The secular and beautiful Portuguese university of Coimbra has its own prison. Rather, it had it, because it is no longer open to punish, for example, students who plagiarize their work on the Internet. It functioned between the 16th and 19th centuries, until the liberal reform abolished this special jurisdiction of the university community. It would be the natural place, if it had been in operation, to confine one of the most singular dictators, Oliveira de Salazar, who ruled Portugal for 40 years, after leaving his chair of Financial Law in Coimbra.
On the tourist visit from the old prison, you go up to the library, with its colony of bats that take care of the paper, in one of those historic, white buildings that preside over the hill above the Mondego river and confer to Coimbra its iconic image.
The prison remains a vestige of the past, but since this week the shadow of alleged heinous crimes, committed under the guise of academics, shakes not only the oldest university in Portugal, but the entire country and the international progressive intelligentsia. Because the alleged author of the events is the professor, already emeritus, the most famous of the university, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, sociologist and great reference for criticism of globalization.
Over the last few days, at least five testimonies have emerged from former higher education students who claim to have suffered sexual harassment and, after their refusal, moral harassment. They point not only to Santos, but also to one of his conniving assistants. The intellectual has announced that he will take the women to court. Once the first witnesses were heard, he claimed that he was suffering from “anonymous, shameful and vile defamation”. He claims that he is the subject of a “public lynching”, based on “serious lies and fanciful insinuations that hurt my dignity and affect my professional reputation”.
The case began to be made public with a graffiti outside the Social Studies Center of Coïmbra. ” Bonaventure out. We all know it”, he said. They estimate that it was erased and repainted about eight times. It served as the title for the article The walls spoke when no one else did. It was published by three former researchers, the Portuguese Catarina Laranjeiro, the Belgian Lieselotte Viaene and the American Miye Nadya Tom, in a collective work on bad sexual practices in academia by the prestigious British scientific publisher Routledge.
Female teachers use nicknames and do not use real names even for themselves. They don’t even mention the university, although everything in their article is very identifiable. At the center of the plot, with the support of the “helper”, the most noted as a bully, and the “vigilante”, appears the “star teacher”, Santos, at that time, between 2010 and 2018, director of the Center for Social Studies, in which today, at the age of 82, he has the status of director emeritus, although he is removed from the position while the investigation continues.
One of the scenes described is that of the annual dinner, at the end of the cycle, in a restaurant in Coïmbra, to honor the star, all washed down with a lot of alcohol. Two of them were embraced by the accused, in an action that “lasted too long”. “A researcher who became aware of the situation, alerted them that this inappropriate behavior was common and that it used to be underestimated with humor or denial”, they narrate.
Those who did not want to enter the wheel suffered, they claim, loss of academic opportunities. They explain that the star professor put his hand on another student’s leg, and invited her to deepen the relationship as “payment” for academic support. Everything indicates that this is the Brazilian woman who reported a similar case to Público this week, which made her return to her country, despite having gone to Coimbra to be a student at Santos.
In a YouTube video from last year, Argentine Moira Ivana Millán, a Mapuche activist, explains that after participating in a colloquium, she saw herself having dinner alone with Santos, who, with a wink, took her to his apartment and opened up to her. “She trusted him, an old man, supposedly a revolutionary”, she revealed, while recounting how she was dissuaded from reporting, because in the face of his prestige, “she would end up all alone in the desert”.
