(Entry by Andrés
Bernasconi)
PROPHE Summary:
A survey of 120 high school seniors revealed that two thirds of the
respondents would not consider applying to the University of Chile,
as a result of the one-month long occupation of the administrative campus
by a group of student government leaders protesting against the government's
financial aid policy, and what they consider is the privatization of
public universities. The rector of the University has pointed at this
survey as an example of the damage to the reputation of the institution
that students can bring about with their disruptive actions.
For the full story, see "Conflicto universitario: "Escolares
no quieren entrar a la Universidad," June 25, 2005.
PROPHE Observation:
The survey ought to be taken cautiously, given its sample size of 120
out of over 150,000 potential applicants, and the possible bias involved
in the fact that those surveyed were attending a university entrance
test preparation academy. Moreover, the occupation of university buildings,
extremely unpopular among Chilean students (who pay high tuitions to
attend private and public universities), has acquired a highly ritualized
character, whereby protesting students avoid interfering with academic
activities, interrupting instead administrative operations, a strategy
deliberately more fitting to engage top university and national authorities
and to capture the attention of the press, than to galvanize the faculty
or the student body.
The implied flight of prospective students to more peaceful and
orderly universities (typically private) evokes the drain from public
institutions of the elites that in the past ended up populating the
new, strike-free private universities in Latin America. The rector of
the University of Chile, knowingly, plays to that image, in an effort
to erode student mobilization.
However, the alleged damage the image of the University of Chile
may derive from these events is overblown. Disturbances of this kind
happen every year in the University of Chile as in many public universities
throughout the country, most often, as in this case of protest against
the new student loan law (see Chile news feature of June 05), a reaction
of leaders of student organizations against national higher policy rather
than to internal affairs of the universities. These protests notwithstanding,
the University of Chile has continued to be the second most selective
university in the country (its freshmen cohort has the second best average
scores in the national university entrance test), a trend that so far
has seemed impervious to student strikes. This is not to dismiss the
dangers that disorder can often present to public universities, in Chile
and elsewhere in Latin America, thereby opening opportunities for private
institutions.
