In his inauguration speech as rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Leonardo Lomelí Vanegas offered to implement an inclusive policy and carry out changes but without stridency. The first is demagoguery, and the second is a call for the political demobilization of the university community (students, teachers and workers).
Does that inclusive policy mean that all university students will become part of the golden bureaucracy, which seems impossible? Or does it mean that the golden caste will give up their insulting privileges in order to receive salaries like all other university workers? That would be inclusive.
If this were the case, we would have to start by making the UNAM budget exercise transparent. True transparency and not simulated as it has been for decades and until now.
If this were done, the monstrous inequalities in salaries and benefits between this parasitic bureaucracy and the rest of the workers would come to light.
And the most obvious examples of the silent privatization carried out at the UNAM under the pretext of budgetary insufficiency would also come to light, which according to the spokespersons of this parasitic leadership, makes it necessary to charge fees for all the services that, should be free, they are charged to users: students, teachers, workers and graduates.
To disprove this crude pretext of the insufficiency of the budget, it would be enough to eliminate the enormous privileges of the leadership, and redistribute the budget among all workers.
The example is clear to Lomelí Vanegas and the rest of his brothers. The elimination of the privileges of the high federal bureaucracy was enough for the government of President López Obrador to have access to large resources that today are allocated to the most disadvantaged sections of the population.
The second central point of the rector’s speech, that is, changes without stridency, is, as it is popularly said, giving atole with the finger. Can there be substantive changes in the painful conditions in which the vast majority of UNAM teachers and employees live without demands, without mobilizations, without political and ideological struggle of the university community?
As history shows, without social struggle there is no possibility of true change. And if by saying without stridency the rector means without violence, we should remind him that violence at UNAM has always come from the joints, provocateurs and vandals in the pay of the authorities themselves, starting with the rectors. Or not, Dr. Lomelí?
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