[News] Venezuelan University Law Creates Student Bill of Rights

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Venezuelan University Law Creates Student Bill of 
Rights, “Democratizes” Higher Education

By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/jamessuggett>James Suggett

http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5893
Sunday, December 26, 2010

Mérida, December 24th 2010 (Venezuelanalysis.com) 
– As students in the United States and Europe 
protest against soaring tuition and lack of 
funding for public higher education, the 
Venezuelan National Assembly has passed an 
unprecedented law to include professors, 
students, workers, and local community members in 
university decision-making and to eliminate barriers to higher education.

The law is based on the principle that the 
government has the responsibility to provide 
free, high-quality, public education from 
childhood through the undergraduate university 
level. This principle is established in Article 
103 of the nation’s constitution.

The law says students will have the right to an 
equal vote in the election of university 
authorities, evaluate professors and participate 
in self-evaluation, freely express opinions, 
access university administrative records, and 
receive a range of services including housing, 
transportation, meals, health care, and monthly stipends, among other rights.

The law also establishes a series of university 
councils that are to be elected on each campus 
through a one-person, one-vote democratic system 
that includes students, professors, 
administrators, wage workers, and other members of the university community.

This includes a University Public Defenders 
Council and an Ombudsman Council to audit and 
oversee university budgeting and administration. 
Likewise, each campus will elect a legislative 
body of representatives called the University 
Transformation Assembly that will work with the 
National Council for University Transformation to 
manage the changes to the public university 
system’s administrative structure and programs in 
line with the new law and the constitution.

Currently, universities are run by a smaller 
group of authorities called the University 
Council which is elected in a system that weighs 
higher authorities’ votes more heavily and gives 
virtually no power to students or workers.

The new law explicitly upholds the principle of 
autonomy of public university administration, 
which is mandated by Article 109 of the national 
constitution. This principle was inspired by 
Venezuela’s deep history of deadly political 
repression and resistance on university campuses, 
especially during the U.S.-backed, right wing 
dictatorship that ended in 1958 and the 
subsequent period of representative democracy.

But the legal interpretation of autonomy has 
changed under the new law, according to 
legislator Alberto Castelar from the governing 
United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). He 
said public universities will now have 
“co-responsible autonomy, which means that 
university authorities cannot go and do as they please.”

University autonomy will be “deeper” because the 
new law increases the participation of previously 
excluded parts of the university community, 
according to legislator María de Queipo, who 
heads the Commission for Education, Culture, 
Recreation, and Sports in the National Assembly.

Yesterday, several student organizations 
including the M-28 movement and student chapters 
of the PSUV held demonstrations in different 
parts of the country in favor of the law. M-28 
leader Vicente Moronta told the state news agency 
AVN that those who oppose the new law “consider 
education to be a commodity, not a human right.”

In the central state of Lara, PSUV student leader 
Erick Prado said, “The student movement has 
fought for decades in favor of a more democratic 
and inclusive education, long before the 
revolution came into power.” He added that the 
new law will help to “democratize the university.”

Meanwhile, opposition political leaders and 
student organizations staged a march in Caracas 
yesterday to protest the new law.

Diego Scharifker, the head of the University 
Student Federation, told the Associated Press 
that the law “imposes socialism as the sole 
ideology and does away with university autonomy 
because it concentrates all powers in the 
minister for higher education.” Students carried 
signs calling President Hugo Chavez a “dictator” 
and referring to his administration as a “totalitarian government.”

Opposition marchers pointed to the part of the 
law that says, “university education is part of 
the non-alienated labor that consolidates the 
socialist model of production,” and the part that 
says autonomy includes academic freedom but also 
must be exercised “in accordance with the 
National Development Plan for the strengthening, 
consolidation, and defense of the sovereignty and 
independence of the homeland.”

Police and National Guardsmen broke up the 
demonstration with a water cannon and plastic 
shotgun pellets after authorities said the 
students did not have a permit to extend the 
march beyond university campus boundaries.

Central University of Venezuela (UCV) Rector 
Cecilia García Arocha called for widespread 
disobedience of the law and said the UCV will 
initiate classes next semester according to the 
old university law. “This is the beginning of the 
resistance,” she said while defending the 
opposition students’ decision to march beyond university grounds.

Despite the fact that all of Venezuela’s public 
universities already operate tuition-free and 
provide services such as free student housing, 
transportation, and meals, the tendency remains 
for rich students to be admitted to the 
traditional autonomous public universities while 
poorer students attend the burgeoning Bolivarian 
University of Venezuela, which was created by the 
Chavez government and has an openly pro-revolution administration.

The passage of the new University Education Law 
comes just days before a new National Assembly 
with a 41% opposition contingent will replace the 
current National Assembly, which is almost entirely controlled by the PSUV.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20101227/2004aa01/attachment.htm>