July 20, 2009

HE has not yet been elected a congressman, but Inquirer columnist and former TV talk show host Randy David is already taking slings and arrows from, of all sectors, his own academic backyard and fellow leftist travelers.

Randy David

David, the chairman of the University of the Philippines’ Department of Sociology, is being accused as part of an academic cabal that voted to purge activist assistant professor Sarah Raymundo from the sociology department despite her having taught at the Diliman school for the last 10 years.

The issue further gained international heat after it was picked up by the Web site of the National Democratic Front, which last week not only published sympathetic articles about Raymundo but also showed pictures of the Diliman rally with a red banner directly singling out David.

According to published accounts, it was David who dropped the verbal bombshell that the female professor was technically no longer a faculty member of the Department of Sociology despite her open case for tenure.

If the pro-Raymundo voices are to be believed, David and his department have adamantly refused to put down in writing the bases for their rejecting the professor, without which the latter could not begin a legal process to challenge and appeal the decision.

Even David’s Inquirer colleague, occasional columnist and now party-list Rep. Walden Bello, has weighed in, claiming "no sane reason" for the department to do what it just did.

"A purge has taken place, perpetrated not by the usual suspects but by strange bedfellows who have found a common enemy in a young faculty member who found her own Sociological voice distinct from the established personalities and their Sociologies of Capitulation," an Arnold Alamon harrumphed.

"By singling out this faculty member, maliciously accusing her of politically-loaded intentions, denying her tenure and subsequently closing ranks to supposedly defend the integrity of the Department [of Sociology], the tenured faculty seems to be saying that Sociology has no room for the likes of us who believe that the point of Sociology is not to interpret the world, but to change it."