Student parties hit termination of UP-DND accord as ‘assault’ on UP’s academic freedom, autonomy

The termination of a decades-old pact barring military and police forces from freely entering the University of the Philippines (UP) was an “assault” on the state university’s academic freedom and institutional autonomy, two student parties said Wednesday.

Alumni and members of SAMASA and Nagkaisang Tugon, whose activism in the ‘80s and ‘90s led to the creation of the 1989 accord between UP and the Department of National Defense (DND), said the termination of the pact was a “barefaced betrayal.”

On Monday, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana informed UP President Danilo Concepcion that the DND had decided to end the accord

“Intellectual liberty is foundational to democracy... And in no place should academic freedom be most zealously guarded than in our schools and universities, where it stands as the first protection of the unfettered life of the mind,” the parties said in a statement.

They urged the DND to respect the accord and called on UP alumni in both houses of Congress to “lead a legislative initiative to defend these protections to UP and academic freedom which the DND would now circumvent, and to elevate them into law.”

The student parties also appealed to members of the UP community to defend the university.

“To allow the heavy boots of soldiers and police to freely march into UP and harass the community of scholars within its precincts, would be to cede the intellectual liberty that is so essential to UP’s mission for Philippine society, of finding new paths to a better condition for Filipinos, and calling out the powers that lie astride those paths,” they said.

Among the signatories to the statement were Senator Francis Pangilinan, former congressmen Teddy Baguilat and Barry Gutierrez, and De La Salle University School of Law Dean Gil de Los Reyes.

The 31-year-old pact came about after a staff member of UP’s student paper, Philippine Collegian, was abducted, tortured, and forced to confess to the killing of an American soldier.

Its unilateral termination was opposed by several lawmakers from both the Senate and the House of Representatives. -MDM, GMA News