Rift ruining Satya Wacana's future
Rift ruining Satya Wacana's future
By Ariel Heryanto
SALATIGA, Central Java (JP): Indonesia has never seen anything like this before. And the full story has yet to be written.
Thousands of students and faculty members are on a strike that has now lasted half a year. They are protesting against the leadership of a university.
This civil crisis is taking place at Satya Wacana Christian University in this small and ancient town. The events that motivated the strike and the action itself have paralyzed the whole system of the university. And yet that is only a small part of the story.
The conflict is mostly internal in nature. It would, therefore, be unfair to overlook all of the details of the events and make sweeping interpretations. Nonetheless, the strike is reflective of what is happening to Indonesian society, and perhaps to Southeast Asia in the 1990s.
This decade is ushering in the growth and spread of an educated urban middle class. Not only has the size of the middle class increased tremendously, a sense of collective identity has emerged, albeit it is far from being monolithic, clear-cut, or solid.
The rift at Satya Wacana is a complex one, and it is not easy to pinpoint where it all actually started. But at least one aspect is fairly clear. The one major event triggering the public split and the strike was the arbitrary dismissal of Dr. Arief Budiman, a senior lecturer for the university's postgraduate program. That was one year ago today.
The dismissal provoked anger on a massive scale among the academic community at Satya Wacana and far beyond. What enraged them was not the dismissal itself, but the fact that is was a gross violation of proper procedures. The dismissal itself was only part of a series of events whose origin dated back as far as 10 years ago. The conflict had intensified steadily from June 1993 when the university elected a new rector.
The dismissal had no precedence. This was the first time Satya Wacana had dismissed an employee dishonorably. To make matters worse, the decision was made without any consultation with the direct superior of the employee, as stipulated in the university statutes. The university's board made no specific allegations concerning Budiman's wrongdoings. It made only a brief reference to a statement he made in the media. The media reported that Budiman thought the board regarded him as hostile to members of the University's board and administration. Budiman was given neither the chance to present a defense, nor any sort of compensation. He simply lost all his earnings and positions less than a week from the moment he was given the letter of dismissal.
Observers generally view the dismissal as revenge for Budiman's involvement in the widespread university opposition against the board's appointment of Dr. John Ihalauw as the new rector in 1993. The board apparently overlooked the fact that Budiman did not lead the opposition as post-dismissal protests attested.
The crux of the matter was that, unlike many of his colleagues, Budiman had been a public figure since the 1960s. And he has long been a darling of the media.
According to those opposing the appointment, Ihalauw lost in the election to Dr. Liek Wilardjo. On the other side, the board claimed to have veto power and the right to suggest alternative candidates to the minister of education and culture for final approval. In any case, Ihalauw was appointed in a ceremony boycotted by most of the universities deans and the people chairing service units within the university. Since then no university-level assembly (University Senate) has taken place due to lack of a quorum, a result of the same boycott.
The conflict has since snowballed into the crisis it is today. The rector has terminated most of the university's deans and heads of departments in response to the insistent opposition to his holding the post of rector even after Budiman's dismissal, when they filed a motion of no confidence in the rector. Those who cosigned the motion made up 75 percent of the University Senate members from teaching units, 64 percent of all active faculty members, and over 80 percent of the university's Ph.D. holders.
About 70 faculty members have received no salaries since August 1995. Instead, each of them has received letters threatening them with dismissal. Over the past 12 months, massive demonstrations have become a regular sight on the campus in response to the dismissal. The last major demonstration occurred in September, when more than 1,000 students attacked the university's main administration building. Security officers broke up the protest, arresting 19 students, and handing three of them over to the local prosecutor's office for possible trial in the near future.
Last July, the university suffered a defeat in a court case over Budiman's dismissal. Now they are facing no less serious legal charges from hundreds of parents of students for the university's failure to provide education to their children. Overseas institutions decline to continue cooperation and support of Satya Wacana under the current leadership.
The Ministry of Education and Culture has opted to wash its hands off the affair. The minister even refused the desperate plea of students and faculty members to act as a mediator.
One of the many remarkable things about the whole affair is the vigor and perseverance of those opposing the university leadership. This has involved hundreds of lecturers and thousands of students over an uninterrupted period of two years. At the risk of losing secure jobs, promotion and much sought after university degrees, these people have fought fiercely for something as abstract as "ethical principles, justice, and due procedures".
This implies exhaustive meetings over the whole period of two- and-a-half years. The struggle took place in many fronts and forms: religious services, negotiation, intimidation through anonymous pamphlets, telephone calls, and letters, litigation in courts, interrogation by the police and military officers, interviews with the media and press conferences, hunger strikes and repeated physical violence.
It is worth emphasizing, nearly all of these people had no prior experience, nor interest, in political activities. Significantly they called themselves the Pro-Democracy Group, in a time when certain officers within the military elite declared "democracy" to be politically incorrect, along with "human rights, environment, or openness".
In the 1980s Satya Wacana ranked as one of the top tertiary institutions in the nation. Its strength was derived from administrative viability, as well as a reputation of outstanding individual professors in the humanities and social sciences. The notable writer Goenawan Mohamad suggested that individuals like Arief Budiman, George Junus Aditjondro, Th. Sumartana, Liek Wilardjo, or Nico L.Kana constituted unparalleled prestige and resources for the university.
Incidentally, all of these individuals belong to the Pro- democracy Group.
Critical statements from these individuals on separate occasions on sensitive issues of political significance often made the university's leadership nervous.
Satya Wacana was the first private university to obtain the government's approval to open a postgraduate program in development studies. The program quickly attracted many foreign scholars and academic institutions to establish joint projects. This program was also one of the first and the worst victims of the rector's attack. The fact that many people and important institutions considered the university the institutional bastion of the opposition forces undermined the rector's position.
Satya Wacana's dramatic growth would have been unimaginable without taking into account the sustained economic growth in the country, or the whole of Southeast Asia, for more than two decades. Neither can the political volatility within the university be separated from the wave of contemporary democratization in the society at large. Both the university's growth and its political consequences appeared to be going too far and too fast for the old university bureaucracy to handle.
Now, impatient with the seemingly never-ending conflict, many of the university's best lecturers have fled and have taken jobs elsewhere. Others will follow suit, unless the conflict can be resolved substantially and soon. That seems unlikely.
One wonders what these contemporary pro-democracy professionals will find in their new working atmospheres. Also it seems appropriate to ask just how unique the volatile situation at Satya Wacana really is, or whether it has correlations to the atmosphere existing in the nation's major cities.
The writer was, until recently, a lecturer for the post- graduate program at the Satya Wacana Christian University.
Window A: The rift at Satya Wacana is a complex one, and it is not easy to pinpoint where it starts.
Window B: Impatient with the seemingly never-ending conflict, many of the university best lecturers have fled and worked elsewhere.