The university of social change

I am happy to see that political science students from the University of San Carlos (USC) came out of their classrooms to hold a demonstration just outside the school’s downtown campus in protest of the recent spate of extrajudicial killings.

The young millennials who were still in their uniforms raised placards scrawled with words calling for respect of human rights and rule of law and lay down on the pavement to mimic dead bodies with the now familiar cardboard signs that warn people that the corpses are drug pushers or addicts not to be emulated.

It is good that USC’s School of Law and Governance has taken the lead in denouncing the blatant disregard of due process in the government’s all-out war against drugs. The lack of public outrage over the rise of extra-judicial killings has shown an alarming lack of awareness of some of the most fundamental Constitutional principles: human rights, due process, rule of law, and so on.

The situation calls for massive public re-education. And who else can do that better than the professors of Law and Political Science? We need their expertise and insight right now to counter the wave of misinformation being spread in the social media, targeting the current generation who have no experience with the martial law and are thus being misled to believe that the Marcos years were the country’s Golden Age.

I would even be surprised and alarmed if our Carolinian Law and Political Science professors preferred silence over this recent threat to rule of law and democracy. I saw some of them along with other fellow professors in USC during the protest rally held recently in Plaza Independencia against the President’s plan to bury Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. They came with some of their students.

I am happy that some Carolinian faculty and students have broken their silence by taking part in public demonstrations or initiating their own. In fact, I am happy and proud that the University of San Carlos has joined the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP), a broad network of Catholic colleges and universities in the country, in opposing the dictator’s burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

USC chose neutrality during the last elections and rightly so. It issued a memo preventing faculty, staff, and students from openly campaigning or representing the university in any partisan activity.

But the plan to bury the former dictator in the heroes’ cemetery and the rise of extrajudicial killings are threats to the core values of this predominantly Christian nation. We could not just ignore the deliberate attempt to revise history so as to erase our people’s traumatic memory of Martial Law. It would be a great injustice to thousands of those who were killed, tortured, incarcerated and persecuted in so many ways during those dark period of the dictatorship.

Likewise, the University, which professes an “education with a mission,” who looks up to her graduate not just as a competent professional but as a “witness to the Word,” cannot remain neutral in the wave of extrajudicial killings that, so far, have victimized mostly the poor. To speak in behalf of those who are weak, innocent and defenseless against the onslaught of violence is to heed the call of Christ to love the least among us and even our enemies.

For the university to translate academic wisdom in a language that could be understood by the people, so as to help shed light on these issues, is to perform the ultimate form of teaching, of evangelization.

Back in the early 90s, when we took over the batch of student activists who struggled through the last years of the dictatorship, representing USC in the local rallies in support of the Edsa Revolution, for example, we proudly tried to live up to the tag of USC being the “University of Social Change.”

That reputation came after the school became known for its activism.

Now, with history repeating itself in frightening ways, I am glad to see Carolinian millennials living up to their mission.