University heads of department in Coimbra – arguably Portugal’s most prestigious centre of academic excellence – are investigating a series of WhatsApp messages (with images) that have been circulating, and shocking many who have received them.
The messages are overtly racist, xenophobic and misogynistic, writes Correio da Manhã tabloid. Some even “make a case for Nazism”.
They apparently first appeared on a WhatsApp group created to “welcome freshmen to the Faculty of Law” – but then extended to a wider group of 800 students at the university.
The ‘audio messages’ included “around five minutes of insults directed at women, foreigners and black people”. Multiple voices could be heard saying things like: “Women are just to beat, nothing more.”
It didn’t take long for the content to reach the eyes and ears of those in charge, who are now trying to find out who is behind them. “On the table is the possibility of the opening of disciplinary procedures which could result in the expulsion from the Academy of Coimbra”, CM stresses.
For now, it appears that the messages emanated from students at ISCAC (the Coimbra Business School run out of a city polytechnic). “One of the students involved (who sent a file over his mobile phone) has already presented an apology to the university, polytechnic and student bodies, but has not identified colleagues who participated in the recording,” CM continues.
The general directorate of the Academic Association of Coimbra, in conjunction with associations that represent students from Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Brazil, as well as the Erasmus Programme, has issued a ‘statement of condemnation’, insisting that “there is no space” in the city, nor in the academic community, for “hatred or exclusion”.
The rigorous investigation that follows will need to have “action taken”, the statement adds.
CM explains there are roughly 40,000 students in Coimbra, when one combines those at the university with those attending other local institutions of higher education.
Samuel A. Gomes, former pupil from the Faculty of Law – himself a former president of the association of students from Guinea-Bissau – has labelled this situation “an opportunity to create strong mechanisms that allow people to denounce, register and take precautions, so that these episodes do not repeat themselves in the future.”
Source: Correio da Manhã
