The earlier University of the Philippines (UP) president Angelo “Jijil’ Jimenez is sacked, the better for UP’s eight constituent universities, its underpaid faculty members, and its threatened students and alumni.
Unlike the late UP President Salvador P. Lopez who backed protesting students from late January 1971 to February 1971 as they battled intruding soldiers, some of them inebriated. The late Dean Cesar Adib Majul, who called on the students of the then College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) to “bring down the chairs” (and found himself being made accountable for the destroyed chairs but not lauded for his defense of the college), Jimenez is defending the military and UP’s strange Declaration of Cooperation (DOC) with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP.)
Jimenez is acting as a “Cabo” for the intellectual labor of faculty members who would join the fun and act as the brain trust of the AFP. Jimenez and his Quezon Hall partners call the deal as “cooperation” and somewhere along the many lines of subterfuge concocted by the “eminence grise” at the UP administration, they talk of “critical collaboration,” a term made palatable during martial law by the late Jaime Cardinal Sin, like eating your cake and keeping it, too. Jimenez is completely out of whack to think that the UP Center for Integrative Development Studies (UP CIDS) could maintain its academic status while working as an adjunct of the AFP’s Office of Strategic Studies and Strategy Management (OSSSM) and, by extension, as a collaborator for intelligence analysis, assessment of plans, logistics, propaganda and scenario building.
For instance, how can CIDS assess AFP’s logistical needs and suggest increasing its stockpile of artillery rounds? As one officer who headed plans (now hopelessly dead) complained: How can we fight a war when we only have 20,000 artillery rounds? Or how can CIDS improve AFP’s ghastly record of human rights abuses? Surely, the AFP, which provides the personnel for the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), would not lay bare the plans on how to sabotage the contemplated peace negotiations between the government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP.)
Moreover, how can the AFP talk of intellectual acuity among its officer corps when it is the spearhead of the campaign to seize “subversive” books in the libraries of state colleges and universities (SCUs)? The AFP, the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA) and an alphabet soup of overt and covert units that surveil activists and tail suspected “terrorists” are not even interested in the journals that OSSSM puts out but are genuinely keen on bagging their targets as determined by their project officers.
Jimenez is not budging despite the strong opposition of the University Council (UC) to his DOC with the AFP, which called on him to rescind the deal since it was crafted “sub rosa” even if the deal commits the entire university to be more than a willing partner to the AFP. The UC was miffed when Jimenez cut a deal with the AFP behind the backs of thousands of UP professors nationwide. UP does not need labor bosses who would deploy academics to satisfy the pecuniary interest of parties opposed to academic freedom and who think that ideas must be suppressed for tactical and strategic reasons.
Instead of explaining why he crafted an agreement without consulting UP constituents, Jimenez tried to gin up support for his collaborationist pact by saying the DOC was meant “to provide a framework for cooperation between the AFP and UP in order to foster the development of possible collaborative projects and activities in the field of strategic studies through research, publication, training, conferences and visits.” The research projects would be conducted jointly by UP CIDS and OSSSM and those who work on strategic matters would be required to get security clearances. When sensitive pieces of information are collected and written about, it follows that these papers would not be discussed in the academic sessions. Jimenez has this grotesque idea that UP must serve the AFP. There is no mutual benefit on a one-way street.
At this point, when Jimenez has shown that he neither has the managerial skills nor the intellectual capacity to helm UP, then he has to quit his post and let the eight constituent universities, the faculty, staff, students and alumni choose who should replace him. He has made a mockery of academic freedom and prostituted it at the altar of Camp Aguinaldo. Or does he sincerely believe in what Groucho Marx once said: “The most important thing is honesty. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” By cutting the DOC with the AFP “in camera” and failed to inform the UP Community about it, he lost the trust and confidence of his constituents. A good leader, as one French revolutionary said, always obeys his followers.
