We express grave concern about the issues surrounding the now-deleted viral post on October 14, 2019 by a victim who shared grievances over the unjust result of his sexual harassment complaint against a faculty member. We trust the victim and others who have not come forward. We stand with members of the Ateneo de Manila community who have voiced their sentiments online and offline regarding current and previous sexual harassment cases, and the forces that have worked to contain them.
We have witnessed for too long the culture of silence, secrecy, and impunity that seeps through all levels of the University, from upper administration down to the departments. In his October 18 statement, our University President has admitted to “the change in culture that we need to eradicate the evil of sexual harassment;” this change in culture goes hand in hand with addressing “the gaps and inadequacies in our system and processes.”
We acknowledge our President’s diagnosis: A culture of silence, secrecy, and impunity represses open and critical discussions of the failings and excesses of the institution. It is a culture that veils investigative protocols with the guise of legality; it shields the identities of administrators and committee memberships under the guise of following the rules. It is a culture that approaches valid complaints with hostility rather than sympathy: Victims recount being castigated rather than being heard in meetings with upper administration, with no assurances, no matter how ceremonial, for their safety and protection, as they go through the system and its processes.
Silence has for its offspring impunity, with an atmosphere of ghostly secrecy shrouding both. In our institutional culture, silence has become the god who punishes those who speak and breach open the ghostly secrets in their pleas for accountability, transparency, justice, and fair treatment from authorities. Ours is an institutional culture that rewards those who pray to this god and ask for blessings of amity, industrial peace, and career advancement.
As Ateneo alumna, and author of the Safe Spaces Act, Senator Risa Hontiveros puts it: Even if the law upholds due process it should not promote “a culture of secrecy.” Senator Hontiveros has called out the University’s “misinterpretation” of the Safe Spaces Act: The law must not be weaponized against complainants, as this violates its spirit and intent, which is precisely to protect them from reprisals likely to be meted to them by those in positions of power.
The same holds true for the Data Privacy Act, as invoked by the administration to explain the calculated opacity of its system and processes: A selective interpretation of it shuts down critical discourses that the modern university, as an institution, is expected to promote and foster, in the spirit of the “free inquiry” across all fields and disciplines which is supposed to be its basic mission.
Section 2 of the Data Privacy Act (DPA) qualifies its strictures on data privacy: “It is the policy of the State to protect the fundamental human right of privacy, of communication while ensuring free flow of information” (emphasis ours). The latter aspect of the law, which highlights the tension between the right to privacy and the rights to free expression and freedom of information, has been conveniently glossed over by University authorities.
It will not astonish us if the DPA will soon be invoked as a “legal” response to demands for the institution’s accountability and transparency in its decisions concerning other matters like faculty and staff promotions, hiring and firing, and tenure, which might appear to aggrieved parties as capricious or unaccountable, even as punitive actions, for voicing their disagreements with the prevailing dispensation.
Therefore, with the victims, past and present, and with our concerned colleagues, students, and alumni:
1. We demand that instead of silence, let our voices as members of the community be heard, certainly within reasonable limits, and with assurances that no punishment or prejudicial action will be visited upon us for vocally expressing our concerns regarding current, and emerging, issues.
2. We demand that instead of impunity, let there be institutional structures that make our leaders accountable for their decisions and policies. It is remarkable that while faculty and students are evaluated for their work, administrators seem spared from the same protocols. A specific step toward a culture of accountability and transparency will be the creation of an instrument for the community’s evaluation of administrators and their competence.
3. We demand that instead of secrecy, let there be a community that welcomes and encourages openly critical discourses about matters of common concern to it. We wish for investigative committees to be guaranteed independence in the conduct of their work and in their actuations, freed from undue pressures from the administration or powerful interest groups. Assured of this independence, committee members may then feel the confidence to be held accountable for their determinations of the cases presented before them, with no need to invoke the cloak of secrecy that disallows them from being transparent in their processes and decisions.
The issue of sexual harassment has exposed a number of the institution’s patent weaknesses. Our institutional culture has made these shortcomings appear formidable, given, and immutable. They are not; we must address them. We hope that as a community—diverse in our interests, yet united in our concerns—we can work toward attaining justice for the victims and genuine institutional transformation.
Oscar V. Campomanes, PhD, Ma. Socorro Q. Perez, PhD, and Vincenz Serrano, PhD, are associate professors of the English Department.
