical tradition, this is bad news indeed.

Cease-fire

According to historian Richard Hofstadter, anti-intellectualism is the rejection of rational thought, perceived as insensitive and amoral. Today, we are familiar already with the most vulgar of all forms of anti-intellectualism: a dismissal of the merits of critical opinion and most popularly exemplified by the Filipino catchphrase “E, di wow.”

But anti-intellectualism goes even further than smart-shaming. Hofstadter goes on to explain that anti-intellectualism also exists in perhaps more sophisticated but still no less dangerous forms, such as liberalism and postmodernism. Existing thus, anti-intellectualism is the antithesis of UP’s tradition of “matatapang at matatalino” and its hard-earned academic freedom.

The allure of liberalism and postmodernism rests on the desire to be “tolerant” and noncombative. On social media, such as on Facebook, UP Sociology Professor Gerardo Lanuza is famous for his feisty posts, condemning what he perceives as a prevalent liberal attitude among UP students. “In short: be gay/black/atheist/satanist, but don’t come near me!” Lanuza writes in one of his posts.

The professor discusses this more at length in many other of his Facebook posts. This attitude is not limited to the classroom—it is simply when people are afraid to venture out of their comfort zones to discover new ways of seeing the world.

This observation is by no means exclusive to Lanuza. Filipino Professor April Perez notes the same phenomenon in her own classes. “Minsan may pagkakataong nahihiya pa lang sigurong sumagot o magsalita ‘yung iba kaya hindi nagrerecite,” Perez says. In fact, professors would often resort to various methods just to spark discussions and encourage students to speak up in class, including graded recitations by calling students randomly using class cards.

Lanuza points out the grim reality that underlies this phenomenon. “Students are subtly programmed to believe that getting better grades and mastering the skills are the be-all and end-all of education,” he says, “and teachers are reduced to mere bodies without organs of the teaching-war machines diligently preparing students to live in [a heartless world].”

False Peace

“Agreeing to disagree” is not only a manifestation of liberalism, but also of the belief that all the different ways of looking at reality are correct and ultimately subject to individual sensibilities. 

In welcoming and taking all subjective points of view as valid, history loses significance, which alone can stay objective. Literary critic Fredric Jameson decried this loss of the “organic relationship” between history and our everyday lives.

Any subjective interpretation, without history to guide it, is left to the sway of an individual’s biases—even unconscious ones. Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek argues that subjective views fall short as a measure of reality, exactly because there are unconscious ideologies that color every individual’s way of seeing it.

When plurality of ideas is accepted as equally valid and correct, we effectively surrender ourselves to the dominance of ideas supported by hegemonic structures. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explains this in terms of the possession of “cultural capital,” like education: Whoever has more access to cultural capital by virtue of being wealthy or powerful, has the say in setting trends in society.

Crisis

The prevalent liberalism and postmodernism among students trace their roots to the commercialized character of the education system in the Philippines. In UP, schemes such as socialized tuition reinforce this phenomenon, commodifying UP education and qualifying the extent of their right to education based on their capacity to pay.

As UP students are forced to subsidize their own education and those of other students who belong to lower socioeconomic brackets, education at the national university becomes less of a right than a privilege that may be utilized—based not on the duty to serve the nation, but on relative interpretations of what it means to be an Iskolar ng Bayan.

This can be seen in the view that many forms of activism exist nowadays. Armchair activism is sometimes seen as entirely disparate from other ways of expressing dissent, such as by joining the mass movement. Such mentality creates unnecessary divisions and prevents us from realizing the potential of activism itself, as proven by history.

According to literary theorist Edward Said, an intellectual’s goal is to keep questioning that status quo. All the suppression of critical voices in society does is deprive not only the dissenters themselves, but also society as a whole, of the potential to effect change. Closing off our ears to intellectual critique denies the existence of faults in the prevailing order and presumes that current conditions are favorable even when they are not.

There is nothing to be gained from refusing to voice out dissent, except for entrenching the ruling elite, whose interests are far removed from our own. Within the university, debate must persist in response to issues as polarizing as the socialized tuition scheme. The studentry cannot now afford to fall into the trap of smug liberalism and postmodernism. UP’s long tradition of militancy shows the potency of engaging in debate and coming out of it with correct answers that will guide our relevant response to challenges.

The time is 11:15 AM. The professor turns to us, “Any question?” A few awkward moments pass, and then the questions commence. So much for comfort zones. ●

Published in print in the Collegian’s January 20, 2016 issue, with the headline “To each his own?”

Andrea Joyce Lucas joined the Collegian as a features writer in 2013, and served as Kultura Editor from 2015 to 2017. She studied Anglo-American literature.