On Aug. 14, 2024, just as UP sectoral regents, students, faculty and non-academic personnel were denouncing the AFP-UP Agreement on Cooperation inked by UP President Angelo Jimenez and his underlings at Vinzons Hall, scores of uniformed UP Traffic Management Office (TMO) employees who are supposed to be force multipliers at Diliman campus were busy checking each motorcycle, car and van that enters the 554-hectare campus.
It is no coincidence that more restrictions on the ingress and egress of vehicles into the campus were imposed just as Jimenez is getting creamed for signing a deal with the military to “professionalize” officers who do “strategic policy studies” for a military journal, never mind if the AFP already has its own Command and General Staff College (CGSC) and the Department of National Defense (DND) takes pride in its National Defense College of the Philippines (NDCP) which bestows graduate and postgraduate titles to their students, many of them politicians or those who want to add titles to their curriculum vitae, including businessmen way past retirement age.
Furious motorists naturally resented the latest Jimenez faux pas, which stemmed from “concern” over a recent stabbing incident at the College of Science. After the initial report, nothing more was heard about the case but the UP administration asked everyone to be conscious of their safety. Jimenez did not say that he will ask the UP Department of Police and private security personnel hired to guard colleges and offices in Diliman. It became the basis to again require motorists to have UP stickers and set them apart from lesser mortals who are not UP students, alumni, personnel and faculty. The stickers cost P500 each and the applicant is limited to only two stickers. UP bureaucrats get free stickers along with business concessionaires.
This sticker is a guarantee that you can enter and leave the Republic of Jiji stan but it leaves a very, very bad taste in the mouth. Taxpayers subsidize the operations of the university, but UP officials still want to cadge some cash from them for the “privilege” of entering the campus. In plain language, it is insane. Yet, it is expected that all “red plates” will be exempt from the eagle-eyed scrutiny of the Jimenez enforcers, along with the covert operatives who may have been planted with private security agencies that have contracts with the UP administration.
On Aug. 14, Jimenez actually experimented with deploying “traffic enforcers” at UP to control ingress and egress, not only of vehicles, but also of people who have business with the university, or those who want to taste of the highly-regarded beef ramen at UP Hotel and regale at the mausoleum-type structures like the Atencio-Libunao Hall or the Gimenez Gallery, built by the Gimenezes, once close to the Marcos family and who share some of the damning secrets of the dictatorship. Campus old-timers have warned that these Jimenez “enforcers” remind them of the barrio self-defense units (BSDUs) that were actually paramilitaries like the Alamara of today. Give them batons and shields and you are on the way to creating Jimenez’s “barangay scholarship defense units.”
Forced on the defensive, Jimenez has argued that the deal with the military was cut to strengthen “scholarship” on the part of both parties and rationalize the use of “expertise and resources,” some boilerplate language stuck in the hornbook that had been rendered obsolete. At the Vinzons Hall press briefing, Jimenez was skewered for his failure to defend UP, with CONTEND UP slamming the UP president for not preventing the unjust arrest of UP faculty member and union leader Melania Flores on campus. “Instead of assuring the safety and well-being of their constituents or addressing pressing issues, the UP administration instead chooses to partner with those who bomb Lumad schools,” CONTEND UP added.
Faculty Regent Carl Marc L. Ramota, Student Regent Sofia Jan D. Trinidad and Staff Regent Marie Therese S. Alambra also lambasted Jimenez who has not done his job to raise salaries, promote the welfare of faculty and staff and defend harassed students who have been terrorized by the likes of Sen. Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa. The deal cut by Jimenez, they added, “is a most dangerous arrangement. UP purportedly champions fearless scholarship and critical thinking but its administration now wants to ‘strategically align its resources and expertise’ with a coercive institution that we all know has been accused countless times by local and international human rights watchdogs of trampling on civil liberties in its purported counterinsurgency campaigns and attacks on government critics and dissidents.”
Jimenez has shown no respect for the institution he leads, and he has not stopped the police from preventing mass mobilizations in UP. Neither has he done anything to defend students who have called for decent wages for workers and protection of farmers from massive food importations while plutocrats amass billions, take over arable lands with impunity and bureaucrats steal from the national coffers with abandon. The Ugnayang Tanggol Kolehiyo ng Agham Panlipunan at Pilosopiya (UTAK) said during the Aug. 14, 2024 briefing that in UP Diliman alone, there have been three cases of intimidation, three instances of red-tagging and 27 campus intrusions since August 2023. UP Solidaridad documented 12 cases of attacks on campus newspapers while UP Visayas and UP Mindanao were militarized and students barred from backing striking transport workers. The UP College of Dentistry also found itself engaging with the AFP for “skills training” while policemen intrude into UP Los Banos. In UP Baguio, red-tagging forums were launched as part of NSTP. Jimenez has failed to function as a genuine UP President. He is just, in plain language, really unqualified.
