It was several hours after midnight. J. Prospero De Vera might have been asleep already when, under the cloak of night, on May 8, burglars entered his house at 58 A. Roces St., on the UP Diliman campus. No CCTV or police patrol was around to catch them in the act—a fact that De Vera could not be more outraged at. But, by his own account, at a House committee hearing on May 17, we could only imagine the culprits scurrying in the shadows, smirking and snickering, and groping along the walls to De Vera’s kitchen to run off with, what else but of course, a gas tank. It was, in his view, the peak of criminality.
The gas tank was hardly the weirdest household item that De Vera was hysterical about. More or less 30 minutes was spent, at last week’s hearing of the House committee on higher and technical education (CHTE), on how the university had failed to guard his washing machine against burglars in a separate incident. The make and model of the washing machine might as well have been mentioned for the record. Legislators actually meant to tackle during that meeting three House bills that sought to institutionalize in the UP Charter of 2008 the recently terminated agreement between UP and the Department of Defense (DND) from 1989.
The CHTE has since resolved to draft a substitute bill to combine the provisions of the three bills instead of creating a technical working group to deliberate them as originally planned. It is left to prove, in the committee’s next meeting on June 2, whether the likes of De Vera will once again hijack a supposedly serious discussion about a serious matter that only the UP community seems to be taking seriously.
For what should have been nuanced arguments degenerated, not even halfway through the May 17 hearing, into expressions of sympathy for De Vera’s stolen washing machine. Lawmakers hemmed and hawed. De Vera, the chairperson of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), turned into a lampoon of grief and defeat. Some of the sponsors of the resolutions under review let their high-minded defenses of academic freedom fall by the wayside to entertain De Vera’s tangent on the evils of petty theft.
“I have to tell the committee, very frankly, that I do not feel safe inside the UP campus,” De Vera said. “If our students feel that they are unsafe because of the abrogation of the accord, I say that I feel unsafe, with or without the accord, because the basic law and order inside the campus has been problematic.”
De Vera prefaced his statement with a disclaimer of impartiality. He fancied himself a mediator between the university and the DND, which had unilaterally abrogated the UP-DND accord, via a letter to UP President Danilo Concepcion dated January 15, citing the department’s “legal mandate of protecting our youth against CPP/NPA recruitment activities.” For a self-professed go-between, however, De Vera could not be more blatant about his biases. He cautioned against senators who had earlier filed a resolution affirming the accord’s legal safeguard of the university's autonomy against military intervention.
"It is imperative that if there is an attempt to make these policies, they should be grounded on a consensus on what is meant by academic freedom," De Vera told ANC’s Matters of Fact in late January, echoing his earlier remarks, in a press release, on how the accord was “destined to be problematic.”
The representatives at the May 17 hearing, many of whom were university alumni, had readied a steady supply of stock phrases about what academic freedom meant to them. They extolled the values of UP, “a bastion of activism,” and declared their admiration for its adherence to principles of democracy. Some of them talked about how they got to where they were having imbibed the university’s spirit of rational inquiry, its openness to all manner of subjects that students and faculty can hash out on the bedrock value of free expression. UP seems, to their thinking, free of any constraints on thought and action.
But what many of the lawmakers failed to point out is that such freedom is the exception rather than the rule. The various stakeholders of UP can run with their ideas, dabble in whatever ideology, proselytize about God the Mother or Marx or Foucault, and fall in with radicals or reformists, but only on sufferance of tyrants and their military-industrial machine. For all this privilege, no amount of nostalgia or naivete could make the state-sanctioned boundaries of academic freedom broader than they actually are.
The problem lies not so much in defining academic freedom, like De Vera insists, but in questioning how far this freedom goes, to begin with. It is only freedom insofar as almost everywhere else we have been trained to exercise speech with so much restraint, to be grateful for the scraps of favor authorities throw our way. But you cannot think yourself free just because you are among the luckiest in a hapless nation.
Even on campus, not all activists can air their discursive provocations in class without risking alienating or antagonizing their professor and other students. Not all faculty can teach a course that has not met curricular standards. Not even everyone on campus understands communism, or detests capitalism, but some professors themselves could be just as vicious as government inquisitors in red-baiting students.
The university is not as free as it should be. It is only as free as the guardians of the status quo want it to be, and however much leeway it is afforded remains less than the critical amount needed to threaten the hierarchies of wealth and power in the larger society. For so long, even a place like UP, for all its vaunted militancy, has kept up its end of the bargain by sending more of its graduates to the assembly lines of superprofits and falling wages than to picket lines and civic spaces at the heart of communities.
The CHTE deliberations on June 2 would do well to proceed from an honest acknowledgment of where, as it currently stands, academic freedom ends and state repression begins. Any proposal for change from here on out must dispense with shrill alarms about law and order and everything else that bureaucrats seem to conflate academic freedom with. Washing machines and gas tanks are hilarious distractions, not the bone of contention. So, too, are romantic notions of academic freedom that tend to erase the hardscrabble history of how it has been won, asserted, and protected, often at a bloody cost.
There is no shortage of material and analyses to turn to when problematizing and historicizing academic freedom, which the Collegian, in as early as 1957, interrogated in a special issue edited by leading thinkers of the day like Jose H. Y. Masakayan, Virgilio R. Samonte, and Ruben M. Garcia.
We are bringing you an essay from the collection, by O. D. Corpuz, on the threat that ideological schism poses to academic freedom. The zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s saw Corpuz’s beleaguered scholar go out into the streets to shake the establishment by the lapels, so to speak. Ian Victorino looks back on this era in “We Who Were Not Children of the Storm,” from 1988, and ponders the role the First Quarter Storm has played in redefining the student movement’s struggle for academic freedom. F.Y. Medina, in an opinion piece from 1988, challenges students to carry on this tradition in defiance of higher education’s elitist and colonial orientation. The university, to him, is far from a hermetically sealed world.
Periods of turmoil such as the Marcos dictatorship, and the thinly veiled attempts at consolidation of power in the decades since, have birthed generations of activists, some of whom, like Carol Araullo of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN), continue to serve in the mass movement. She would often deliver “a sharp rebuke to those who claim students have no place ... asking big questions and demanding solutions to the ills of the prevailing social order,” Victor Gregor Limon writes in his profile of Araullo, from 2015.
Some other activists have chosen to work in the university as teachers. Gloiza Plamenco talks to Rolando Tolentino, Sarah Raymundo, and Mykel Andrada, to name a few of these professors, and writes about how they contend with the feudal culture in the classroom to impart to their students the lessons learned from the thick of political and ideological battles. This story from 2013 complements Andrea Lucas’s criticism, from 2016, of liberal education and its belief in the marketplace of ideas. A plurality of ideas, without context and history to guide them, she argues, is left to the sway of dangerous biases.
Finally, in “Silid-Aklasan,” Sanny D. Afable observes the rise of smartphone-wielding millennials and the pitfalls of writing them off as “temperamental brats.” Ours is the burden of proving presumptions wrong and steering the conversation to truths about the cultural gains that need to be hammered home most tirelessly. In the face of digressions, only confidence in our principles can outweigh the nonsense disguised as buttoned-up seriousness of those who wish to stonewall any further affirmation of our freedoms. ●
The article has been updated to clarify that De Vera's washing machine and gas tank were stolen in separate burglaries. He also claims to have lost a "high-end bike," although it was unclear from his statement at the May 17 hearing if it was stolen at the same time as the washing machine.
