Dear Editor,

My name is Márcio Augusto and I was a lecturer at the University of Belize from September 2015 until March 15, 2016. I am sending you this letter in which I explain some of the things that happen within this institution, which the general public is unaware of, and I hope you will publish it for the public interest I believe it has.

Best regards,

Márcio Augusto

In September 2015, my wife and I arrived in Belize. We had been invited by the University of Belize to be lecturers teaching courses in Sociology, Psychology and Research Methods but also to be undergraduate thesis advisers. We came from Portugal after having been told that the UB needed to “raise standards”, that it needed “new ideas” to help it become a 21st century institution. What we found was an institution that refused to prepare students and preferred to give them passing grades just for showing up. This opinion of ours has been often mistaken for colonial arrogance. It is not. Quite the opposite, actually.

I could tell all the stories about the many students that came to me and asked me, “I’m failing your course, what are you planing to do about it?” or about the ones that threatened to hurt us, or to damage our car or to commit suicide if we didn’t pass them. I could tell you about how many students go through a university program without learning anything but still getting straight A’s. It would certainly be gory and entertaining, but that’s not my purpose here.

We were often told by students that we were being disrespectful, but my point here is that the true disrespect comes from an institution that, while trying not to upset students (who are viewed as clients) in any way, deeply disrespects them by not having standards, by making it virtually impossible to fail, by not preparing them properly and not promoting a strong work ethic.

As the first semester came to an end, it was visible that many of our students became disgruntled. Even after deeply adjusting standards to the national context, most of the students were failing for the very simple reason that most were unable to show a basic degree of understanding of the contents.

It was around this time that the threats started. But also online petitions, belligerent confrontations, offensive emails with as many insults as spelling mistakes. This, of course, was something that we anticipated: it was even something we discussed throughout the semester with the management team and were constantly encouraged to keep up being strict and not lowering standards.

What we didn’t expect was that, as soon as these problems arose, not only did the Faculty’s management team do like Pontius Pilate, leaving us alone to deal with all these things, but they actually encouraged students to be belligerent. We were left unprotected, all internal rules were disregarded, and the burden of proof was ours. An Inquisition-like process in which our work was thoroughly scrutinized looking for mistakes took place after a group of students decided to file grade appeals based on unsubstantial, ethereal arguments that could have never been proven.

We saw ourselves in the middle of a Kafka-esque maze and the disgruntled students were fully aware of it. As the second semester started, many students tried to avoid us at all costs; many of them laughed at us in the hallways, some even got up and left when they found out who they’d have for lecturers.

I will spare you of everything we did to help all students that were hard-working; they, more than anyone else, surely know what we did and most of our colleagues do know that, probably more than anything else we did everything that was asked of us and then some. We were being punished for being professional and for having reasonable standards, for not accepting plagiarism, for making students be held accountable for their own actions (such as submitting papers after the due date), for penalizing students who didn’t study and didn’t work.

We soon realized that we no longer had conditions to stay. It was impossible to establish tertiary level standards because we were (almost) the only ones to do so. Except for a small number of lecturers who still try to make a change, there is a generalized culture of complacency with the students. They are not held accountable for anything. And, quite honestly, more than anything, that culture is disrespectful towards the students. Our efforts to make a change, as soon as they were translated into upset students, were sabotaged by the very management team that had brought us in precisely to make that change.

It was at this time that the true problem revealed itself. Our long process of asking to leave the country (not because we wanted to, but because we weren’t being given the necessary conditions to do our job properly) involved blatant lies from the management team, complicit silences by those whose moral didn’t allow them to agree with what was happening, recorded meetings without our knowledge or consent, emails with no reply, accusations of dishonesty, and personal attacks.

No-one wanted our side of the story to be told.

So, after discussing our departure for a very long time and after a very long period of silence in which no one replied to our emails, we were suddenly informed on a Friday that we were no longer going to teach any more classes and that we were not allowed to speak to our students. We offered to stay in the country long enough to assure a smooth transition, to prepare the students and to prepare the substitute lecturers but, out of spite, this was not accepted and the ones who ended up losing were the students.

There is something very wrong within the University of Belize. There are power games going on that revolve around everything except the students’ interests. There are those whose main interest is their own personal ambitions, those who keep their heads down, and those who don’t accept it and are either pushed out or are dying to leave.

During our time in Belize, we’ve come to love the country and its people and as we left it, we couldn’t help but feel like the whole country is being deceived by this institution. Objectively, UB students are nowhere near the level of students of most of the universities in the world and this is not a statement against the students, but rather against the university that disrespects them and disrespects the country by not having the courage to do what is needed.

This is a university that is isolated and that isolates its students from the rest of the world.

Márcio Augusto