THE barbecue is heating up and the red rice is steaming. With graduation less than a month and a half away, UOG seniors Maria and Joe are getting set to walk down those Field House aisles while Tanya and Jacob are turning in their first job applications. The light is green and the countdown has begun.
But despite the excitement of these final senioritis days, we must not forget in the hustle that determining truism: Behind each graduate getting a degree is a proven process. Laboring in the shadows are men and women who, for four years or more, have been training, molding and testing the tensile strength of their product. Only after they’ve passed muster are Maria and Joe and Tanya and Jacob awarded the stamps of approval and signaled to switch their tassels on the count of three from one side to the other. These behind-the-scenes workers are the researchers and scholars who labor quietly in their fields of expertise then pass on their marketable skills to their students.
Many think of these backstage experts as serious, closet people like Professor Ned Brainard from The Absent-minded Professor or Professor Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady. But while these abound, let’s remember that there are also Indiana Joneses and Professor Robert Langdons (Da Vinci Code), Professor Xaviers and his X-men and Professor Victors (the creator of Frankenstein) who, behind the scenes, lead lives of intrigue and even danger.
Fortunately, UOG doesn’t have any Professor Victors that it knows of but it does have a few Indiana Joneses-and Langdon-type characters and a whole array of other diversely fascinating personalities who work on research that can change the way people eat, dream, and perhaps even radically think of themselves.
Although the danger in the movies is sensationalized, it is deeply seated in the nature of research. After all, scientists and scholars across time and cultures have been harassed, tortured, exiled, and executed: as examples, Russian historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka — all Nobel Prize winners, Solzhenitsyn and Soyinka in Literature, 1970 and 1986, respectively, and Ebadi the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, and all imprisoned for their work. Why? Because new knowledge although productive can also pose a threat to previous knowledges.
Solzhenitsyn, Ebadi and Soyinka and other scholars like them refused to bury the new knowledge they had grasped even if reality as they knew it might crumble and power structures collapse because of their stance:
It is true that in our country, research and scholarship are in general protected, but the examples through the centuries underscore why the university research environment must be guarded.
Twice in remembered UOG history, most recently in 2000, the university’s accreditation was threatened because of violations of university autonomy and institutional integrity by either the local government or the senior administration. Both times the institution was rescued from losing its accreditation through heroic efforts by organizations or who championed the university’s fundamental principles.
What are these principles? Scholars must be given the latitude or academic freedom to explore where their genius directs them; the institution in which they work must have integrity in order for their research to be recognized and accepted internationally; in order to have integrity, the university must have a foundation of autonomy or freedom from political influences and of shared academic governance to insure the power and authority of scholars’ voices in the governing of the institution in which they work. These protections form the fundamental principles of any university.
The researchers and scholars at our University work there so they can have job security, certainly, but more importantly so they can have a research environment that nurtures and supports the free and daring spirit that their search for knowledge must have. In order to keep our scholars and researchers engaged, this exploratory environment must be continuously guarded. However, a university by itself cannot protect the principles of scholarship and research. It needs the communities in which it lives to share the responsibility.
To foreground the importance of the island community in this defense, the UOG Faculty Senate has created the Palulap Medallion Award to honor members of the community of Guam who have made extraordinary contributions to the protection and promotion of the fundamental principles of the academy. The Award named after the legendary Micronesian navigator Palulap, whose great wisdom and skill continue to inspire youthful navigators today, envisions the University as a flying proa being guided towards landfall by a navigator skilled and wise in the arts of academic governance.
The University of Guam inaugurates this first year of the Palulap Medallion Award with its first Call for Nominations inviting the island community to nominate an individual for the Award who it feels has gone far beyond the pale to step up, speak out, or stand up to protect the core principles of what continues to make us a university.
Then on May 15, as we watch Maria and Joe, Tanya and Jacob smiling at the camera as they sail down the aisles, we will understand better how they got there and how the University which graduated them is not here amongst us by chance but by determination and the concerted effort and will of all of us who live in it and surround it. The more we understand this, the stronger and more enduring our University will be.

DR. EVELYN FLORES
Chair, Faculty Senate Palulap Medallion Awards Committee
University of Guam