Revolution and Academic Freedom in Venezuela: The Struggle over University Autonomy in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

David Smilde, Tulane University
Hugo Perez Hernaiz, Universidad Central de Venezuela

Socialist projects in Latin America have a complex relationship with academic freedom. On the one hand, liberalism in terms of checks and balances, rights and liberties, and nonpartisan state institutions is generally thought of as anathema to socialist projects that seek the integration of state and society. On the other hand, over the past 150 years, academic freedom has been at the center of struggles for democracy and a central tenet of Latin American liberal discourse, but also as the preeminent space for leftist and Marxist organizing. Our study of Chavismo and socialist student supporters in Venezuela reveal elements of this tension. The socialist student activists we interviewed showed ambivalence toward both liberalism as a broad concept and academic freedom in its concrete instantiation in Venezuela. On the one hand, most of our socialist students embraced liberalism as an historically important ideal, as well as academic freedom. On the other hand, they argued that Venezuela’s autonomous public universities were not spaces of open debate but rather actively marginalized and repressed leftist ideas. They suggested autonomous public universities basically served to educate privileged young people and serve the needs of capital. Our socialist respondents tended to believe in open spaces of research, teaching and debate as long as they were “constructive” and “well-intentioned,” and preferably in line with the societal and national goals. A control group of non-socialist student activists did show a more robust embrace of liberalism and academic freedom. We suggest that our socialist students are best understood as post-liberal. They understand socialism more as an alternative to the poverty, inequality and obstacles they have faced and observed than as a wholesale rejection of liberalism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 31. New Perspectives on Revolutions Old and New