Justin Podur
The Venezuelan government, under President Hugo Chavez, has created "missions" to provide services to Venezuela's population. Perhaps the most well-known of the missions is Mission Robinson, which has brought adult literacy programs to at least 1 million Venezuelans, essentially eliminating what had been a relatively small, but persistent level of adult illiteracy in the country.
Another mission, called Mission Sucre, has as its goal the provision of university education to anyone who wants to study. This goal has necessitated not only a system of scholarships and courses of university preparation for adults and students who had lacked access in the past, but also the creation of more space in universities. Part of the government's answer to these needs has been the creation of new universities, among them the Universidad de las Fuerzas Militares for soldiers who want to study, and the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela.
The management of the state oil company, PDVSA, locked out the company's employees during the "national strike" of 2002-03. The lock-out was an attempt to cripple the country and drive Chavez out of office by punishing the population. The government retaliated by firing the managers. In the process, the government ended up with several massive, furnished office buildings that had been playhouses for unproductive managers for decades. These buildings became the campuses for the new universities.
On August 17, 2004, two days after Chavez won the recall referendum that the opposition had intended to use to throw him out, I interviewed Maria Ejilda Castellano, the rector of the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela (UBV), on the Caracas campus.
Can you talk briefly about the history of the UBV?
I was commissioned by the new minister of higher education to work on the project. We had an expert on curriculum, an expert on academic policy and the dropout issue, and two other education experts on the commission. We worked from January to March 2002 and made our preliminary report in March.
Our objectives were to break with the fragmentation of knowledge and the university structure of faculties, schools, and departments. We wanted to pay attention to the holistic development of students. Traditional universities produce depoliticised professionals who see themselves as using technical skills but do not have any sense of social responsibility. We want to contribute to the reconstruction of our society. We want to create professionals with a sense of public service.
In terms of disciplines, we wanted to consider disciplines that have been neglected and are urgent priorities for the country. The three main disciplines are environmental management, social management (which is not just sociology or social work, but a complete formation including anthropology, sociology, and psychology), and social communication (including journalism and mass communication).
2002 was a very difficult year. The military coup happened in April. It was immediately followed by the "national strike" and the economic sabotage. We had beaten these attacks by March 2003. But that period slowed our work down.
How did the university come to be located at the PDVSA offices?
Over that period there were debates about where the university would be located. The original plan was to have it in Miraflores, in the presidential palace itself. When we had first conceived of the university, the idea of having a university there seemed like a good way to reclaim what used to be a very remote, sealed off place. But after the coup, Miraflores became a very public space. Any time there was any threat or uncertainty, the people would gather at Miraflores. There was no way to have a university there.
The next proposal was to have it in the interior of the country, to try to fight the centrality of Caracas. But in 2003, when we won the PDVSA battle, there was a clean up of PDVSA. We discovered there were these huge office buildings where there was nothing going on. The minister of mines and the minister of education decided to give the buildings to us. When we got here, we discovered all these offices. It's been some time since these buildings were cleared out, and PDVSA has recovered. What were the doing in here?
So once we had the buildings, we finalised the project in 2003. In July, the National Council of Universities was approved. The council consists of the rectors of all the universities of the country, though the public institutions have a full vote and the private institutions have a consultative vote. There is also ministry, National Assembly (Congress) and student representation.
The university was inaugurated on July 22, 2003. In October, the Maracaibo campus was inaugurated (housed in what used to be a private university), and in November a third campus was inaugurated in the Ciudad Bolivar (in buildings formerly used by the Corporacion Venezolana de Guayana).
Can you expand on the educational philosophy behind UBV?
In 1998, UNESCO published documents in Havana with principles for educational transformation. These were reiterated in Paris in 1999, and ratified again in 2003. The principles are equity, quality, relevance, internationalisation and contribution to society.
UNESCO's principles are based on a body of academic work in anthropology and the sociology of knowledge. They show the need for modern universities to change their thinking, to recognise the cross-disciplinary nature of work, and advance to trans-disciplinary work.
This implies new forms of organisation, alternatives to the "faculty" mode that enable encounters between sciences and the humanities, that recognise the human centre of education. When a professional acts, her actions have an effect on human beings. So professionals must come to understand the human consequences of their decisions. This implies a change in the process of learning, and some really fundamental questions: Why teach? Why are we trying to form professionals? What does a professional in this country or in this world, need to know?
We've answered some of these questions in our curricular models. We will prove that you can have quality and equity in education. We will form holistic professionals who are citizens. They will learn ethics, social responsibility, respect for a Latin American and Caribbean identity, solidarity, respect.
The professional produced by this institution will work for the transformation of society. She will be a critical thinker who can stimulate others and generate questions. Our curriculum is based on "axes" of education. Any plan or program of study — say an engineering or teaching professional program — is your "professional axis". But you also have a cultural axis, a political axis, ethical axis, aesthetics axis, a social-community interaction axis where you work directly with sectors of society outside of the university from the start.
The drop-out problem is one we pay serious attention to, with a full department dedicated to working with professors and students to watch for potential problems. This requires a new model of what professors are supposed to do. A professor is not just someone who gives classes. She is the motivator for a student to learn. She should help the student find his talents, abilities, and limitations. She should give the student options.
Remember, our doors are open — 77% of our students come from poor backgrounds, 17% from the lower middle class. These are students who have a lot of barriers in front of them — family problems, violence, difficult lives. Our mission is to give them tools and help them become citizens who can listen, speak, ask, read, understand, and solve problems as citizens, without violence. We are already making major advances in these spheres.
How do you incorporate this educational philosophy into the structures of the institution and the decision-making process?
We are different from most universities in that most of the people on campus are professors and students. There are relatively few administrative and other staff. One way we try to help students from popular backgrounds stay in school is by providing food, transportation, and health services — doctors, psychologists, social workers, vocational guidance services, are at the students' disposal.
We still need a lot of investment. We inherited the buildings and the furniture but these were office buildings; we are still equipping the laboratories.
In terms of organisation, we have an executive council for day-to-day administration. The highest authority is the directive council, which will have professors, staff, students and government representatives. There are also academic councils, with academic directors, campus councils for each campus, and an off-campus advisory council with people from the community.
Educational access is important, but how do you avoid just creating a bigger elite that is separated from and above the population? How do you break down the distance between the university and the community?
Of course it cannot just be the university that does this. But the explicit goal of Mission Sucre is to provide access to higher education to the whole population. Obviously this cannot be done simply by creating more and more universities. That is why we want an integrated national system.
Speaking just of UBV, one of our programs is called the Universidad Para Todos (University for All). Under this program we open the university up to the community, who can attend talks, courses, and events. We have open courses and tracks of courses.
Is the point of a university education to prepare a youth for a job? No. It is to teach a student to think. It is, moreover, to teach a student to learn and to use that learning in the world.
We have always said that education is not just to create professionals. Education is much more than that. Knowledge is power, and more people with knowledge empowers the whole population. Educating women empowers not only the women educated, but the whole population. Creating critical thinkers, a population of intellectuals, is a much more profound project than just preparing people for jobs.
[Abridged from <http://www.zmag.org>. Justin Podur is a US writer and activist. He visited Venezuela in August 2004 to cover the recall referendum and social movements.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004.
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