editorial

So the University of Panama administration, just 10 days beforehand and without publicizing the details of their proposal, called a “plebiscite” on a proposed law that’s primarily intended to extend the rector’s powers and term in office. In the words of the administration front group “Committee for the Modernization of the University,” the proposal aims to protect “the rights of... administrators” and for the “conservation of the acquired rights of... administrative personnel.”

The plebiscite is scheduled for the last week before classes end, a week after student elections, a time when most students and professors will be concentrating on upcoming finals. It's a calculated bid for a low turnout election in which it is expected that the self-interested votes of the administrative political patronage machine will be decisive. Then the proposal would go before the Legislative Assembly during the school vacation, making it more difficult for students and faculty to mobilize and make themselves heard in the legislative debate.

The final word on the proposed change to the nation’s higher education system is up to the Legislative Assembly and President Torrijos (or maybe, after them, to the courts). And if the university administration has played corny political tricks to manufacture a dubious mandate for itself, that charade should not detract from the reality that the nation as a whole has a vital interest in this debate because it will affect our economy and national culture.

If the national government decides to get strictly partisan about this question, the leading politicians might take the position that since both they and the rector are PRD members, they’ll do what the rector says. Or, they may conclude that since the previous rector was also a PRD member, and he was ousted in an electoral process that the Mireyistas manipulated with a contrived financial crisis and allegations of improprieties that were never tested in court, partisan loyalties don’t apply.

It would be far more sensible to take another partisan Torrijista approach, based upon what the late General Omar Torrijos did.

Better than most of us, Martín Torrijos ought to know his father’s judgment about the University of Panama. The general’s own son went not to that school, but to Texas, to get his higher education.

Since Omar Torrijos’s time there hasn’t been a lot of improvement at the nation’s principal public institution of higher learning. In fact, there has been a decline in a number of areas.

There is a chronic budget squeeze, in the face of which successive administrations have shown poor judgment when allocating the inevitable sacrifices.

There is the appearance of corruption. Most notoriously the University of Panama, which is in charge of chartering private universities, has allowed far too many inferior diploma mills that have no good reason to exist.

Instead of a movement for quality education that would allow them to hold their own in a competitive world, University of Panama students in various departments have been misled into expecting monopolies on jobs in their fields. Not only does this lower the overall quality of the professions in this country, it robs Panamanian professionals of opportunities to work abroad.

Student politics have degenerated into increasingly lame displays by ever smaller groups that can’t think of anything better to do than to block traffic. This is a symptom of a university cultural, economic and political system that freezes students out of the participation that should be a part of their education, with roles that ought to be played by students reserved for a bureaucracy in which there is too much political patronage and nepotism.

Look at it from the journalistic point of view. While the Faculty of Social Communications tells students that only graduates of that department at the University of Panama should be allowed to work in the Panamanian media, the university has no student newspaper or broadcast outlets at which the next generation of journalists can perfect their skills. Because of the university’s too-rigid wall of separation among various fields of study, the nation’s business reporting is retarded because we don’t have accounting, marketing or management students taking journalism classes as a minor field of study, or vice-versa. The level of scientific discourse in our mainstream media, and thus the scientific knowledge of the general public, is diminished because exaggerated specialization hinders University of Panama students from studying journalism and the sciences at the same time.

Or look at it from the standpoint of the university’s library. Not only is the facility at the University of Panama not world class, but in fact it’s so inadequate that any US university that tried to get by with a comparable library would lose its accreditation. Because the university --- and this country --- lacks a decent library, students have a hard time learning to do research, which in turn retards Panama’s technological and economic development.

Thus the national government should not take this “plebiscite” at the face value its proponents urge, but as proof of the university’s decline into frivolity.

Yes, the government does need to address the matter of university reform. But it should do so by thinking first and foremost about this country’s needs, and if it does that the university administration’s privileges, which its self-serving “reform” proposal is intended to expand, must give way to far more important national interests.

Respect for the rights of others is peace.

Benito Juárez

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything... or nothing.

Nancy Astor

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