Panama University Elections: Threat of Intervention and the Fight for the Future

This news concerns teachers, students, and administrative staff who do not want any administration to stir up waves of change; if proposals are made, they should be cosmetic reforms, just as the current administration has done so far. In other words, they do not accept a university that fosters capabilities aimed at autonomous and national development with all the country's actors, without excluding any in particular; a reasonable and apt proposal that I have heard the aforementioned candidate from the Faculty of Humanities put forward. Indeed, we find here four social actors that make viable or embody the threat of total intervention or closure of the UP: First, the authorities of the current government, in whom we find the great enablers for the execution of such a 'Trumpist' measure, that is, of repeating in our University the policy of economic asphyxiation and academic control promoted from the 'White House' to the detriment of the best North American universities. Second, certain business sectors of real estate that promote the expulsion of university students from the current campus to any place, be it the city of health, university city, etc., to speculate with the sale of the lands occupied today, causing a kind of gentrification of the country's main professional training house. Third, the owners of companies that produce academic titles who see in our public universities their main obstacle to controlling this lucrative business. But there is an actor who is an integral part of the University itself and who, without realizing it, would make viable the fulfillment of the threat posed in the midst of these elections. This social actor has not realized that keeping everything as it is—in frank academic deterioration and of the pluriversal character of the university functions before society—is the greatest and best excuse for the other political and speculative actors to make the imminent threat a reality. Apparently, this majority group is the great support of the officialism, which, based on the application of clientelist mechanisms, find an imaginary of false security in their acquired comfort zones, in the electoral offers of those who exercise power in the academic-administrative units. In this sense, if the elections were today, the official candidate—known as the 'candidate of the continuism'—would very probably win, and not the one from Humanities, who argues that the challenges of these elections pass by other coordinates that require other administrative, technical, social, and political management capacities, which are not those that characterize the university management of the last 35 years, unless a social movement arises that reduces to its minimum expression this actor that, in its concern for individual comfort, opens the doors to the debacle of the University. Who has also recognized that the electoral tournament that has begun faces several challenges, the main one being the threat of total government intervention—no longer only suffocating it budgetarily—and even the closure of our study house, as part of a policy traced from power centers that are not even national, but that have it in their sights to eliminate the presence of this institution which they sell offensively as a 'house of terrorists and communists'. In depth, the problem of these supranational powers is that they do not accept anything other than the training of robots and automatons without ethics or morality, for the purpose of exploiting peoples and resources of our nations in favor of foreign economies and a few privileged locals. This, we see in that he is the only one who has recognized not only that there is a crisis in our academic institution but the historical-structural causes of that crisis. This is so as for the official calendar. As for the factual truth, the 'officialist' candidate has spent more time on this exercise from his position of power than the rest of his adversaries. Along with the officialist candidate, there are three more candidates—including a lady—who, although they present themselves as opponents to the officialism—or in other words, to the 'continuism'—do not express or develop weighty arguments that make a difference with what is proposed by the continuists. The appearances of these four aspirants in the media have left much to be desired from those who wish to assume the management of our first house of studies. However, it should be recognized that the offer of the fifth and last to register shows a different bearing, in what we have been able to verify so far, by closely following his arguments. Perhaps, the fact of being a professor of History at the Faculty of Humanities, but simultaneously a lawyer, gives him a 'plus' that the other candidates do not possess. Indeed, there is an enormous distance between what this candidate is proposing regarding the current reality of our house of studies, compared to what the rest of the aspirants to the rectorship are proposing. Otherwise… may the Lord find us confessed. Image of the headquarters of the University of Panama. By Roberto A. Pinnock Rodríguez. Sociologist, researcher, and teacher. March marked the official start of the race to reach the top leadership position to lead the institutionalization at the University of Panama.