Philosopher Guillermo Rosado Haddock has sent the following letter to philosophical colleagues in the U.S. and elsewhere:
Dear Colleagues:
I am not discussing here any philosophical issue but just asking for
some international awareness about the terrible emergency situation at the University of Puerto Rico. The University of Puerto Rico's main campus -and also three other ones- have been invaded by the police and military police.Brief History: Puerto Rico -a Latinamerican Spanish speaking country- has never been a free country since the beginning of the 16th century, when it became a colony of the Spanish monarchy. At the end of the nineteenth century and as a result of the so-called Spanish-American war it became a colony of the United States of America. The University of Puerto Rico was founded in 1903. For some decades it had only two campuses, the Río Piedras and the Mayagüez campuses, which are still the biggest and the most important. Since the 1960s it expanded and to this day has eleven campuses. From an academic standpoint, the best epoch of the UPR was that of the 1950s and 1960s when thanks to the appointment of many exiled academicians both from the Spanish Civil War and the second World War, and others fleeing from totalitarian regimes in other Latinamerican countries, the UPR became one of the very best Latinamerican universities.
Due to to the abnormal political status, since a 1948 political strike and then tlater due to the tensions during the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the1970s, there have been conflicts at the university, especially at the biggest Río Piedras campus -where I have taught for a little bit more than three and a half decades. The strong
development of the pro-statehood movement beginning in the middle of the 1960s, and especially of an extreme rightist fringe of that movement has produced some clashes with the main campus where a considerable number both of students and professors want Puerto Rico to be a free country. During the conflicts in the second half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s the police forces, especially the military police -called "fuerza de choque" (collision force)- entered the university causing a chaos, many injured and a few deaths. They entered once more the Río Piedras campus in 1976 and for many months in the five months long first economic strike of 1981-1982 against a triplication of the matriculation fees.From then on the university administrators decided to maintain the police outside the university, and there were very few and always minor conflicts until 2005. In that year there was once more an economic strike due to a new increase of the matriculation fees. Politically , since 1968 the colonialist party -which had been by far the strongest- and the pro-statehood party have succeeded each other at the helm of the government. However, none of the pro-statehood governors (there were three of them) had been a far-to-the-right member of the USA republican party. That happened for the first time at the end of 2008, when Luis Fortuño, a disciple of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and so far to the right as the so-called Tea Party in the USA, obtained the governorship. Since then, in two years of government, this extreme neo-liberal government with some fascist traits has directed all its energies against the workers and against cultural institutions.
There have been some 25,000 layoffs of government employees accompanied by even more in the private sector. Moreover, he has almost dismantled cultural institutions like the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (Puertorrican Institute of Culture), the Escuela de Artes Plásticas (School of Plastic Arts) and the Conservatorio de Música (Music's Conservatory). But by far the most important public institution in Puertorrican history is the University of Puerto Rico, which is also by far even now the best university in my country. (There are some private "universities", namely, two mediocre ones and others that do not deserve being called 'universities'.) Arbitrary decisions made by the Junta de Síndicos (Board of Directors) and the president of the UPR caused a two months strike last semester (from mid-April to mid-June, though the semester normally ends by mid-May). The Board of Directors (to which belong mostly non-academicians, supposedly representative of the people but really representing the interests of the government and private interests of millionaires) violated the agreement that finished the strike, and since then has been taking measures against professors, employees and students. They have abolished previously determined increases in the wages of all employees, including professors, as well as promotions of professors. Moreover, they have arbitrarily decided to put a lower bound to the number of students in the different courses. In the case of graduate courses, the lower bound is 10, which means that I will never be able to teach a graduate course again. Thus, I opted for retirement effective the 31st of this month (though it is now not clear when will the semester end).
In fact such a measure and the many obstacles that the administration puts to the appointment of new professors will probably make many graduate programs disappear. In particular, the Philosophy Department at Río Piedras, the only philosophy department in the whole country and the only place in the whole country where you can study an M.A. in Philosophy -B.A in Philosophy can also be studied in Mayagüez, where there is a sort of sub-department of Philosophy as part of a much bigger Department of Humanities-, is on the verge of disappearing. Usually, in better days we had ten professors in the Philosophy Department at Río Piedras. Presently, we have four professors and six vacancies. In order to have a chairman we had to ask for help from the sub-department in Mayagüez. Since I am retiring and one of my colleagues is almost seventy, there exists the strong possibility that the department will have only two to three professors in the near future.
Among the arbitrary measures taken by the Board of Directors and the president of the UPR there is a special $800 fee, besides the matriculation fees, per year for each student. That would reduce in about %15 the number of students at the UPR, since they will not be able to pay the extra fees. It would be especially damaging to graduate programs, since graduate students' matriculation fees are three times as high as those of the undergraduate, and with two to three exceptions per graduate program they do not receive any economic assistance. The Graduate Program in Philosophy has two to three graduate assistants of a total of some twenty or more graduate students, but in other more peopled programs like History or Hispanic Studies the proportion is three or four assistantships from more than one-hundred students. In view of this extra fee that woul begin in January 2011, the students had a two days strike last week and announced an indefinite strike beginning next week. The president and the Board of Directors asked the governor for "help" and the governor ordered an invasion of the university campuses (Río Piedras + thre smaller ones) by the police, in the case of Río Piedras, by the military police, and they have already announced that the police will stay permanently in the campus. On the basis of former experience, especially during the 1981-1982 strike, we all fear the worst.
In fact, this is simply a part of the government's plan. They want to close the public university and then get rid of students, professors and other employees that are political dissidents, i.e that are not right wing pro-statehooders. They also want to use that opportunity to sell some of the campuses to some of the so-called "universities", the president of one of which helped economically the present governor to win the elections.
In view of the terrible situation described, I would like those of you that have some contact with organizations of liberal academics to inform them of the situation and to denounce it wherever you can, in order to put some international pressure to the government of Puerto Rico and the Board of Directors of the University of Puerto Rico. In view of the colonial status of Puerto Rico, most news about this country do not transcend our frontiers, but the situation at the University of Puerto Rico is probably worse than that of the protesting students in England, since in England the government is certainly not a neo-fascist one like in Puerto Rico, nor one that has already menaced with the use of extreme force and violence -a little bit of which was already experienced a few months ago.
Best regards to all of you, many thanks, and my best wishes that next
year will be intellectually very productive for all of you.
Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock
I've opened comments for readers with additional information, pertinent links, etc. Professor Rosado Haddock seems to be correct that these developments are receiving almost no attention in the U.S.--this is the first I've heard of them.
