With the hierarchy culture in the student-professor relationship, academic writing is the least fancied of college life. We often hear the story of how students must uphold respect while corresponding with the thesis supervisor. On a monthly basis, tweets about the student getting scolded by the professor for ‘not being respectful enough’ become a popular discussion in the platform.
To what extent politeness must be expressed? The majority of the people agree there is a certain limit of displaying politeness, otherwise it would sound very much like a ramble. In the meantime, students are asking or giving advice on the best way to arrange the most POLITE texts to send to their professors, indicating this issue is a universal thing to Indonesia academic culture.
How did we get here? Is it just a common Asian hierarchy in a professional manner? Who, or what pushes the limit of speaking respectfully egalitarian to the point of excessively mannered?
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The utter politeness is extended to the writings. The student—as the writer of the thesis—is encouraged to represent themselves in the least salient way. The writer must not present themselves in the pronouns I, such as “Based on the data, I conclude…” They must stay absent in the paper as the responsibility holder of the research. We would often find the writer is taking a distance with the research and its findings, by presenting themselves with the objectified-pronouns, such as “Based on the data, the researcher concludes…” The writer is no longer a subject—I is no longer a subject—thus I lost the agency of themselves. I is not an actual person with opinionated traits. I is presented as an inanimate object—a distant, anonymous writer whose presence we could not fully grasp; somehow only sensible to us in the two-dimensional shape of ink and papers.
By positioning themselves in a certain absence, the writer is not taking direct stances about their research. As if their ideas and findings were thrown out of nowhere into the wild, and no one is accountable to defend its reasonings.
Why are we afraid of taking stances?
Academic culture in Indonesia has been hazardous. It could lead to a life-or-death situation. We could still clearly recall the questionable death of Lambang Babar Purnomo in 2008, an archaeologist who persisted in investigating the theft of antiques, including fossils in Sangiran sites and relics in Radya Pustaka Museum in Surakarta. Later on, it was discovered that the case involved Jakarta’s elites, that included high profile military officers and billionaires.
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Tracing back the evolution of the academic culture in our country, it was, and still is, heavily saturated with high politics. During Soekarno’s presidency, universities and academic communities were pivotal as ‘national revolution tools’ to support anti-imperialism propaganda. This direction opened the gate to political streams in the academic culture. Students and lecturers were actively involved in organizations with straightforward political stances: anti-exploitations and anti-neoliberalism. Moving on to the New Order regime led by President Soeharto, the anti-communist campaign launched by the government became an intellectual genocide.
Professors, students, and activists were removed if they did not pass the ‘clean environment’ screening to deem they were free of affiliation to the communists or signifying the leftist tendency. In the meantime, many scholars have endorsed its claim to justify the mass-killing for the PKI and alleged leftists (accused or confirmed) as ‘logical’, ‘inevitable’, and ‘spontaneous horizontal violence’ rather than bureaucratic violence. This penetration to the academic institutions led to its utmost consequence; an entire generation of intellectual elites with critical capabilities the country needed the most—were silenced. Self-censorship is a product of fear—organized and trained by the State.
Shortly after the legislature passed the bill in March 2025 that enables Indonesian military officers to fill positions in certain civil departments, news emerged that military officers were making attempts to infiltrate the academic fields–once again. Students at universities in Bali, Papua, and Banyumas were facing mandatory military training, unwanted visits during free discussions, and data collecting–coincidently within the span of just three days. These attempts are said to be a part of ‘territorial development’ (pembinaan teritorial) that is closely tied to the Dual-Function of the Military during the New Order regime.
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Throughout the dark decades embedded in our generational memory, we witnessed the consequence of taking stances as a scholar. We learned to water down our attitude, to remove ourselves as an independent I by taking a certain distance to the subject we are writing. Eventually, we removed ourselves from the society we lived in. We subjected ourselves as an outsider in seeing a real problem. We learned about hierarchy through our academic culture, we learned about obedience disguised as respect. And we observed how the higher ranks held higher power that defined our outcomes, hence determining our future through the academic title and grades we received. Our lifelines hang tightly on how much we follow the so-called system of hierarchy, and the future is a stake too high to gamble in this economy.
It might be in our periphery of consciousness—spread of awareness has started to emerge as we noticed in the social media’s comment section—however those micro-examples of utter-politeness are inevitable to ignore. What we witness is an impeccable illustration of how the State’s policy manages to make ourselves diminish our senses of political agency. It begins by infiltrating the sphere where each generation gets to be introduced to how the system works: our schools.
