The Venezuelan government suffocates university autonomy
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Loading... - John Fraser
- 06 Feb 2023
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The Venezuelan educational sector is going through one of the worst moments in its history, as confirmed in studies by national and international organizations and in street protests, writes Ramón Cardozo.
Entering the 21st century, we live in a time in which the generation of knowledge has become the essential lever for countries to achieve higher levels of development and progress. As the World Bank warns in its "Accelerating Catch-up" study, published in 2009, "capital is a necessary instrument, but the arbiter of economic success - even survival - in today's world is the ability to mobilize knowledge and make the most of it”. In addition, this study points out that knowledge-intensive growth requires priority attention to secondary education and, what is more important, to post-secondary or higher education.
Contrary to these premises, the Venezuelan educational sector has been going through one of the worst moments in its history , as confirmed both in studies and reports from national and international organizations, as well as in the street demonstrations that take place far and wide. from the country. Indeed, since the beginning of this new year, workers in the education sector in Venezuela have taken to the streets to protest their miserable wages, the absence of a social security system, and the lamentable material conditions in which they find themselves forced to work.
The precarious situation of the Venezuelan educational system, denounced by educators and verified by specialized studies, is due not only to the economic disaster in which the country has been for more than a decade, but is also the necessary consequence of XXI Century Socialism. . This political project, imposed on the country by Hugo Chávez since he came to power in 1999, distorts the purpose of education and conceives it as an instrument of political and ideological confrontation.
Legislation intervening in education
Following the ideological guidelines of Socialism of the 21st Century, expressed in the Plan for the Homeland, the Chavista regime promulgated a new Education Law in 2009. In this rule, the concept of the Teacher State was introduced, thus granting the National Executive powers of control over university regulations, internal policies to choose their authorities, university budgets and teacher training. As the Universidad de los Andes warned in its Human Rights Observatory report, this new law "undermined the academic, administrative, and economic autonomy of higher education institutions [to] adapt them to ideological purposes contrary to those of free and open education." to all currents of thought.
The new Education Law not only violates university autonomy enshrined in the Venezuelan Constitution, but also contradicts the Declaration of Inter-American Principles on Academic Freedom and University Autonomy, adopted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) , in 2021. This declaration consecrates the "Principle of the autonomy of academic institutions", which prescribes that "autonomy is an essential requirement for academic freedom and works as a guarantee for higher education institutions to fulfill their mission and production objectives and dissemination of knowledge.
The Venezuelan autonomous university, budgetary drowned
Simultaneously with the approval of this confiscatory legal framework of academic freedom and university autonomy, the government of Hugo Chávez began to apply a policy of budget suffocation to the country's autonomous universities. The priest Luis Ugalde, former rector of the Andrés Bello Catholic University, warned in his article "The besieged University" (2013) that "the objective of this siege is to replace the current autonomous university with another subject to the socialist imposition of the State government -party (…) The main rope to hang the universities is the budget: we take away their bread and water and they will have to surrender”. Five years later, Mario Bonucci, rector of the Universidad de los Andes, ratified Ugalde's complaint at a press conference: " Read More…
