Some days ago the poker faced policemen stationed around the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico, were being showered with flowers and petals. The perpetrators were part of a makeshift community of some 300 students sharing food, water and shelter inside the campus in a peaceful protest against increases in enrollment fees.
Unbeknownst to them, a storm brews outside the gates of the campus, among the ranks of the policemen. The passive aggressiveness of the students makes them tense. Sticks in hand they prepare to enforce the latest ruling in the political hand wrestle between the students and the local government: no food will be provided to the students protesting inside the campus, if they want food they have to leave the campus, hence leave the strike. This “ruling” however, does not come from a judge in a court, but from the Superintendent of Police, who with outstanding and very misguided cockiness announced that “whoever disagrees with his order can just take him to court”. At once, alarmed parents and professors make their way to the campus; they try to sneak food through the fences. One parent has a close encounter with an officer’s stick, after trying to fling a can of potato chips over the fence. Even after making his face bloody, the officers, apparently still feeling threatened by those potato chips, throw him to the ground to handcuff him and thrash him about a little, before putting him inside the patrol car. The can of chips is left, uneaten, on the floor.
Local artists, union leaders, activists, and just regular people make their way to the campus to show their support for the student’s plight, in spite of the riot police that has now sealed off the campus.
The strike started as a vote for a 48 hour strike to protest an increase in enrollment fees, part of the local government's plan to cut $100 million from it's subsidy to the University. The plan includes cuts in payroll, purchases of materials, books, equipment, also the possible elimination of the summer courses and scholarships.
The original vote for a 48 hour strike ended up as a national strike and a regretfully violent clash between a group of students and the police, during a $1,000 dollar a plate event offered by the Governor at a Sheraton Hotel. The irony was not lost on the students.
This video shows how a father was arrested by the police for passing food to his son who was participating in the strike.
The government's subsidy for the University, in theory, is not bound by any law, so it is almost exclusively the arrogant refusal of the University's President, José Ramón de la Torre, and his administration to let the students participate in this decision making process, that has ignited the present situation. The President made his position clear by ignoring, and not even making an effort to attend the negotiating table with the students. Maybe his chauffeur couldn't drive him, but more likely he is an instrument of the current government's agenda to privatize the University by auctioning it off bit by bit. The proposed increase in enrollment and credit fees is just the beginning, and the students and the University’s employees know this too well.
The history between the students of the University of Puerto Rico and the local government has been a contentious one, almost from the moment the University opened its doors, in 1903. During most of the 20th century, these clashes between students and the government had to do, mostly, with the unwanted presence of the ROTC inside the campus. But, nowadays, it still has much to do with our government coming to terms with an increasingly educated population, who are now more aware of their rights, and have the intellectual tools to fight for them.
Most Puerto Ricans cannot afford to pay $100 dollars per course credit. Privatizing our only public institution for higher learning would set us back to the time when the only people getting a college education were the ones with enough money to study in Spain or the United States.
We have to protect the University, our University, if only because its history has been one of teaching not only its students, but all of us, the important, and sometimes, painful lessons of civil liberties and the right to dissent.
Joanne Namerow, a regular contributor to Axis of Logic, was born and grew up in the beautiful Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico which she describes as, "a forgotten corner of the old empire", where we have been a colony of the United States since the end of the Hispanic-American War in 1898. We currently 'enjoy' a second class citizen status, as we are allowed to go to war for the U.S., but not allowed to vote for the president."
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