"Mean Girls" by Antares Gomez B.

Professor Sarah Raymundo, an upstanding member of the Department of Sociology, was denied tenure after a year-long drag of closed-door meetings. Professor Raymundo is perfectly qualified for a tenured position in the department. She has almost ten years of teaching experience, completed her Master’s Degree in Sociology within the given time, and has numerous published articles in refereed journals and publications exceeding the minimum requirement for tenure. According to the rules on granting tenure, this should have been a no-brainer. What gives?

Reportedly, the department of Sociology simply closed its ranks like a bunch of cliqueish high-school-movie bimbos after failing to provide anything but piddling whines about not having been invited to a forum. Furthermore, there are allegations that the grounds for denial cited during their meetings are of the lowest order of cheap: that Professor Raymundo invited the parents of Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeno to the Department Christmas party as her guests only to abandon them in order to join the anti-TFI rally that December, that she became a suspect in the theft of a laptop simply because she did not share the owner’s hysteria, or that she was insensitive for asking the owner if they had already purchased a new one.

Is any of this valid? Are these really the bases with which they denied tenure to someone who, by the rules, should be judged solely on academic grounds? Is it really just because they don’t like her? Or are these pathetic jabs the smokescreen of a juvenile cynic who is basically terrified by real political engagement? If not, what then are the grounds on which Professor Raymundo was denied tenure? Why this silence that stinks of “privileged information”? Does someone really need to get hit by a bus before this is resolved?

This is no way to behave. But, then again, as Kant wrote in one of his shorter works, “It is so easy not to be of age”.


Antares Gomez b.
BFA Art History
Department of Theory
College of Fine Arts