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Read the letter in PDF:
US-based Academic Scholars' Dec. 2 Letter to Pres. Roman
2 December 2009
Dr. Emerlinda R. Roman
President
University of the Philippines
Diliman, Quezon City
Philippines
Dear Dr. Roman:
As academic scholars in the U.S. with
long-lasting commitments to the Philippines and important connections to
the University of the Philippines in particular, we write to urge a
redress and reversal of the denial of tenure to one of your most exemplary
faculty members, Sarah Raymundo. We feel there has been an egregious
breach in the integrity of the tenure process and in the principles of
academic freedom that our international scholarly community upholds and
vigorously defends. Moreover, as a result of this breach, we feel the
University of the Philippines has done a grave injustice to an outstanding
scholar, teacher and public intellectual, standing to lose one of its most
valuable young faculty and setting an alarming precedent that is sure to
erode the ideals, quality and principled practices of higher education.
Along with our colleagues in the
Philippines, we were appalled and dismayed to hear of U.P. Diliman
Chancellor Cao’s decision to overturn the original recommendations for
Sarah Raymundo’s tenure made by, respectively, the Sociology Department,
the College Executive Board and the Academic Personnel and Fellowship
Committee.
We have reviewed the documents in
Professor Raymundo’s case and find the irregularities in the tenure review
process to be insupportable. It is clear from the paper trail that while
Professor Raymundo’s excellent academic accomplishments have been
recognized at all the above institutional levels as meritorious and
deserving of tenure, she has been punitively judged, in the most
unilateral and arbitrary fashion at the behest of a red-baiting minority
bloc, for her radical political commitments and involvements. We find this
egregious violation of the codes of academic integrity and freedom and
dismissal of scholarly achievement in favor of political ideology to be a
huge mar on the University of the Philippines’ well-known and longstanding
record of commitment to the principles of intellectual freedom and
justice.
Many of us are familiar with
Professor Raymundo’s brilliant scholarly writings on Filipino popular
culture in the context of the global economy, Philippine national politics
and social movements. We have been impressed by and learned enormously
from her astute and illuminating sociological analyses of the conditions
of lived life in the Philippines, the insights of which have been honed
precisely through her long-time activist involvement and experiences
substantiated through more formal research and study. Indeed, in our
estimation, Professor Raymundo’s activist work in the areas of human
rights and global social struggles is undoubtedly both a key source and
form of expression of her research and theoretical approach, and as such
should also be understood as a significant intellectual and professional
contribution in its own right.
Professor Raymundo’s combination of
theoretical erudition (her fluency in sociological theory, critical social
theory, as well as cultural studies) and empirical knowledge is an
inspiring example to all of us, as it has been an invaluable instruction
to the many students who have had the privilege of taking her classes. In
addition to her achievements as a scholar and a teacher, Professor
Raymundo has also been an exemplary colleague in the international
academic community. She has not only been an active participant in
international conferences but has also been central to the vital
intellectual exchanges between students and scholars in the U.S. and in
the Philippines, arranging talks and seminars at the University of the
Philippines that have brought U.S. academics in important dialogue with
our colleagues and with students at U.P. as well as at other universities
in the Philippines. We cannot overemphasize the importance of Professor
Raymundo in fostering these intellectual exchanges, in which many of us
first came to know and appreciate her brilliance as a scholar of
Philippine society and culture.
We can say with confidence that
Professor Raymundo’s scholarly contributions to the interdisciplinary
fields of Global Studies, Philippine studies, and Cultural Studies as well
as Sociology, her strong teaching record, and her exceptional record of
service to the intellectual community at large are well beyond the
requirements for tenure. It is our hope that you will redress the grave
injustice of the arbitrary denial of her tenure. Along with our colleagues
in the Philippines and at the University of the Philippines, we understand
the importance of her intellectual work to the critical work we undertake
in multiple fields and urge you, as the President of this prestigious
university, to recognize the broad respect she has gained as a scholar,
teacher and public intellectual and to grant her the tenured position that
she greatly deserves.
Sincerely Yours,
Delia D. Aguilar
Women's Studies Program
University of Connecticut
Christine Bacareza
Balance
Assistant Professor, Asian American
Studies
University of California, Irvine
Nerissa S. Balce
Assistant Professor of Asian American
Literature
Department of Asian and Asian
American Studies
State University of New York at Stony
Brook
Joi Barrios-Leblanc
Visiting Lecturer
University of California Berkeley
Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
Rick Bonus
Associate Professor of American
Ethnic Studies
University of Washington
Tracy Lachica
Buenavista
Assistant Professor
Department of Asian American Studies
California State University, Northridge
Lucy Burns
Assistant professor
Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Jeff Arellano Cabusao
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Cultural
Studies
Bryant University
Peter Chua
Associate Professor of Sociology
San Jose State University
Valerie Francisco
Doctoral Candidate
City University of New York, The Graduate Center
Maria Hwang
Graduate Student
American Civilization
Brown University
David H. Kim, Chair
Philosophy Department
University of San Francisco,CA
Anne E. Lacsamana
Assistant Professor
Women's Studies Department
Hamilton College
Allan Lumba
Doctoral Student
Department of History
University of Washington, Seattle
Ruth Elynia S.
Mabanglo
Professor and Coordinator
Filipino and Philippine Literature
Program, IPLL,
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Martin F. Manalansan
IV
Associate Professor of Anthropology
and Asian American Studies
University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign
Nerve Macaspac
MA in Asian Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Paul Nadal
Graduate Student, Rhetoric
University of California, Berkeley
Claire Oliveros
Coordinator, Multicultural Center
Portland Community College
Lorenzo Perillo
Doctoral Student
World Arts and Cultures
University of California Los Angeles
Roland Remenyi
Doctoral Candidate, Pharmacology
University of California, Los Angeles
E. San Juan
Fellow W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
Harvard University
Suzanne Schmidt
Doctoral Student
Department of English
University of Washington
Sarita Echavez See
Associate Professor
Asian/Pacific Islander American
Studies
Program in American Culture &
Department of English
Pacharee Sudhinaraset
Doctoral Student
Department of English
University of Washington
Neferti Tadiar
Professor and Chair of Women’s
Studies, Barnard College
Director, Center for Critical Analysis of Social Difference,
Columbia University
Thea Quiray Tagle
Doctoral Student
Dept of Ethnic Studies, University of California San Diego
Allyson
Tintiangco-Cubales, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Asian American
Studies
San Francisco State University
Rowena M. Tomaneng
Interim Dean
Language Arts Division
De Anza College, CA
Michael Viola
Doctoral Student
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Bryan Zadie
Doctoral Student
Comparative Literature
University of California, Riverside |
POLITICAL PERSECUTION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE
PHILIPPINES, QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES:
The “Strange” Case of Professor Sarah Raymundo
By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
[first posted in POLITICAL AFFAIRS website:
<http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/9209>]
Dr. E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
emeritus professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Ethnic Studies,
was a recent fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.
He recently taught at Leuven University, Belgium, as a Fulbright lecturer
in American Studies, and at the University of the Philippines as visiting
professor of English and Comparative Literature. He received his A.B.,
magna cum laude, in English and Philosophy from the University of the
Philippines in 1958; and his doctorate from Harvard University. He taught
at UP from 1958-60, 66-67, 87-88, and 2008. His recent books are US
Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave), Critique and
Social Transformation (The Edwin Mellen Press), and Toward Filipino
Self-Determination (SUNY Press).
In the global North, the plight of academics being fired or denied tenure
scarcely merits attention in the media. This is so starkly banal today
when teachers’ salaries are either drastically frozen or cut back (as at
Harvard University, University of California, etc.) while tuition fees are
jacked up. Becoming redundant or retrenched has not spared
professor-scholars in this unprecedented crisis of global capitalism.
Economics has become politicized when Washington rescues failing banks
with taxpayers’ money; politicians’ decisions can no longer be quarantined
from the carnage in Wall Street.
During the decades of the Cold War, of course, it was routine for
professors to be weeded out for being “commies,” Soviet spies, traitors,
etc. When I was first hired in 1965 at the University of California,
Davis, I had to sign an oath of loyalty to the U.S. government even though
I was not a citizen. My former professor at Harvard, Howard Mumford Jones,
was famous for refusing to sign that oath as a condition for being hired
by the University of Texas then. During the sixties and seventies,
radicals such as Bruce Franklin and Barbara Foley--to name only two of
many--were purged for their activist stance in protesting the Vietnam War,
torture and war crimes in Latin America perpetrated by the “shock
doctrine” technocrats of disaster capitalism (to borrow Naomi Klein’s
terms). Franklin and Foley are brilliant and prolific scholars, respected
in their disciplines. But obviously it was not their intellectual worth
but their anti-imperialist political commitment that brought down the
wrath of the Establishment on their heads. Like all state apparatuses, the
university is not a sacred “think-tank for alternative models,” but a cog
in the machine for reinforcing the oppressive status quo and stifling
dissent.
In the Philippines, as in embattled “third world” countries generally, it
is difficult if not impossible to disentangle the academic realm from that
of everyday political struggles. Everyday life is a mixed affair of
politics, economics, and witchcraft. Traditional customs of peasant life
based on kinship, religious beliefs, memory, habits, etc. disturb the
presumably “neutral” market competition of equal citizens. Ethics is
compromised in political skulduggery and business deals carried out by
political dynasties, warlords, and corporate hustlers. The reification or
commodification of life in industrialized bourgeois society has not
materialized enough to fully compartmentalize the public sphere from the
private. This is a product of uneven development and the unsynchronized
process of imperial subjugation and exploitation.
In a peripheral dependent formation such as the Philippines, the
sociohistorical field of power is constituted by the dynamic interplay of
economics, politics and ideology. Class struggle, while anchored in
production and property, proceeds on various interacting levels. If
Filipinos suffer from a “damaged culture,” this can be viewed as a logical
outcome of the legacy of over three hundred years of Spanish colonial
domination and more than a century of being “tutored” by U.S.
entrepreneurial democracy and market pluralism. Class and racial
differences are supposed to wither away in the course of “free market”
modernization. Except for the perennial “maoist” insurgents and
recalcitrant Moros, Americanization succeeded in molding the thinking of
the intelligentsia, especially the academic gatekeepers at the University
of the Philippines, and the self-reproducing hierarchy of civil servants
in the judiciary, military-police agencies, and so on.
Missionary Positions
After killing 1.4 million natives, the United States ruled the Philippines
from 1898 to 1946 as a direct colony. The fruit of this “civilizing”
experiment is nearly a century of severe underdevelopment of the economy
and disintegration of the collective psyche whose symptoms are evident
today. The colonial power preserved the feudal-oligarchic property system,
overlayering it with the trappings of comprador electoral democracy. One
result is the authoritarian Marcos regime (1972-1986) whose human-rights
violations have now been surpassed by the corrupt Arroyo regime
flourishing in the midst of extreme class inequality, nurturing barbaric
warlords such as the Ampatuan dynasty responsible for the recent
Maguindanao massacre of 57 unarmed civilians. Not that the U.S. ruling
class is to blame for everything—indeed, the founding of the local
educational system is supposed to be one of the durable contributions of
U.S. colonialism to the heroic task of civilizing those “benighted”
natives, Nonetheless, a large share of what Filipinos enjoy today can be
ascribed to the “benevolent assimilation” policy of the wise suzerain
William McKinley and his no doubt well-intentioned successors.
One of the institutions established by the U.S. colonizers is the
University of the Philippines (UP). It was designed to produce
functionaries to serve the ideological state apparatuses of the colonial
state. The U.S. needed trained “little brown brothers” (William Howard
Taft’s affectionate terms of endearment) to legitimize the particularist
motive of capital as one identical with the general interest. Its prestige
eventually rested on the nurturance of generations of scholars and a
significant number of activist intellectuals since its founding in 1908.
Despite what historian Renato Constantino called “the mis-education of
Filipinos,” that is, the slavish worship of EuroAmerican values and its
elite gurus such as Richard Rorty and Benedict Anderson, UP students led
mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the sixties and ruthless US
interventions in Latin America and the Middle East from the seventies up
to the present.
Class struggles worldwide could not be kept away from the classroom. Not
only has the UP served to train subalterns for the colonial bureaucracy;
it has also exposed students (given the internal contradictions of
capitalist rule in a semifeudal dependency) to counterhegemonic,
revolutionary ideas. During my student days in UP in the fifties, the
writings of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre,
and later on of George Jackson, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Mao, and other
progressive activists were disseminated among student-faculty discussion
circles. From this arose organizations that spearheaded the
national-democratic movement which challenged U.S. imperial hegemony and
its support for the bloody dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and his
successors, up to Arroyo. To a limited extent, the UP still serves as an
arena of ideological -theoretical debates reflecting the intense conflicts
and antagonisms of a nation of over ninety million most of whom live on
less than $2 a day, under a brutal regime praised by Barack Obama and
credited with over a thousand victims of extra-judicial killings, forced
disappearances, and torture.
Subalterns Speak
Now comes the news that within the hallowed halls of “academic freedom,”
which the oligarchy takes pride in as “the marketplace of ideas,” the
persecution of a prodigiously talented militant scholar,
Sarah Raymundo, is going on without much fanfare. Except for the
local demonstrations of sympathizers from student organizations in the
campus and, incredibly, the massive support of academics, public
intellectuals, and professionals from around the world, her case is
scarcely noticed by Manila pundits and commercializing media celebrities.
Globalization thus works in contradictory and paradoxical ways.
Raymundo’s case may be a minor affair compared to the issues of global
warming publicized at Copenhagen or the genocidal wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still, with the Philippines labeled a danger
zone because of the unrelenting attacks by the Abu Sayyaf, one of the
home-grown “terrorist” groups beloved by the U.S. State Department (the
other being the Communist-led New People’s Army, stigmatized by then State
Secretary Colin Powell), we might take the case of Raymundo as an allegory
of what’s going on in that otherwise obscure tropical archipelago once
noted for hosting the largest US military bases during the Korean and
IndoChina wars—a nearly anonymous remote group of islands that is still
remembered for Bataan and Corregidor and the thousands of Filipino and
American dead sacrificed by General Douglas McArthur for the Empire’s
honor.
Raymundo’s plight has been succinctly summarized by Dr. Walden Bello, a
tenured sociology professor at the same University and now a
representative of the party-list Akbayan in the Philippine Congress
(accessible at <http://
www.gopetition.com/online/
32122.html>). Although trained by the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila
University, Bello knows the inner workings of the UP academic
bureaucracy. The facts are simple: On April 2008, the tenured faculty of
the Sociology Dept. in a vote of seven to three recommended granting of
tenure to Raymundo on the basis of her substantial academic record.
Seven months later, Raymundo was informed that the faculty decided to
reverse their decision. What happened?
|
Wonders can happen, even in bureaucratic chambers, without covert CIA (or
local military-police) cues. In the hiatus of seven months, the minority
schemed to overthrow the majority by “manipulating the Chancellor for
Academic Affairs” (to quote Bello) to demand that the majority who voted
for Raymundo justify (again!) their decision. Surprise? This was evidently
a ploy since the majority report affirmed that Raymundo exceeded the
necessary requirements for tenure. Meanwhile, the college’s highest
governing body, the College Executive Board (CEB), upheld the majority
decision. Finally, the Diliman campus Chancellor Sergio Cao dismissed the
CEB’s decision and refused tenure. In effect, the Chancellor sided with
the minority. Why? Not because of Raymundo’s lack of academic excellence;
everyone concedes that. It is because of Raymundo’s ethical stand,
political beliefs, and civic conduct as the general-secretary of CONTEND
(Congress of Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy) and active
member of ACT (Association of Concerned Teachers) and the All-UP-Academic
Employers Union. She is being penalized for those rare virtues.
Raymundo is alleged by her detractors to have been involved with groups in
support of victims kidnapped, tortured and killed by the military, in
particular Karen Empeno. To such vague and muddled allegations that she
hid such involvements, Raymundo has fully responded in a substantial
memorandum submitted on Nov. 16 to university president Erlinda Roman. She
has never made her activism a secret to anyone. The department allegations
are all shoddy innuendoes and insinuations, unworthy of even a C-
sociology major. Roman, for her part, played the coy and hedging fox (or
is it mealy-mouthed Pontius Pilate?) in her Dec. 14 memorandum to Cao and
the current department chair Randolf David as she tendentiously recounted
the whole rigmarole.
Admitting that there was no argument about Raymundo’s academic
qualifications, president Roman seemed obsessed with a conundrum: whether
the April vote really showed “consensus.” Given the contentious,
politically charged milieu of everyday life in the Philippines from which
the university is not immune, Roman believed that Raymundo’s politics
fouled up, or more exactly problematized, consensus. The original vote of
7-3 did not truly express “consensus” if by the term we mean unanimous. It
was hard to really determine what the department’s consensus was despite
or notwithstanding the April vote, Roman thought aloud. In effect, that
little word “consensus” became Roman’s alibi out of this sorry mess.
Alternatively, it was her fortuitous disguise to appear neutral and above
board, not least that she was exercising conscientious leadership of a
great institution.
No, Roman was not a hypocrite, only a realist.
Cognizant that the composition of the department’s tenured faculty had
meanwhile changed with the dropping-out of Raymundo’s supporters, Roman
ordered another vote, which this time yielded the right “consensus”: 4
for-6 against Raymundo. The latest is the really more authentic
“consensus” for Roman. Beholden to her neoliberal patrons in the “old
boys’ network,” Roman knows that she has to safeguard her clientele within
the university by upholding departmental cliques, “yahoo” mediocrity, at
the expense of a more inclusive, libertarian, democratic, forward-looking
vision of higher learning. This is perhaps too much to expect, given the
politicized genealogy of UP presidencies. Compounding authoritarian
methods and chicanery with fatuous casuistry, this whole exercise has now
become a sad comment on the abysmal sinkhole to which this group of UP
faculty and administrators have succumbed.
In summing up his brief supporting Raymundo, Dr. Bello pleaded to
president Roman to “reverse a terrible miscarriage of justice and reassert
UP’s commitment to academic excellence.” He was appealing to one of the
executioners. Of course, operating legalistically within the institutional
framework, Bello could not do otherwise—even though the case had already
been thoroughly politicized by Raymundo’s enemies, those against
Raymundo’s radical left-wing politics. He had already alienated the
“yahoos” of the sociology department, which contaminated alleged
progressives such as Randolf David and Cynthia Bautista. Can the Board of
Regents, the last resort for the aggrieved, succeed in resisting the
proven inertia of institutions and overturn Cao, Roman, and David? Maybe,
if the popular-democratic voices prevail. Probably not, given the
scandalous shenanigans of the traditional politicians challenging the
Arroyo clique.
I want to sketch a parenthetical aside here. A subtext or submerged
narrative, threaded with complex nuances that I cannot elaborate here,
lurks behind this instructive controversy. Despite Bello’s tie-up with the
Akbayan party and his record of defending his World-Social-Forum
personality against the suspicions of former comrades in the
anti-imperialist National Democratic Front-Philippines and in Bayan-Muna
party (with which ACT and CONTEND are allied), he seems to have
transcended sectarian narrow-mindedness, not to speak of barkada
scholasticism. Meanwhile, the media-savvy Randy David, a leading member of
BISIG (Bukluran sa Ika-uunlad ng Sosyalistang Isip at Gawa; Association
for the Advance of Socialist Words and Deeds), an admirer of Rorty and
other Western elite missionaries, finds himself somehow aligned with
conservative if not reactionary Neanderthals, or “yahoos” (to quote Bello).
In a single stroke, he forfeited his claim to be a nationalist (in the
tradition of his distinguished kin, Renato Constantino).
Incidentally, BISIG is one of the groups allied with Akbayan; BISIG’s
former chair, UP President Francisco Nemenzo and other colleagues figured
prominently in the 1993 Forum for Philippine Alternatives which rejected
the political strategy and tactics of the Sison-led Communist Party of the
Philippines and the National Democratic Front-Philippines. Former comrades
split, symptomatic of what was then happening in the Philippines during
the retrograde administration of the late Corazon Aquino. For many
academic leftists in a tributary shark-infested milieu, opportunism and
obligatory tithes seem more functional if risky preoccupations in
advancing careers than supporting human-rights organizations, or the cause
of nationalist democracy. At any rate, this dialectical twist of events,
one more proof of Lenin’s thesis that reality/practice is richer than
theory, may augur a renewal of progressive and radical energies in the UP,
despite Raymundo’s predicament. This may be a hope, but in a permanently
crisis-wracked country like the Philippines, the improbable sometimes
becomes realizable.
Lessons for Lilliputians
Our critique of abusive authority and conservative power needs to extend
beyond the university precincts. As noted earlier, the neocolonial
university is permeated with manifold contradictions symptomatic of the
whole moribund system. To be sure, the balance of political forces may
suddenly change and affect pedagogical agencies. One more Maguindanao
massacre may stir up slumbering “people power.” If Raymundo’s case is not
only flawed with procedural mistakes and ethical misjudgments, but also
corrupted by scarcely veiled charges of political activism and
humanitarian/social conscience on Raymundo’s part, it is shortchanging the
victim if we do not put at the center of this whole affair the active
complicity of Roman, Cao, Paredes, David, Bautista, Aquino, and others
with a bankrupt regime that thrives on flagrant corruption, lies,
mendacity, threats, and fascist violence—not least, the symbolic violence
that the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu associates with bureaucratic
discourse, authoritarian procedures, and administrative rituals, such as
tenure-granting (in which academic capital trumps intellectual capital),
that insure the petty privileges of a self-perpetuating, obsequious elite.
What is to be done and undone? The now notorious “culture of impunity”
fomented by the shameless Arroyo regime seems to have descended on the
Diliman campus and is saturating the hallowed classrooms and libraries of
this once esteemed sanctuary of learning. As it did before, once in the
McCarthyist-like persecution of a community of pro-people nationalist
scholars as communist sympathizers during the Magsaysay-Garcia regimes;
this U.S.-styled witchhunt was repeated periodically in the terrible
nights of collective suffering and resistance from the time of Marcos to
Arroyo.
But lose no hope, friends and partisans in the global commons. While the
UP is slowly being commercialized and privatized, students and faculty who
are relatively privileged are feeling the pressures of unemployment,
anomie, environmental degradation, and ubiquitous military-police
violence. While serving the neocolonial state and the predatory merchants
of global capital, the UP remains funded by taxpayers and is ultimately
answerable to the Filipino people. Resistance to capitalist globalization
is gradually rising, as shown by this robust and enthusiastic
international support for Raymundo and what she stands for.
In California and elsewhere, students and faculty are rebelling against
state terrorism: cutbacks in salaries, privatization, lay-offs,
deterioration all around. Many are beginning to grasp that higher public
education is a social and human right, no less than health care, food, and
adequate shelter. Peoples around the world are mobilizing against the
global war of terror launched by the U.S. corporate elite. The Filipino
people are crying “No more massacres” by Arroyo and her Ampatuan
accomplices.
Whatever the final arbitration of her case, Sarah
Raymundo’s voice cannot be repressed or denied “tenure”—an index of the
inexhaustible resources, energy and intelligence of the Filipino people
fighting for justice and liberation in solidarity with others beyond the
surveillance of the gatekeepers of the University of the Philippines and
other public institutions.
_______ |
