Bandung, Saco-Indonesia.com - Hermain Tjiknang (91) mengikuti prosesi wisuda menggunakan kursi roda di Graha Sanusi Universitas Padjadjaran, Jalan Dipati Ukur, Bandung, Selasa (4/2/2014) lalu. Peraih gelar doktor Ilmu Hukum kelahiran Muntok, Bangka, 26 Juni 1922 ini tercatat sebagai wisudawan tertua.
Tentu, sosok Hermain Tjiknang menjadi sorotan dan tidak sedikit hadirin yang berdecak kagum untuk wisudawan lulusan gelombang II Unpad Tahun Akademik 2013/2014 itu.
Bukan karena saat wisuda Hermain menggunakan kursi roda, tapi ketika tahu bahwa usia Hermain sudah mencapai 91 tahun lebih 7 bulan.
Ya, Hermain memang menjadi wisudawan paling tua, namun semangatnya terlihat saat ia ditanya oleh wisudawan lain.
Sebelumnya tercatat, Mooryati Soedibyo adalah peraih gelar doktor tertua di Indonesia menurut Museum Rekor Dunia-Indonesia (Muri) ketika lulus S3 dari Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Indonesia pada tahun 2007.
Di Unpad, pada wisuda tahun 2010, Siti Maryam Salahuddin juga meraih gelar doktor pada usia 83 tahun. Melihat catatan tersebut, bisa jadi Hermain adalah peraih gelar doktor tertua di Indonesia saat ini.
Bukanlah hal mudah bagi Hermain yang di usia 90 tahun harus menyelesaikan disertasi. Bahkan disertasinya yang berjudul "Perlindungan Hukum Atas Pekerja Alih Daya (Outsourcing) Berdasarkan Keadilan dalam Perselisihan Hubungan Industrial Akibat Pemutusan Hubungan Kerja Sepihak", sampai tujuh kali direvisi oleh promotornya.
Namun karena semangatnya, dia berhasil menyelesaikan program Doktornya dalam waktu lima tahun.
"Sebenarnya banyak kendala, tapi karena saya memang ingin mempertahankan disertasi ini, akhirnya selesai juga," katanya ditemui seusai wisuda.
Tak terbatas usiaMenurut lelaki yang masih aktif bertugas sebagai dosen di STIH Pertiba, Pangkalpinang ini, menuntut ilmu tidak terbatas usia. Selagi keinginan masih ada, usia bukanlah halangan untuk memperdalam ilmu.
Terlebih sebagai dosen, ia merasa sudah kewajibannya untuk mendapatkan ilmu lebih banyak untuk dibagi kepada mahasiswanya.
"Usia boleh tua, tapi belajar tidak ada batasan," kata lelaki yang meraih gelar Doktor pada Sidang Terbuka Promosi Doktor pada 17 Januari 2014 lalu ini.
Karena masih ingin membagi ilmu inilah, Hermain masih menyempatkan datang ke kampus untuk mengajar Ilmu Hukum untuk mahasiswa sarjana dan magister. Tiga kali dalam seminggu, ia mengajar di perguruan tinggi yang juga didirikan oleh Hermain bersama rekan-rekannya di tahun 1982 tersebut.
Merasakan masih haus akan ilmu jugalah, yang membulatkan tekadnya untuk mengambil doktor Ilmu Hukum di Unpad. Ia harus berkuliah hingga menyeberang pulau karena ia bersama keluarga telah menetap di Bangka.
"Saya sudah cinta dengan dunia pendidikan," kata lelaki asal Palembang ini.
Stres
Sakit jantung yang dialaminya itu sempat pula membuatnya harus masuk intensive care unit (ICU) rumah sakit saat dia tengah menyusun disertasi. "Gara-gara stres karena flash disk naskahnya dikira hilang," kata putri sulungnya, Suzanna Indrawati.
Beruntung, ternyata data itu ternyata berada di tangan asistennya.
Kecintaannya terhadap dunia pendidikan sudah ditunjukkan saat masa penjajahan Belanda. Ia sempat mengajar pejuang-pejuang. Bagi Hermain, dengan pendidikan, Indonesia bisa menjadi negara merdeka dan maju.
"Pendidikan, mencari ilmu itu harus. Apalagi buat generasi muda, agar Indonesia maju," kata suami dari Federika Henderika dan ayah dari lima anak ini.
Ia mengaku sedih bila ada generasi muda yang tidak semangat bersekolah. Karena saat ini ia melihat menuntut ilmu jauh lebih baik dan lebih mudah. Dengan kemajuan teknologi, seharusnya generasi muda semakin bersemangat.
BanggaYashinta, anak Hermain yang menemani wisuda ayahnya mengaku bangga. Meski terkadang ia tidak tega melihat ayahnya menyusun disertasi hingga larut malam.
"Ayah saya sudah tua, tapi sampai malam masih nyusun disertasinya, kadang suruh istirahat, nanti dulu katanya, karena pengen cepat selesai," katanya.
Ia juga tidak bisa menahan keinginan ayahnya yang masih ingin terus mengajar. Karena ia sudah memahami karakter ayahnya yang sudah mencintai dunia pendidikan.
Sumber :kompas.com
Editor : Maulana Lee
Tetap Semangat di Usia 91 Tahun, Bagi Wisudawan Tertua Universitas Padjadjaran
Late in April, after Native American actors walked off in disgust from the set of Adam Sandler’s latest film, a western sendup that its distributor, Netflix, has defended as being equally offensive to all, a glow of pride spread through several Native American communities.
Tantoo Cardinal, a Canadian indigenous actress who played Black Shawl in “Dances With Wolves,” recalled thinking to herself, “It’s come.” Larry Sellers, who starred as Cloud Dancing in the 1990s television show “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” thought, “It’s about time.” Jesse Wente, who is Ojibwe and directs film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, found himself encouraged and surprised. There are so few film roles for indigenous actors, he said, that walking off the set of a major production showed real mettle.
But what didn’t surprise Mr. Wente was the content of the script. According to the actors who walked off the set, the film, titled “The Ridiculous Six,” included a Native American woman who passes out and is revived after white men douse her with alcohol, and another woman squatting to urinate while lighting a peace pipe. “There’s enough history at this point to have set some expectations around these sort of Hollywood depictions,” Mr. Wente said.
The walkout prompted a rhetorical “What do you expect from an Adam Sandler film?,” and a Netflix spokesman said that in the movie, blacks, Mexicans and whites were lampooned as well. But Native American actors and critics said a broader issue was at stake. While mainstream portrayals of native peoples have, Mr. Wente said, become “incrementally better” over the decades, he and others say, they remain far from accurate and reflect a lack of opportunities for Native American performers. What’s more, as Native Americans hunger for representation on screen, critics say the absence of three-dimensional portrayals has very real off-screen consequences.
“Our people are still healing from historical trauma,” said Loren Anthony, one of the actors who walked out. “Our youth are still trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in this society. Kids are killing themselves. They’re not proud of who they are.” They also don’t, he added, see themselves on prime time television or the big screen. Netflix noted while about five people walked off the “The Ridiculous Six” set, 100 or so Native American actors and extras stayed.
But in interviews, nearly a dozen Native American actors and film industry experts said that Mr. Sandler’s humor perpetuated decades-old negative stereotypes. Mr. Anthony said such depictions helped feed the despondency many Native Americans feel, with deadly results: Native Americans have the highest suicide rate out of all the country’s ethnicities.
The on-screen problem is twofold, Mr. Anthony and others said: There’s a paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts (those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived in a narrow way.
In his Peabody Award-winning documentary “Reel Injun,” the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explored Hollywood depictions of Native Americans over the years, and found they fell into a few stereotypical categories: the Noble Savage, the Drunk Indian, the Mystic, the Indian Princess, the backward tribal people futilely fighting John Wayne and manifest destiny. While the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves” won praise for depicting Native Americans as fully fleshed out human beings, not all indigenous people embraced it. It was still told, critics said, from the colonialists’ point of view. In an interview, John Trudell, a Santee Sioux writer, actor (“Thunderheart”) and the former chairman of the American Indian Movement, described the film as “a story of two white people.”
“God bless ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ” Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk in “Twin Peaks,” said sarcastically. “Even ‘Avatar.’ Someone’s got to come save the tribal people.”
Dan Spilo, a partner at Industry Entertainment who represents Adam Beach, one of today’s most prominent Native American actors, said while typecasting dogs many minorities, it is especially intractable when it comes to Native Americans. Casting directors, he said, rarely cast them as police officers, doctors or lawyers. “There’s the belief that the Native American character should be on reservations or riding a horse,” he said.
“We don’t see ourselves,” Mr. Horse said. “We’re still an antiquated culture to them, and to the rest of the world.”
Ms. Cardinal said she was once turned down for the role of the wife of a child-abusing cop because the filmmakers felt that casting her would somehow be “too political.”
Another sore point is the long run of white actors playing American Indians, among them Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and, more recently, Johnny Depp, whose depiction of Tonto in the 2013 film “Lone Ranger,” was viewed as racist by detractors. There are, of course, exceptions. The former A&E series “Longmire,” which, as it happens, will now be on Netflix, was roundly praised for its depiction of life on a Northern Cheyenne reservation, with Lou Diamond Phillips, who is of Cherokee descent, playing a Northern Cheyenne man.
Others also point to the success of Mr. Beach, who played a Mohawk detective in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and landed a starring role in the forthcoming D C Comics picture “Suicide Squad.” Mr. Beach said he had come across insulting scripts backed by people who don’t see anything wrong with them.
“I’d rather starve than do something that is offensive to my ancestral roots,” Mr. Beach said. “But I think there will always be attempts to drawn on the weakness of native people’s struggles. The savage Indian will always be the savage Indian. The white man will always be smarter and more cunning. The cavalry will always win.”
The solution, Mr. Wente, Mr. Trudell and others said, lies in getting more stories written by and starring Native Americans. But Mr. Wente noted that while independent indigenous film has blossomed in the last two decades, mainstream depictions have yet to catch up. “You have to stop expecting for Hollywood to correct it, because there seems to be no ability or desire to correct it,” Mr. Wente said.
There have been calls to boycott Netflix but, writing for Indian Country Today Media Network, which first broke news of the walk off, the filmmaker Brian Young noted that the distributor also offered a number of films by or about Native Americans.
The furor around “The Ridiculous Six” may drive more people to see it. Then one of the questions that Mr. Trudell, echoing others, had about the film will be answered: “Who the hell laughs at this stuff?”
Native American Actors Work to Overcome a Long-Documented Bias