By The Star Staff
Rep. Lourdes Ramos Rivera directly accused the Financial Oversight and Management Board on Wednesday of violating the human rights of students in Puerto Rico by continuing to insist on further cutting the resources allocated for the operation of the island’s public university system.
Ramos, who has authored numerous legislative measures and laws in favor of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), its professors and employees, and its retirement system, once again criticized the oversight board for putting at risk the accreditations of the different disciplines offered at the island’s main center of higher education.
She urged the UPR governing board and its chairman, Ricardo Dalmau, to stand up for the rights of university students and not be intimidated by the federal entity.
“One thing is to seek reasonable consensus and understanding and another is to be silent and hostage to the abuses of the board,” Ramos said. “With so much inertia, the UPR is losing its life!”
The New Progressive Party at-large legislator noted that Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 states that “we all have the right to education.”
She used excerpts from the UN declaration to reaffirm that “education is a human right, a public good and a collective responsibility.”
“The UN established that education ‘is the only investment that countries can make to build equitable, healthy and prosperous societies,’” she said.
The worst outrage, Ramos said, is that the oversight board has never yielded in its strategy to financially dismantle the UPR, taking more and more from the institution’s operational budget. That even includes budget resources that were assigned by law by the Legislative Assembly for specific use by the university.
“After subtracting $49 million from its budget,” she said, “the board is now also putting at risk the accreditations of the university programs and offerings that train the new generation of professionals who have to drive the economic growth of the Island, after the end of the bankruptcy. This abuse has to stop!”
It is equally embarrassing for Ramos that all this is happening when just a week ago, the prestigious educational firm QS World University Rankings ranked UPR at No. 1 as the best university in the Caribbean.
“It is like a concerted plan by the board to sabotage the prestige of our UPR, the talent of the faculty and the research efforts that have given it so much renown,” she asserted.
Ramos insisted therefore that Dalmau and the governing board cannot assume such a passive and complacent position.
She also denounced that the members of the oversight board can send their children to the best universities while restricting the right of humble and middle class families in Puerto Rico to receive an excellent education.
“Not only are they the confirmation of the crudest colonialism that the ELA [commonwealth status by its initials in Spanish] imposes on us, but they also think of themselves as masters, lords and landowners, as if our students were children of slaves lacking any rights,” Ramos said. “They should be ashamed!”
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