Philosopher Guillermo Rosado Haddock wrote to me last week:
The situation at the University of Puerto Rico continues in the New Year as bad as before. The Río Piedras campus looks more like a military camp. I had not entered the campus since the beginning of the strike, but had to enter last Wednesday for the evaluation of an MA thesis proposal. There are policemen everywhere, both normal policemen and specialized ones of all sorts, as if the university were a sort of prison. In the last week, the students began to use the method of pacific resistance inspired by Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. Some 100 students were arrested by the military police called "fuerza de choque" between Wednesday and Thursday.
Especially in the case of female students, the arrests were not very gracious. For more information, you can look in You Tube under Universidad de Puerto Rico-Río Piedras-Huelga, or look at <endi.com>, the site of the journal El Nuevo Día, or at <prds@prdailysun>, the site of the Puerto Rico Daily Sun, a newspaper in English. Especially in the edition of this last journal of Friday, January 21, there are photos on pp.1,3 and 7 that speak for themselves.
In the meantime, the administration has already taken the first step to dismantle the department that has given the University of Puerto Rico the most international prestige, the Department of Hispanic Studies, as well as the Linguistics Program, arguing that the admissions in the last years to those programs have been low. But on the other hand, the administration has announced that it will reduce the general number of admissions to the university, a measure that will produce similar effects on other programs.
Thus, they are simply beginning to dismantle the state university.
Professor Rosado Haddock has also invited me to share a much longer analysis of the political situation and the situation of the universities that he has now written: Download Crisis at the University as a Mirror of the Social
Feel free to submit links to more news sources and updates in the comment section.
