UP President Angelo Jimenez is unfit to lead the university. The AFP-UP Agreement on Cooperation cut on August 6, 2024 proves it. The deliberate effort to keep it “sub rosa” only got busted when some eager-beaver element fiddling with the AFP Facebook liked what he saw in a five-page deal that he or she posted on their website and later deleted it when all hell broke loose.
What higher principle of opacity moved Jimenez to think that his UP constituents are blind or deaf that they would not scrutinize agreements signed on behalf of the entire university, particularly those that are inherently ugly? By keeping it under wraps, Jimenez violated the remaining shred of respect that he has, and he has gambled and lost when he wagered his John Hancock on a deal with the military that disrespects academic freedom?
We are back to reminding ourselves that William Shakespeare wasn’t wrong when he wrote “’tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind” in his play King Lear. The nobility of UP as a bastion of academic freedom was brutally emasculated when Jimenez signed the five-page agreement dated Aug. 8, 2024, two days after Sen. Ronald de la Rosa, now under investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the deaths of 30,000 Filipinos in the bloody “war on drugs,” launched a vicious tirade against UP at the Senate, tagging it as a boot camp for the New People’s Army (NPA) along with other state colleges and universities (SCUs.) No pipsqueak from Jimenez as the university he leads was raked over the coals by a cheap copy of Vin Diesel and a copious version of the late comedian Pugo.
The AFP-UP Agreement on Cooperation is similar to the deals cut by the regime to coopt, intimidate and control SUCs, with a similar agreement mistakenly signed by the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) that is now being duplicated among SUCs that the military can threaten with budget cuts in collaboration with the Department of Finance (DOF), Department of Budget and Management (DBM), the Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC), the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), the Department of Interior and Local Governments (DILG.) First, they tried banning books to start the inquisition and later on they tried to bowdlerize textbooks to follow their nescient and thersitical narrative.
Jimenez has failed his constituents by not lifting a finger to protect UP professors and students from direct attacks on academic freedom. As the 1,700-member Network in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom (NDHTAF) led by Ramon Guillermo and Sol Iglesias of UP and Oscar Campomanes of the Ateneo de Manila University (AdMU) said, there have been 38 cases of harassment of academics from January 2021 to December 2023, and 45% of them involved red-tagging. The Supreme Court (SC) has ruled that those red-tagged are targets of vigilantes, paramilitary groups and State agents. The Philippine record is so bad that UN rapporteur on freedom of expression Irene Khan recommended the abolition of NTF-ELCAC, whose signature is all over the sites of summary executions, enforced disappearances and failed abductions.
Attacks by de la Rosa and his cohorts have not moved Jimenez to support the organization of the UP Committee on the Protection and Promotion of Academic Freedom and Human Rights, as recommended by UP sectoral regents and UP Diliman, UP Manila, UP Los Banos, UP Cebu and backed by the University Council in UP Visayas and UP Mindanao. Since 2023, Jimenez has not shown any interest in establishing the committee. Yet, he was more than interested in signing the AFP-UP Agreement on Cooperation posthaste in time for de la Rosa’s rants, wrote Rommel Rodriguez, the vice president of the All UP Academic Employees Union (AUPAEU) and professor at the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) in UP Diliman.
Neither did Jimenez call for the Department of National Defense (DND) to restore the UP-DND Accord that barred military intrusion into UP campuses which then Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana unilaterally scrapped on January 18, 2021 and allowed military and police units to surreptitiously operate in UP campuses nationwide. His deafening silence only reinforced suspicions that he maintains an agenda crafted for him by Malacanang, the DND and his backers for UP presidency. His refusal to take the cudgels for the UP community only betrays the possibility that the university’s interest is meaningless to him. But what is truly meaningful to Jimenez? His aligning policies, programs and projects with the wishes of top congressional leaders? His kowtowing to the demands of the DND and AFP? His making UP a junior partner to the bloody plans of the AFP for the sake of “scholarship”?
The souls of hundreds of UP graduates and former students who died during martial law and until this very crucial moment are restless. They, too, are asking why Jimenez continues to prettify his subservience to the regime and adorns it with props like “scholarship,” justifying the deal with UP’s Center for Integrative and Development Studies (CIDS) as one that would strengthen strategic and military studies. This is a barefaced lie. Strategic studies are a euphemism for collecting and analyzing intelligence. It is not academic freedom when UP scholars process information that the military will use against their colleagues, students and UP personnel. The martial law experiment called Philippine Center for Advanced Studies (PCAS) has come and gone, or actually fled, to New Manila when the artifice could no longer be sustained. Let PCAS rest in peace, along with its successor-organization, the President’s Center for Special Studies (PCSS.) Let sleeping dogs lie.
