translated from Spanish: End eternal war against university – Teresa Da Cunha Lopes’ Opinion

In college, no one is safe until everyone is safe. However, it is the first thing that forgets those who, for a certain period, cease to be teachers to move to bureaucrats.
In recent weeks, this previous sense of optimism gave way to unease, as the university political scene saw new depths of dysfunction. Teachers at the university have suffered attacks that have had no point of comparison since the Jarista era.
Again, the absence of leadership at the university implies that after four years of Medardo, we continue in this administration with disruption in the employment relationship. At times I cultivated the illusion that an era of constructive cooperation in academic and labour affairs was coming. Pure fantasy of mine
It’s true that I hate stoppages. They’re useless, viscerals. In pandemic they add to the feeling of prison proper to confinement. I hate futility. The energy wasted badly. The aimless turmoil. To finish it all, not at all. Like every year.
But, on the other hand, I hate, too, being robbed, to lie, to hide behind bureaucratic opacity. Because that’s what non-payment of work and benefits accrued is: a robbery. A robbery made by grey characters, who like bulliyes, are violent when they smell weakness and cowards when you’re not afraid of them. A robbery made with real cynicism. A robbery that shrinks the university. That humiliates his workers and teachers. That undermines the little confidence that allowed a dialogue between the parties.
It is true, too, that UMSNH is not the only university that has “shreded”.
The general public university(s) have been “narrowed”. Cuts, more visceral than necessary, visions of the last century, weak leadership in governance capacity and, strong in repression, simulations and mediatization, have contributed to this “narrowing”. Which results in the absence of room for manoeuvre in the face of political occurrences; in the “normalization” of internal pacts, in bureaucratic and budgetary opacity and, in the impunity of the authorities
Clearly, we should more equally rebuild the university adapted to the post-Covid 19 era. Many academic communities, both in Michoacán, and other parts of the so-called first world would not be displaced in a poor country: decrepit schools, bell boyish mindsets, ruined and/or outdated infrastructure, and increasing levels of organizational dysfunction, including job insecurity and closing of personal development opportunities.
Taking proactive action to defend the labor rights of teachers and researchers is not just doing the right thing, given the considerable risks facing IES in the Covid 19 era. Taking them is also in the interests of developed projects, the quality of teaching and academic competitiveness.
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The current inequality in the availability and deployment of support to higher education institutions and research centres is very marked.
On the other hand, getting it right in what needs to be done to resist this process of college drowning will not be easy at all. Some fighting movements are essential if university students and researchers want to avoid living in isolation in structures that are getting closer and closer to “prison colonies”, having a mindset in line with that lockdown.
What they should announce is additional measures to facilitate, more affordable and equitable access to education, in the age of covid. In order to combat school dropout, occupational insecurity, cultural impoverishment, the weakening of scientific knowledge. But no. They are bent on destroying what little had been achieved.
In this situation I only have to fight to build synergies and put an end to the eternal war against the university

Original source in Spanish