Top universities denounce red-tagging of universities

Four of the Philippines’ top universities on Sunday 24 January denounced the latest red-tagging effort against them by the spokesperson of the government task force against communists, reports Rappler.

In a joint statement, leaders of the Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, Far Eastern University and University of Santo Tomas took issue with Lieutenant General Antonio Parlade Jr of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict. Parlade tagged them the previous day as being among the 18 schools that he claims are “recruitment havens for the New People’s Army”. Parlade claimed that the 18 are in the same ranks as the University of the Philippines (UP).

His statement came more than a week after the Department of National Defense unilaterally ended an accord with UP over supposed communist recruitment activities in the country’s premier state university. In their joint statement, the four universities objected to Parlade’s statement red-tagging them. “This charge, though, is really ‘getting old’ – a rehash of the public accusation the general made in 2018 – irresponsibly since cast without proof,” the universities’ joint statement read.
Full report on the Rappler site

Meanwhile ABS-CBN News reports that Senator Francis Pangilinan on Monday 25 January filed a bill that would institutionalise “academic freedom” amid concerns of “militarisation” in some state colleges and universities due to the government’s anti-insurgency drive. Pangilinan filed Senate Bill 2016 or the “Academic Freedom Act of 2021”, which seeks to “strengthen and uphold the freedom of teachers and students to teach, study and pursue knowledge and research without unreasonable interference or restriction, in all state universities and colleges”. He filed the bill on the heels of the Department of National Defense’s unilateral termination of a decades-old agreement with the University of the Philippines, which prohibits state forces from conducting operations inside the state university’s campuses without prior notice to the school administration.
Full report on the ABS-CBN site