DEMOCRATIC SPACE
The Limits of Academic
Civility
By the Congress of Teachers/Educators for
Nationalism and Democracy
October 11, 2006
Posted by Bulatlat
"Academic freedom" exists among the
faculty of the University to some extent because, within our limited
sphere of action and thought, all of its members are considered
approximately equal in their possession of power or lack thereof. A
situation in which a military man talks to an academic cannot exactly be
characterized as a propitious and equal academic encounter. One is trained
to impose order by force, while the other advances knowledge by thinking
"disorderly" thoughts. One is an expert on human extermination, while the
typical representative of the latter hardly knows heads or tails of the
business of killing people. The authoritarian culture of the military is
completely antithetical to the ideal culture of the University. The beauty
of the University is not the fact that we can simply think or fantasize
whatever we want to, but that we can actually think against the ruling
ideas of the dominant groups and classes in society and still be protected
to some extent by our intransigent and impudent claim to "academic
freedom."
"Academic freedom" is imperiled not by
a "surplus" of oppositional and critical thought but precisely when the
dominant political regime attempts to turn the university into a naked
tool for the perpetuation of its power and when it seeks to expel, punish
or curb the defiant voices of protest within the academe by means of
McCarthyite witch-hunting.
The most serious threat to scientific
thought and the spirit of inquiry is not the act of throwing eggs at
government functionaries or generals in rare moments of rage. Rather, it
is posed by the all too common occurrence of faculty members being reduced
to fanatical functionaries and court poets of the powers-that-be. The
latter type of "academic" is also known to develop grandiose ideas of his
own significance, power and even intellect in direct proportion to the
amount of money stashed away in his bank account. In the final analysis,
they are just paid hacks with professorial pretensions who do not deserve
even the most civil intellectual treatment in the academic context. They
should just quit the academe and take jobs in the field of advertising and
political slogan-writing instead. When we become tired of their mantras,
we even have the right to say to them, "Sell your voodoo ointments
somewhere else! We can't pay you for them."
The "egging" of AFP Chief of Staff,
Gen. Hermogenes Esperon, Jr., at UP Diliman has become a convenient
pretext for some professorial state jesters to call for a crackdown on
activists and activism on the Diliman campus. Gen. Esperon, also known as
the "Hello, Garci General" is the head and representative of an
institution which has been widely condemned if not reviled, both
nationally and internationally for its evident role in the systematic
murder of hundreds of activists, journalists, intellectuals and priests.
These murders were and are still being accomplished with the utmost
brazenness and impunity on the part of the perpetrators. The irony today
is that those who pelted Esperon with eggs and mud at the UP Faculty
Center are themselves being accused of having acted with "impunity"!
How can anything be more absurd than
bearing down upon some harmless egg throwers when the real culprits,
criminals and rotten eggs are left unpunished for their crimes against
society. Such an eventuality would surrender justice to mere form. Have we
already forgotten the "Garci tapes"? Have we forgotten the tragic fates of
Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan? Were they given the proper "academic
civility" by their military abductors? Do we forget the daily indignities
and humiliating poverty that we suffer in order that our politicians,
generals and their professorial jesters can swim up to their necks in the
taxes we pay? Shame on us if we have forgotten all this. Because it means
that we have lost the power to be angry at what is happening outside of
our campus and have likewise become totally incapable of understanding the
sources of the anger seething within it. Even we, who live and breath the
life of teachers and students to our very core, have the right to be angry
at the travesties of justice we daily see before our eyes.
There are indeed limits to academic
civility and these are where the struggles for real social justice begin. Posted
by Bulatlat
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