Aftermath of Mexican UNAM student strike

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Since this is only available to subscribers and it is of exceptional 
interest, I am posting the entire article.)

Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2003

A Socialist University or a Capitalist One?

Issues raised by a strike persist at Mexico's largest postsecondary 
institution

By MARION LLOYD

Mexico City
A dozen students, many with dreadlocks and body piercings, are clustered 
outside the Che Guevara Auditorium, guarding the building as if it were 
their last refuge against a hostile world.

In a sense, it is.

The auditorium, which served as base camp and surrogate home for 
striking students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or 
UNAM, for 10 months in 1999-2000, is the last relic of the struggle that 
paralyzed Latin America's largest institution of higher education.

The '60s-era building, which is part of the Faculty of Philosophy and 
Letters and sits at the heart of the main campus, is plastered with 
banners and spray-painted slogans recalling the strike and its jarring 
end, when several thousand police officers stormed the campus and hauled 
off more than 600 strikers. "The police torture and assassinate" reads 
one message scrawled in dripping red paint next to the entrance, from 
which marijuana smoke wafts freely. "The revolution lives," reads another.

Despite an effort by the university to take back the auditorium in the 
weeks after the strike was halted, the building remains the informal 
headquarters of a small group of die-hard strike organizers and a visual 
reminder of their cause.

But elsewhere at UNAM, there is little visible evidence of the strike, 
which began four years ago last month when students and professors 
walked out en masse to protest a proposed tuition increase, and did not 
end until 10 months later, in February 2000.

Administrators later abandoned the measure -- which would have increased 
tuition from a few token cents to $145 a year -- as well as other 
proposed steps aimed at improving academic standards for the 135,000 
students at the university level. (UNAM also runs a system of high 
schools with 100,000 students.) The strikers forged on with other 
demands, however, and the standoff did not end until the government 
deployed thousands of police officers to the campus and jailed hundreds 
of strikers.

Then began the daunting task of rebuilding, both physically and 
psychologically. The university looked like it had been through a civil 
war, with barbed wire and broken glass littering the four-square-mile 
main campus in southern Mexico City. The campus, a vast, cactus-strewn 
oasis of botanical gardens and sweeping lawns that feels worlds away 
from the teeming metropolis around it, is so self-contained -- with its 
own police force, Olympic stadium, and bus system -- that it is known as 
University City.

Although the university long ago cleared the physical debris from the 
strike and is trying to project a fresh image, significant political 
tensions remain. In particular, the debate over how populist or elitist 
UNAM should be reflects a debate over where the country itself should be 
headed.

Tarnished Reputation

The strike drove 40,000 of the university's students away and left its 
30,000 faculty members deeply divided. Equally troubling, UNAM's 
reputation was tarnished after nearly a year in which the news media 
portrayed the university as a haven for rabid leftists and anarchists.

But under the leadership of a new rector, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, who 
was appointed seven months into the strike, the administration set about 
building bridges between rival groups. Dr. de la Fuente, a former 
federal health secretary with a long track record at UNAM, also ordered 
a $150,000 public-relations campaign that highlighted the unique 
offerings of the 450-year-old institution. Within a year of the strike, 
the university had regained its former enrollment and garnered a record 
number of research prizes, administrators say.

"The university is totally recovered," says Nestor Martínez, a former 
journalist whom the rector brought in to lead the publicity campaign. 
"We might even be stronger than before."

Indeed, many at the national university appear eager to forget that the 
strike ever happened.

"If you hear the word 'strike,' most people would say 'no' and then 
they'd run," says Yaneth Villegas, 19, a second-year law student, who, 
like a third of UNAM's college students, holds down a full-time job in 
addition to her classes. "We want to study. Most people feel that way."

However, she and other students cite the damage done to the university's 
image by the strike, and particularly by the news media's coverage of 
it, which they say exacerbated existing discrimination against UNAM 
graduates in the job market. It is not uncommon for private companies to 
post job listings with the qualifier "UNAM graduates need not apply." 
Employers are concerned that UNAM graduates will be lazy or lack the 
sophistication of private-school graduates. The practice began in the 
1980s, after a flood of private universities opened their doors, and has 
become more common since the strike, say students and professors.

"The university's prestige had fallen because of TV coverage," says 
Gabriela Cruz, another second-year law student, who is sprawled on the 
lawn in front of the university's iconic library. The building, designed 
by the architect Juan O'Gorman and adorned with one of his famous tile 
murals of Mexican history, houses the country's version of the Library 
of Congress. The library is emblematic of the key role that UNAM plays 
in Mexican public life, with university researchers providing such 
services as monitoring a dozen active volcanoes and drafting proposals 
for government fiscal reform.

Persistent Image

Now, other university activities are more likely to make headlines.

"They created this image that we were all thugs who stripped 
professors," says Ms. Cruz, referring to an incident in February 2001, 
in which radical students forced political-science professors to strip 
down to their underwear and march around in the cold. The incident, 
which marked the first anniversary of the police raid on the campus, was 
one of several violent clashes after the strike ended.

When the strike started, Ms. Cruz and Ms. Villegas joined their 
classmates at UNAM high schools in handing out pamphlets and boycotting 
classes. "At the beginning, we all participated," says Ms. Villegas. 
"We're against raising tuition. But then other interests took over -- 
labor unions, political interests."

Indeed, many observers argue that the standoff had as much to do with 
politics -- in particular, the heated campaign leading up to the July 
2000 presidential election -- as with the future of the university. The 
administration was aligned with the long-ruling Institutional 
Revolutionary Party, or PRI, while the strikers had the support of the 
leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD. Each party accused 
the other of working behind the scenes to keep the strike going in order 
to make the other party look bad. In the end, a third party, the 
conservative National Action Party, or PAN, won the presidency, ending 
the PRI's 71-year-old hold on power.

But the strike was also fueled by real differences of opinion over the 
future of the university, a division that persists.

"The strike didn't end. It was ended," says Imanol Ordorika, a research 
professor at UNAM's Institute for Economic Studies and a former student 
activist, who led a similar protest strike at the university in 1986-87. 
He says that the forced end to the recent strike had "grave 
consequences," creating a situation of "contained rage" among a small 
sector of the community and weary indifference among the rest.

In that context, he questions whether a proposed university congress -- 
one of the administration's concessions to striking students -- will 
help in resolving decades-old disputes. The congress, about which each 
side says the other is procrastinating, would have representatives of 
students, faculty and staff members, and administrators, and would 
consist of panel discussions of topics such as faculty promotions and 
controversial admissions requirements for UNAM high-school students. 
However, the debate over what proportion of the participants would be 
students has stalled planning for the congress. Many doubt whether it 
will ever happen.

National Debate

The debate over the future character of the UNAM in many ways mirrors 
the conflict Mexico as a whole is facing, between its populist past and 
its halting march toward a free-market future.

On one side are the pro-democracy advocates and more-radical leftist 
groups, who want broader representation for students and faculty members 
in university decision-making. They also oppose most efforts to apply 
more rigorous standards for university admissions and faculty 
promotions, as well as attempts to open up more seats for graduates of 
Mexico's private high schools. And they are against all attempts to make 
students bear part of the burden of their education. (Mexico's 
Constitution guarantees free education, but does not clearly state 
whether higher education is included.)

On the other side of the debate are UNAM administrators, who are facing 
government pressure to find new sources of money. The federal government 
now provides 90 percent of the university's $15-billion annual budget, 
which administrators say is grossly inadequate to keep up with the 
growing costs of research. The institution produces 50 percent of the 
country's published papers and books and conducts half of 
state-supported research, but the quality of science is suffering 
because of a lack of support, the administrators argue.

They also want to improve academic standards to ensure that the 
university remains competitive with the dozens of new private 
institutions that have opened in the past two decades.

"There is no university, either public or private, that can compete with 
the UNAM. But there is always room for improvement," says José Narro, 
director of the institution's medical school and an organizer of the 
proposed university congress. He acknowledges that the campus remains 
polarized, but he is optimistic that the congress will achieve a consensus.

"Everyone wants to see this university become a better place, with 
improved academic standards," says Dr. Narro, who is a close ally of 
UNAM's rector.

But Dr. Narro, who is seen by many as the strategist behind the rector's 
peacemaking style, says that no one in the administration is considering 
raising tuition, the most explosive issue on the campus.

"The government has to look for other sources of funding. But it doesn't 
have to look for them in the pockets of the students," he says, 
explaining that the proposed measure to raise tuition would only have 
generated 3 percent of the budget. "Clearly, that's not the solution."

First World Model?

But critics question where the additional money will come from, and how 
the new emphasis on fund raising will affect the university.

"There is a huge pressure on the UNAM to change into something it's not, 
to follow the first-world model of elite institutions geared toward 
producing patents," says Mr. Ordorika, who has a Ph.D. in social 
sciences and education from Stanford University. He cites statistics 
from 1998, when, he says, Mexico produced 57 patents compared with 
86,000 in the United States.

"What kind of university model do you promote in a country where people 
are still dying of hunger?" he asks. "There needs to be a social 
mission. But they're pushing us to compete with the U.S. The strike just 
exacerbated that tendency."

Those arguments hold sway with the students at the Che Guevara 
Auditorium, where organizers from the student movement still meet. They 
accuse the administration of President Vincente Fox of trying to 
privatize the university, noting the string of public institutions that 
have been sold off by the government since the early 1990s.

"We're against the charging of money for every service," says Héctor 
Galindo, a law student who served as legal adviser to jailed students 
after the strike. "We say that if we let them advance by a single peso, 
they'll keep charging." He cites a university-run Internet cafe, which 
he says charges $1.50 per hour compared with the standard $1-an-hour fee 
outside the university. "Now you tell me if that's not capitalism!" he says.

Pablo Torres, a third-year psychology student who was eating lunch at 
the auditorium's grill, nods his head solemnly. "They're trying to 
change the ideology of the school. That's what's underneath it all," he 
says, citing what he says is a troubling sign. "I mean, in my psychology 
classes, they no longer teach Marx!"

Other people at UNAM, however, dismiss such views as the conspiracy 
theories of a radical minority. Administrators are more concerned with 
restructuring the graduate schools and introducing new programs, such as 
a major in biotechnology and a doctorate in nursing, than in pursuing 
politics. Probably the largest single change under way at UNAM is the 
new coordination between the graduate schools and the research 
institutions, which previously had almost no contact.

Needing New Blood

The university is also grappling with ways of bringing younger blood 
into its faculty. Currently, the average age of professors at UNAM is 
55, according to a study by Mr. Ordorika. The reasons for the aging 
trend are twofold. The state-mandated pension system reduces professors' 
modest salaries by up to 75 percent after they retire, so few can afford 
to stop working. And younger academics often prefer to take jobs at 
private universities, where salaries tend to be higher. A continuing 
publicity campaign, which emphasizes the university's unparallelled 
breadth of courses and facilities, seeks to make UNAM more attractive to 
prospective students and professors. And there are plans to expand 
scholarships to top students who are at risk of having to leave school 
for financial reasons.

For most college students in Mexico City -- including those who want to 
see changes -- UNAM remains the only option.

"There are certain people here who just want to cause trouble," says 
Antonio Cruz Quintas, 32, a philosophy-and-letters undergraduate. He 
says he is grateful to the university for allowing him to continue his 
studies after a hiatus of six years, during which he worked as a waiter 
to support his family.

"The UNAM is still the most important university in Mexico," he says. 
"Nothing is going to change that."



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