opinion

Also in this section:

Bernal, Where is Panama headed?
G. W. Bush, Progress in Iraq
Mikulski, Remove the gag on the Iraq War debate
Wayne, Guantanamo and the semantics of terror
N. Jackson, Read and weep
Human Rights Watch, A Chilean judge's bad decision on Fujimori's extradition
Silié, Peace with poverty isn't peace
Pilgrim, Sao Paulo air crash raises deadly questions

Sánchez, Hispaniola as a major drug smuggling hub

Hill, Free trade and immigration

Gutman, Hugo Chávez is a disgrace

Shelton, A better plan for the canal's expansion

E. Jackson, Troubles at the alma mater

Sirias, The price of perfection

My alma mater in the news

by Eric Jackson

An undergraduate education at Eastern Michigan University is not recognized as an education by this country's so-called journalists' union, which is composed of University of Panama journalism grads.

However, my old school has a student newspaper and a student radio station and their old school does not. Not everybody who writes for EMU's student newspaper, the Eastern Echo, is a journalism major. But majors and non-majors alike, newspaper staff and newspaper readers alike, the kids at Eastern tend to get a better sense of civic and journalistic values than do the kids at the University of Panama.

I don't say this to be a snotty gringo, or play "my school is better than your school" kinds of games. I say it based on years of observations of how people at the two places react to scandals.

See, EMU has been in the national and international news lately, which it rarely is other than in the sports pages. It's not a happy story.

Last December at Eastern Michigan University a young student was found dead in her dorm room. The university put out official statements that it was due to natural causes, that foul play was not suspected, that there was no cause for alarm and so on. The university administration told the young woman's parents that as well.

But the campus police, and the crime lab people, knew immediately upon inspecting the dorm room that this was not the case. The woman had been forcibly raped and asphyxiated.

In February, weeks after the funeral, the slain woman's parents and the university community found out through press reports that another student had been arrested and charged with murder and sexual assault. Then the questions about the university administration's lies and concealment of uncomfortable truths came front and center and the Eastern Echo cautiously but forthrightly began to focus on those issues.

The university president pleaded ignorance and shifted blame to a vice president and the chief of the campus police. The regents, who are political appointees of Michigan's governor, hemmed and hawed and finally hired one of Detroit's top corporate law firms to give some outside advice, given that the university's attorney had been basically accepting the administration's version of events and spinning legal advice around that.

(This lawyer, by the way, was the man I beat in the Michigan Court of Appeals in my very last case as a Michigan lawyer, in a decision handed down after I had moved back to Panama. He advocated the position that transparency laws don't apply to Eastern Michigan University and as attorney, alumnus and pro se plaintiff I begged to differ. I lost in the circuit court in a decision handed down by a judge who had previously been a university lawyer, but won on appeal. Then the Republicans running the state at that time moved in the legislature and courts to change the freedom of information and open meetings laws with some success.)

A national organization concerned with issues of crime on university campuses then filed a complaint against EMU, for violating the Clery Act, a federal transparency statute specifically written to address the tendency of university administrators to cover up news about ugly incidents such as the one in question.

Both the corporate law firm and federal education officials found that the university administration had flagrantly violated the law. The faculty union demanded the ouster of every administrator involved in the cover-up, including the president whom they didn't much like anyway because his first major act on the job less than two years before was the adoption of a hard line anti-union bargaining stance that led to a faculty strike. The campus newspaper made its modest demands for appropriate action.

The vice president in question was suspended with pay and the regents played for time, until summer semester when most students would be gone.

Finally, in an opaque special meeting conducted over the telephone --- they said because they had heard that the president would take some unspecified dreaded action at their next regular meeting --- the regents fired the president, announced that termination agreements for the vice president and the chief of campus police had been negotiated, and reprimanded the university attorney. The three outgoing administrators will among themselves receive more than a half-million dollars in severance pay.

Now the regents say they won't talk about it anymore. As a matter of fact they're threatening anyone else who does. A "final report" by the board of regents chair warns that:

Phrases that have been used to describe the culture here include: “... constant rumor mongering; and lack of credibility.” I could go on. These characteristics overshadow the wonderful achievements of our students and faculty....

This Board will not tolerate anyone who sabotages the educational mission of this university by participating in these destructive behavior patterns.

All is not well at the alma mater, and the hacks who oversee the administration are now threatening the campus press and the labor movement because they think that will allow them to pretend otherwise. So what else is new? Under both Democratic and Republican governors, EMU regents have acted that way.

But you know what? That Eastern Michigan University has a student press and has a faculty union brave enough to take on a scandal plagued administration are signs of institutional strength.

Compare that with the University of Panama, whose rector is a former minister of education under the dictatorship who has a fake doctoral degree, under whose leadership the university has been discredited by another fake diploma scandal. Here the tainted rector has the support of the tenured faculty and the supposed campus radicals, and there is no student press to ask the hard questions or take modestly reasonable but risky editorial stands.

Yeah, those pompous pretenders at the Sindicato de Periodistas can say all they want about how they're qualified to be journalists because they have degrees from the University of Panama Faculty of Social Communication and I'm not because I only have a degree in history and political science from Eastern Michigan University and a law degree from Detroit College of Law, and only took one class in journalism to go with my years of practical experience working for or with the press. They're wrong, and maybe some day some real campus radicals will realize how wrong they are and take actions unauthorized by the University of Panama administration to create the student media that the university and the nation so desperately need.

Bernal, Where is Panama headed?
G. W. Bush, Progress in Iraq
Mikulski, Remove the gag on the Iraq War debate
Wayne, Guantanamo and the semantics of terror
N. Jackson, Read and weep
Human Rights Watch, A Chilean judge's bad decision on Fujimori's extradition
Silié, Peace with poverty isn't peace
Pilgrim, Sao Paulo air crash raises deadly questions

Sánchez, Hispaniola as a major drug smuggling hub

Hill, Free trade and immigration

Gutman, Hugo Chávez is a disgrace

Shelton, A better plan for the canal's expansion

E. Jackson, Troubles at the alma mater

Sirias, The price of perfection