The Coloniality of University Governance
Between 1979-1982, the US Ambassador to Honduras, Jack Binns, who was appointed by Jimmy Carter, began to report human rights violations and continued to do so during the Reagan administration. These reports included the kidnapping, torture, rape, and assassination of a group of nuns in El Salvador in 1980, a couple months after Monsignor Oscar Romero was assassinated (Borgen, 2005). During this time period, Juan Almendares was the president or rector of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH). The University Council, the highest governing body at the time, was composed of university administrators (rector, directors, and deans), professors, and students, all of whom had decision-making power. Thus, a radical form of shared governance, which was a result of past student movements, still formed part of the democratic life at UNAH. Shared governance, let me clarify, differs from the hierarchical and delegated governance model described by an article published by the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The truth is that all legal authority in any university originates from one place and one place only: its governing board. Whether it is a private college created by a charter, or a public institution established by law or constitution, the legal right and obligation to exercise authority over an institution is vested in and flows from its board. Typically, the board then formally delegates authority over the day-to-day operation of the institution (often in an official ‘memorandum of delegation’) to the president, who, in turn, may delegate authority over certain parts of university management to other university officials—for example, granting authority over academic personnel and programs to the provost as the chief academic officer, and so on (Olson, 2009, p. A33).
Shared governance at UNAH, in contradistinction to this hierarchical definition, includes students and professors, not as delegates that will form part of some ad hoc committee, but rather as elected members who will have equal decision-making power at all executive and administrative levels, including the university’s highest governing council. However, the radical shared governance student movements fought for in the early and mid-20th century, was gradually eroded during the last decade of the Cold War, particularly through neoliberal education policies in the 1980s that complemented structural adjustment programs.
In 1981, Jack Binns was asked to resign since his reports did not align well with the United States’ geopolitical designs in the region (Borgen, 2005), particularly within the context of the counterrevolutionary policies (e.g., Contra Wars and other counterrevolutionary measures in El Salvador and Guatemala). The information Binns had to offer to the international community, in other words, would have revealed the US’s financial, logistical, and tactical support to regimes with human rights violations. John Dimitri Negroponte, whose name still brings memories of terror to families who lost their loved ones at the time, was assigned as ambassador to Honduras by Ronald Reagan (Borgen, 2005).
Why do I refer to these events that took place so long ago? How is this related to UNAH today and the student movement I worked with for over nearly two years? I primarily refer to these events to contextualize the ways in which the university’s autonomy was violated and the ways in which the university became an instrument of power and a place where critical thought was repressed, paralleling what transpired after the US-backed coup of 2009. I also discuss these events because student activists refuse to forget the 1980s and the university’s instrumental role in legitimizing the geopolitics of knowledge and power. Lastly, I recall these historical facts because they reveal a moment in time when the university was unmistakably recolonized and relinked to the geopolitical interests of US imperialism. The atrocities that unfolded in the 1980s are not a list of events one retrieves to understand what unfolded during a particular time period. Instead, past events form an integral part of the collective memories and subjectivities of social movements, including the ones that constitute student movements in the present.
Collective memories manifest themselves occasionally in forums such as the ones organized by student activists. In one forum, in particular, a storyteller who lived and survived a tumultuous time period was invited to share with a much younger generation the university’s role in society. To my surprise, it was none other than the former President Almendares who was invited to speak. Collective memories are the oral histories that are hardly ever written but are nonetheless remembered, invigorated, and reinterpreted by ongoing social struggles led by youth movements. These stories compose the infinite number of unwritten articles that are narrated by those who choose to remember a past many prefer to conveniently forget. In the dictatorial context in which social movements have emerged in Honduras between 2009 and 2022, the storyteller creates, to use Benjamin’s (1969) words, the “means to seize hold of a memory as it flashed up at a moment of danger” in order to “wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it....where even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” (p. 255). Although Benjamin spoke of the historian’s role in retrieving these memories, here, a storyteller shares not only their individual lived experience but rather sheds light onto the knowledges that emerged from said experiences and the way these stories are embodied by ongoing social struggles and intertwined with broader geopolitical forces. These actions of remembrance are enacted in the present and directed toward an uncertain future. Remembering and storytelling form part of a social movement’s pedagogy of hope and affectivity (Ahmed). Collective memories are therefore pedagogical, intergenerational, and transgressive. But this paper is not necessarily about storytelling. Instead, it is about the collective memories that embolden collective actors.
As Almendares continued to speak in the forum, he made sure to remind others to remain critical of the Unites States’ military occupation of Honduras, the university’s complicity in maintaining power, and the implications of reclaiming the radical shared governance of the university. When Almendares narrated his encounter with the US ambassador in 1982, he first said that he received a call from the US Embassy to schedule a meeting with John Negroponte. He recalled the moment he walked into Negroponte’s office. The ambassador’s wooden desk sat elevated, on top of some sort of platform, while Almendares’ chair was positioned directly across, on a lower level. Negroponte appeared to be sitting on a throne. He was King of Central America. He did not move or stand up when Almendares walked in, nor did he make the gesture to shake his hand. Negroponte simply sat there and stared at him. To use Almendares’ words, “he sat there like a gestapo ready to interrogate and torture his prisoner.”
According to Almendares, the ambassador finally asked him whether he was planning to reelect himself as UNAH’s president. Instead of answering his question, Almendares responded with a question in return, asking Negroponte if he knew when the United States’ military forces were planning to leave Honduras and Central America (as Almendares narrated this encounter, the audience with over 300 students and professors gave him a round of applause while others whistled and cheered). Almendares said that Negroponte replied by telling him that he would make sure to answer his question after his reelection. For Almendares, this was a sarcastic answer because Negroponte already knew that he would not be allowed to be reelected. The brief exchange of passive and not-so-passive aggressive words concluded their meeting. Almendares walked away from US ambassador’s throne, somewhat agitated, in violation of the decorum expected of a subaltern Honduran.
That same year, Almendares received the majority of votes during the university’s elections. The Honduran Supreme Court, however, immediately intervened and annulled the election’s results, thereby violating the university’s autonomy (Borgen, 2005). Soon after his victory, the chief justice of the Honduran Supreme Court contacted Juan Almendares. He told Almendares the following: “If you tell this story, I probably will be killed. I don’t want that to happen. I want to tell you that we were called by Negroponte, General Alvarez, and the President of Honduras. They called all the Supreme Court judges to a meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to prevent your reelection at all costs. Because you and the political forces behind you are a threat to national security” (Borgen, 2005, 27:17). New elections were held in which Almendares was not allowed to participate. Oswaldo Ramos Soto, the right-wing faculty member with ties to the military, as mentioned above, won the rigged elections. Since then, UNAH has been run by members of the conservative national party. It is to no surprise that, in 1982, the president of the University Student Federation of Honduras (FEUH) Eduardo Becerra Lanza, and Félix Martínez Medina, the president of the Sindicate of Workers of the university (SITRAUNAH), were kidnapped and assassinated, while hundreds of other activists were disappeared (Fox, 2011). The student movement in Honduras refuses to forget the horrors of the 1980s and how the present conditions and institutional constraints are linked to the past. The following depiction of murdered student activists is often shared in forums and public assemblies:
One afternoon, in the summer of 1982, I received a call from Alexander Hernández, Chief of the Batallion 3-16, which at that time was called the Directorate of Special Investigations (DIES). He told me in an understandable code between us: ‘there are two packages that you must pick up.’ I went to the site indicated to me, and there, a police officer handed me Felix Martinez and Eduardo Lanza, with the following orders: ‘El Flaco (Eduardo) must be disappeared so that no one ever finds his body; As for the Big One (Felix) leave him in the open field with wounds such that no communist who sees him wants to be in his skin.’ At night we drove to the South and in a remote place, we got out of the car to open a pit. When it was finished, I ordered Lanza to lie inside it. He then told me that he was a leader of the Federation of University Students and if we could give him a paper and pencil to write a note to his mother. I responded by giving the order to shoot him. But my friend did it so badly that the boy shouted and there were houses nearby. I decided to shoot him in the head with a silencer gun. When he was finally still, we covered him with lime to avoid the bad smell. Then we continued further south. We arrived at Concepción de María, and at a place called Las Pintadas, we stopped. It was Felix Martinez’s turn. We shot him three times in the chest. Then we stabbed him 69 times all over the body, except his face. The order was that it would be possible to identify him. (Drucker, 1986, p. 24)
This account has also been told in the third person in a preliminary report published in English by Human Rights Watch (1994). The year 1982 hence marked the beginning of an era of terror that intensified with the coup of 2009. It seems that the brutal residues of the past always live in the present, tending to manifest themselves in times of sociopolitical and economic crises as they aim to reconfigure power through violent force. Given the radical political ontology of Latin American universities, where student activism reemerges as structural changes unfold beyond the ivory tower, it is not surprising that the university governance was also restructured to parallel the dictatorial regime at the state level, undoubtedly linked to imperial and neocolonial designs. University governance was restructured to enable the effective repression of student activists, similar to what had occurred in 1982.
Although this piece is mainly about Honduras, there are some important connections that could be made to what is unfolding in university campuses in the United States.
Universities are repressing student organizations and protests for their solidarity with Palestine
Anti-Zionism is being equated with anti-semitism.
The complicit silence of many academics reveals the superficial understanding of decolonization, which has been misrepresented as a distant past one can study simply by reading texts as opposed to “reading” and interpreting colonial contexts in the present.
You cannot “decolonize” curriculum (or a field and discipline) without taking into account the coloniality of university governance that has created a culture of fear. You cannot “decolonize” academia without seriously taking into account the university’s active participation in producing colonial technologies of violence and surveillance (Research and Development initiatives funded by the Department of Defense).
Individual efforts cannot substitute for organizing and taking collective action.
If neoliberal university governance is not dismantled, all minor changes resulting from collective action will gradually be overturned once student activism loses momentum.