Irresponsible compassion

In this country, so many crimes are committed in the name of compassion. I remember how faculty members in a leading university once voted to keep an incompetent teacher because times were hard and it would be difficult for him to find employment elsewhere. What would happen to his family? How could he, his wife and children survive the times?

Yet, in the same semester they were recommending tenure – permanence – for the concerned teacher, the same faculty members were disqualifying him as a graduate student in their departmental program. The logic was impeccably absurd. Not good enough to be a graduate student, therefore more than good enough to be a permanent college teacher!

All in the name of compassion. A sensible faculty member argued against tenure, citing the teacher’s substandard performance as a teacher and as a graduate student. He also asked his colleagues to broaden their inimitable sense of compassion to include the students; the latter were going to be sacrificial victims to the demonstrably incompetent instructor. (As luck would have it, a faculty member’s daughter enrolled in this teacher’s class. Her mother – one of those compassionate professors recommending tenure – lost no time in asking the department head for a "chairperson’s prerogative" allowing her to transfer to another class. The professor’s request was of course duly granted, a request that other parents could not make lacking familiarity with the track record of this benighted teacher.)

In dissenting against the tenure proposal, the same reasonable faculty member even proposed putting up and maintaining a private fund to tide their colleague while the latter tried to find appropriate work somewhere else. The fund proponent bound himself to singularly match the total contributions his merciful colleagues might give in support of their jobless former associate. That way, he pointed out, there would be no degradation of the university’s academic teaching standards and the faculty members’ ardent sense of compassion would be fully served.

No one among those recommending tenure for an undeserving teacher supported the proposal.

And, as a matter of record, it took an incredible seven years for the University of the Philippines to decide this simple case with finality. In the end, tenure was denied by the Board of Regents sometime in 1984.

Compassion often cloaks a willful unwillingness to confront a situation and manage it towards its successful resolution. There are very few people in this country who are capable of facing up to its many ugly realities and decisively changing them for the better. Most of the nation’s leaders are willing to do no more than talk about problematic concerns, ever anguishing about their persisting ill effects but clearly unwilling to effectively strike against their root causes and their socially-costly consequences.

Instead of addressing the admittedly horrendous state of traffic, garbage, sidewalk vending and squatting by rigorously implementing the law and firmly instilling discipline among law-mocking companies and anarchic citizens, most politicking authorities adopt a policy of extreme tolerance and irresponsible compassion. Poverty is made to be an ultimate defense for criminal behavior, effectively justifying reckless traffic, health-threatening garbage, life-threatening pollution, anarchic initiatives like sidewalk-vending and many other forms of severe social dysfunctions. A culture of corruption linking numerous citizens and various "civil society" groups, law enforcers and the political authorities ironically emerges from what originally might have been projected as compassionate, pro-poor initiatives.

Exceptional authorities like Chairman Bayani Fernando of the Metro Manila Development Authority are not devoid of human compassion. Unlike our irresponsible politicians, however, they situate compassion within the bounds of reason and the just law. They act with firmness without forgetting about fairness in dealing with urgent national concerns. They point out that sidewalk vendors, like squatters, have no rights that are prior to those of the entire nation. When they take over the sidewalks and dangerously spill over into the streets to ply their trade, their siren call might sound like a plea for public understanding and compassion. Actually, it is better understood as an arrogant trumpeting of self-serving anarchy, fully resonant with its unmistakable note of the-public-be-damned.

Citizens will err much should they fail to support Chairman Fernando’s timely initiatives. There are not enough leaders in this country who would seriously attempt what he has so far dared to do. Not with the elections of 2004 just about twenty months away.