VivirLatino

This came through the Facebook this morning and I thought it important to hear from some of the students themselves regarding the recent actions at the University of Puerto Rico.

These words are born from times of great tension, times in which we face a specter of terrible acts of sanctioned violence made against any dissent, and of the dangerous aftermath that ensues. The University of Puerto Rico, alongside the project it boldly and proudly embodies, faces a tragic and needless end: one we truly struggle against. Our beloved university is in urgent need of care, of attention that can only be found in an unquestioning labor of love that we all embrace.

Conditional love is not true love and as such, it cannot impose itself upon a broken and battered student body. This is why we denounce all forms of violence, especially those threatening the very nature of a university’s spirit of true dialog-spaces promoting an open exchange of ideas. This exchange, a fundamentally ethical-political element, requires a degree of openness and respect towards differing and dissenting opinions which cannot exist in any coercive environment. In light of this, we condemn the police occupation of the campuses that make up the body of our university.

Our university is currently held hostage by an authoritarian and anti-intellectual faction who has transformed our campus into a battlefield where shells charged with fanatical rhetoric are recklessly fired with gleeful abandonment. We hereby wish to address this faction (embodied by our own administration) and call for an end to its antidemocratic ways. It is our belief that if such an administration were to truly and honestly care for our beloved university, it would openly join in the University’s communal dialogue for the purpose of achieving a fair solution to the current problems we are all facing.

In its open disregard and omission of our student body viewpoints, the administration is in clear violation of the Middle States Commission of Higher Education’s findings. It has refused to share governance, or any part of the decision-making process, with those who make up the university’s community; and has ignored, for example, the community’s clear rejection of administrative appointments, as well as dismissing any open dialogue or negotiation –vital to any democratic society- with these community members. Participation is fixed upon true and honest acts of openness, not through ratifying abstract certifications.

These violations have jeopardized our institution’s accreditation, plunging us into uncertainty and despair. Because of this, it is crucial that all of Puerto Rico understand a single, undeniable fact: this administration is heralding an end to our UPR through its stranglehold policies.

We therefore choose to raise our collective voice and denounce a lack of representation of the university’s community by the administration’s response to no one except the ruling political party; a party that has consistently attacked all institutions in this country. Alongside it’s political bedfellow, this administration has deceived our society and in doing so, has fostered hatred toward the country’s first and most prestigious university and its students.

The University of Puerto Rico, through its students, professors, and workers, forefronts the engine of change and modernization in this country. In the same way that the UPR would fail to exist without the country that birthed and strengthened it, Puerto Rico itself would not presently be what it is without its public university. During this modernization process, the UPR has cradled this country’s first and finest generation of professionals: workers, social workers, scientists, lawyers, engineers, architects, farmers, and countless others.

The UPR has consistently contributed to socio-cultural development through the arts and humanities, has collaborated in the fight against poverty from within classrooms and by community initiatives, and has directly influenced the livelihood of hundreds and thousands of men and women who have charted a course out of poverty through accessible education. For these reasons, and countless others, we are against our University’s shutdown.

There is no room for either strikes or administrative lockouts. It is time to defend our university’s “raison d’ être,” it’s very reason for being. Even in our recognition of the strike as a valuable and democratic tool for advancing just claims and demands, and as a reinforcement of the value of our rights, we also understand that our current political context renders such an exercise null and void, due precisely to this government’s ideological stubbornness alongside its anti-university stance. This current government seeks violence as a means of turning the UPR into a police state and, in so doing, eradicate our university’s undertaking. The administration wants and, indeed, needs the strike in order to ease this institutional closure and its eventual transformation while following a market plan: to educate those who can afford it and who will ultimately keep quiet.

It is impossible to speak of a university without considering its political and institutional aspects. The university does not, of course, exist within a vacuum; it is rather established through different and diverging power relations taking place within and around its social periphery. In some instances, such power relations contribute to the erosion of our university’s undertaking as an enabler of critical thinking and a fundamental pillar of socio-democratic development. In this we must remain adamant: so long as the UPR remains under paramilitary siege, there can be no talk of university.

Because of these facts, and as members of a complex community, we recognize our political role in the development of the University Project. Student knowledge is not gained merely by coming to class, nor can it be deposited into the mind. Whomsoever chooses to call him or herself a student must accept that knowledge depends on one’s own experiences, from testing acquired skills and challenging the lessons received. To contest such learning is, indeed, the basis of true knowledge. In the end, knowledge stems from what is questioned, not from what is blindly followed.

We fully support the efforts put forth by our Student Representative Committee, as well as those made by other members of the student body while serving as the university’s legislature. We call upon the remaining community and the country to uphold all genuine forms of dialogue aimed at keeping our University Project in motion. Likewise, and as active members of our university’s community, we support any and all initiatives to bring about the open debate of responsible fiscal solutions, such as the Adding Up We All Win’s proposal (Sumando ganamos todos)

We understand that the fiscal problems haunting the UPR are the byproduct of a poor administration. In order to dig the university out from the quicksand of economic deficit, it is vital that the government reassigns the funds that were taken out of the UPR’s budget, and that all sectors, in recognition of this labor of love and in lieu of its worth, contribute something extra to the institution’s reservoir. Students can, for example, agree to a substantially reduced quota while seeking out additional sources of funding as an aid to those unable to pay for themselves.

The UPR is wracked by a difficult fiscal and academic crisis, brought on by the current administration’s anti-intellectual behavior. It is up to us, through civil disobedience and in a declaration of what is just, to transform the political act of confrontation. Our actions must serve to unmask those lawless injustices and abuses perpetrated by the State, by university regulations, and by the impending fiscal and police-driven lock-down. We are committed to uphold this civic responsibility. We will use disobedience whenever the need to achieve our aims arises.

We are driven by our declaration of love. It is what unites us in an undying commitment to challenge injustice.

Download the original document in .pdf format here:http://www.scribd.com/doc/45173816/Proclamation-by-a-Group-of-Students-UPR