Is our university being used to legitimize human rights violators?
The common conception is that universities are liberal institutions where academics espouse theories from their ivory tower. Yet, if we look past stereotypes at the individuals actually teaching in our universities we realize this is far from the truth.
This semester Georgetown University has gotten some attention for their controversial choice to allow the former president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, to teach at the university as a visiting scholar. It is not unusual for former diplomats to be appointed to a position like this but one would like to think it is unusual to allow someone with such a public history of human rights abuses to teach diplomacy to future leaders of our country. The most prominent blemish on Uribe’s Curriculum Vitae is the false-positive scandal. Bottom line: Uribe should be in front of an international criminal court, not a university classroom.
How does this apply to AU? We have our own history of giving diplomats with questionable human rights records a platform to legitimate their past actions. After the coup in Honduras we welcomed Roberto Flores Bermúdez, spokesman for the leader of the coup Roberto Micheletti, to our campus as a Diplomat in Residence. We also extended a similar invitation to Paul Bremer, who is considered by many to be a war criminal.
It is not just visiting human rights violators we should be questioning though. A look at the CV of the dean of the School of International Service is pretty shocking. Dean Louis Goodman served on the Board of Visitors for the School of the Americas (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), a U.S. Army training school that teaches Latin American soldiers counterinsurgency and torture techniques, which they then use against their own people, according to the advocacy organization SOA Watch. As a board member, Goodman essentially sought to improve the image of this infamous institution. Today, Goodman continues to use the cover of academia to further United States imperialistic and military initiatives in Latin America.
These connections should spur a broader questioning of the connections between private universities and United States policies and military interventions. As a student body we need to evaluate how our tuition money is being used to legitimize imperial militarism.
Emma Boorboor School of College of Arts and Sciences and School of International Service
