Blog U.: Hugo Chavez Transforms Venezuelan Higher Education - The World View - Inside Higher Ed

Blog U.: Hugo Chavez Transforms Venezuelan Higher Education - The World View - Inside Higher Ed
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Hugo Chavez Transforms Venezuelan Higher Education

By Daniel Levy September 13, 2010 7:00 pm

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, in office since 1999, has been steadily transforming the country’s higher education system. Supporters find the changes consistent with Chávez’s overall “Bolivarian Revolution” (Chavez’s term)— socialist and populist. Critics find the changes consistent with an overall assault on democracy and on academic autonomy and quality in particular.



The latest chapter in the saga involves criticism of a new formula for government funding of public higher education. The basis for funding will be enrollment size. Why would the rector of the historic national university strongly criticize this approach? Because Chávez has hugely enlarged the public sector through creation and expansion of new universities.



In 2003 he created the Universidad Bolivariana by decree, an institution that grew to a massive 180,000 students by 2006 with a stated target of a million by 2009. Even the 2006 enrollment figure makes the university one of the largest in Latin America. Anything