The list goes on. It is in this environment that SOTUS has come back strongly. In the past several months, two telling incidents revealed how strong SOTUS and authoritarian culture currently are in Thai education. In the first one, a school teacher hit a student on his head after the latter protested against the fee that the school charges for SMS messages that it sends to students. After the video of this incident went viral, the teacher made a clear public statement admitted his fault for hitting the student but would not apologize for doing his duty or for his conscience as a teacher. He meant tha
t a teacher’s duty and conscience
are to groom a student to be obedient to teachers, school and to power. Hence the punishment was justified, thoughexcessive.
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In the second incident, a professor criticized SOTUS on her campus. Quite a number of students, alumni and professors at her school and beyond reacted to her criticism negatively, including issuing sexual and violent threats. As if the matter was not bad enough, the next day one of the university
’s
administrators refused to protect her, saying that it was her personal matter and that the matter was unrelated to the university.
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Instead, he defended SOTUS and the students. These cases may be extreme symptoms, but they are not exceptions.
PERPETUATING SOCIAL MALAISE
The problem is that the hierarchical social relations and personal or person-based social institutions that SOTUS helps to reproduce are a serious cause of the malaise and social ills that permeate major social institutions in Thailand. SOTUS and the damage that it regularly causes are microcosmic of the larger society. Take Thai academia for example. It has been corroded by an obsession with Thainess and by person-based social institutions, too. It is well known that academic promotion, from top to bottom, depends not only on academic merits but also heavily on political or personal relations between the junior and the senior, that is, on connection, favour and acquaintance or the absence of it. The rule of thumb for those who would make scholarly criticism is to recognize the social position of the person whose work one comments on, and then to calibrate the comment accordingly, or not comment at all. Respecting one another is not enough; reverence may be required. Even an academic cardinal sin
–
plagiarism
–
can be overlooked for years if the wrongdoer has good connections, until he finally becomes an untouchable senior.
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In addition to the every-day culture of the academy, the explicitly anti-democratic politics of most administrators in the past decade and the conservative trend discussed above make life in Thai academia a precarious one for critical scholars.
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No guarantee of academic freedom exists, and denials of promotion on political grounds are known. Even the expulsion
of a member of a university’s faculty
for political views has taken place.
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In a society in which good personal social relations are imperative, good academic institutions and good media are hard to achieve, since merit is overlooked and professionalism trumped. The malaise described here is epidemic in the military, police, bureaucracy, and probably every public institution including, sadly, the judicial system. Inefficiency permeates these institutions from top to bottom because their personnel are, by and large, recruited, socialized, promoted and molded not by professional standards, but by nepotism, connections, favoritism, and the personal and hierarchical relations that have been in place for generations. These institutions are not capable of handling complex and sophisticated business.