The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela 9781503634749, 9781503636026

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy
Chapter 2 The Rise and Fall of Academic Autonomy: The University as a Historic Battlefield
Chapter 3 Evaluation Matters: Teachers’ Training at an Alternative University
Chapter 4 The Children of the Revolution and the Matrisociality of the Benevolent State
Chapter 5 Generation(s) of Protests at a Revolutionary University
Conclusion
Epilogue (De)colonial Silences in the Hierarchy of Global Knowledge Production
References
Index

Citation preview

The Alternative University

Anthropology of Policy

Cris Shore and Susan Wright, editors

The Alternative University Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela

Mariya P. Ivancheva

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2023 by Mariya P. Ivancheva. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ivancheva, Mariya P., author. Title: The alternative university : lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela / Mariya P. Ivancheva. Other titles: Anthropology of policy (Stanford, Calif.) Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Series: Anthropology of policy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022047329 (print) | LCCN 2022047330 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503634749 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503636026 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela. | Higher education and state—Venezuela. | Educational change—Venezuela. | Alternative education—Venezuela. | Education, Higher—Political aspects—Venezuela. Classification: LCC LE76.C28 I93 2023 (print) | LCC LE76.C28 (ebook) | DDC 379.87—dc23/eng/20230213 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022047329 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022047330 Cover photograph: Andrej Lisakov/Unsplash Cover illustration: Adobe Stock Cover designer: Kevin Barrett Kane

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction

1

1

The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy

21

2

The Rise and Fall of Academic Autonomy: The University as a Historic Battlefield

47

3

Evaluation Matters: Teachers’ Training at an Alternative University

77

4

The Children of the Revolution and the Matrisociality of the Benevolent State

108

5

Generation(s) of Protests at a Revolutionary University

135

Conclusion

Epilogue: (De)colonial Silences in the Hierarchy of Global Knowledge Production

161 167

References179 Index197

Acknowledgments

It seems that a few lives have gone by between writing the first draft of this book and its current iteration. In this period, a multitude of people have passed through my life and made a significant impact on me, personally, politically, and intellectually, but some have influenced this piece of work more than others, so this acknowledgment is for them. Before all, a warm, immense ¡muchísimas gracias! goes to the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV) community in 2008–11 who took part in my fieldwork. While some are named in this book, others I have presented under pseudonyms, so I will not list them here, but you know who you are. This book is aimed not as a lesson I teach but as my modest attempt to reflect on some of the lessons you taught me with the fierce energy, love, and rage you invested in the UBV project. Eternal gratitude goes to Alexandra Kowalski at the Central European University (CEU), then supervisor and since a mentor, who took pains—and hopefully some pleasure—to support my unruly mind with monumental theoretical knowledge and inspiration and dexterous, caring focus on detail. At CEU, all faculty were helpful and supportive, but Prem Kumar Rajaram, András Bozóki, and Thomas Rooney stand tall: their guidance and confidence meant a lot to me. The work on this book has been influenced by the debates in the intellectual space of the PhD program in sociology and social anthropology at CEU, Budapest, and the Marie Curie SocAnth Program for Anthropology in Central and Eastern Europe. In Budapest, Tamás Gáspár Miklós, Don Kalb, Margit Feischmidt, and Attila Melegh first encouraged Eastern Europeans in my generation to articulate a globally informed Left critique amid the “desert of post-socialism.” In Caracas, I was hosted by the Centre for Advanced Studies of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC). Hebe Vessuri generously and patiently introduced me to the complex link between Latin America’s Left struggles and higher education: our deep conversations still stay with me. Matt vii

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Wilde, Juan Espinoza, José Orozco, Alessia Fulvimari, Evile Hernández, Gabriel Hetland, Karin Bernard, Josant Kilka, Ramon Torres, Oscar Reyes Matute, and Ben Jacob were all sources of warmth and light. During my moves I crossed paths with nurturing humans who added milk and honey to the bread-and-butter plight of precarious academia, such as Justus Aungo, Ola Lis, Uku Lember, Julieta Nagy-Navarro, Agnes Gagyi, Tibor Meszmann, Elissa Helms, Ovidiu Pop, Krisztina Racz, Miruna Voiculescu, Manuela Zechner, Bue Hansen, Ronit Lentin, Kathryn Keating, Rebecca Swartz, Anastasia Riabchuk, Tove V., Katerina Gachevska, Nely Konstantinova, Gabriella Alberti, David Harvie, Tomasz John, Ana Vilenica, Alex Drace-Francis, Tony Phillips, and Jésica Pla. I am in debt to them and other friends in Sofia, Budapest, Vienna, Dublin, Cape Town, Leeds, Buenos Aires, and Glasgow who hold space for me in their lives despite my constant travels. The long-term friendship especially of Stefan Krastev, Neda Deneva-Faje, Florin Faje (rest in power), Alexander Mirchev, Evelina Miteva, Stanislava Markovska, Simona Staykova, Stanimir Panayotov, Martin Fotta, Catherine Friedrich, Gergo Pulay, and Mary N. Taylor always felt like home. Duncan Bickley harbored me in these last months of writing in his giantly caring ways. Returning from Caracas in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, at the peak of the Occupy protest wave, and with new awareness of global injustices and inequalities, I got involved in anticapitalist politics not as an option but as an urgency. Collective work with comrades, especially in LeftEast, PrecAnthro and the European Association of Social Anthropology, and LevFem, is often taxing but offers a rigorous, systematic, yet benevolent test to my ideas and real-life praxis. At Stanford University Press, I was lucky to work with series editors Cris Shore and Sue Wright, whose work has been very influential to me, and with Dylan Kyung-lim White and his team on refining the manuscript. This book was physically possible thanks to Wenner Gren and Marie Curie doctoral stipends, my open-ended contract from and the caring collegial environment at the University of Strathclyde’s School of Education, and my aunt Elena Serbinova who provided me with a safe, warm haven in Sofia when the global pandemic of COVID-19 wrecked havoc on our own, as on so many other families. This book is for my mom, Diana; dad, Plamen; and twin brother, Stefan, for everything they have given, taught, inspired, and allowed me to be. They have been my harshest critics but have also provided the most nurturing, un-

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ix

conditionally loving and supportive home to always count on and come back to. They have also served as my relentless moral compass when navigating the contradictions of financial poverty and symbolic privilege of my middle-class childhood in post-socialist Bulgaria and my migrant life in capitalist democracies in the Global North and South. They keep my faith in and embody the daily struggle for a better, more humane world.

 

The Alternative University

Introduction

The research for this book started a turbulent decade ago. The global financial crisis had just been publicly declared and openly discussed in the mainstream media. Yet the sense of disaster and urgency that a lot of us experience today in regard to the rise of authoritarian regimes, localized wars, and armed conflicts escalating into a discreet global war, intensified economic warfare against the poor and precarious, the impending ecological catastrophe, and the global pandemics of COVID-19 was still not in the air. The Latin American “pink tide,” of which Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian socialism was a harbinger, had just peaked with the elections of Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2005; the World Social forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, under the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006; and the rise to power of Rafael Correa in Ecuador in 2007. After the demise of the Socialist Bloc in the 1990s, the disastrous embargo against Cuba, and the Gulf War in the 1990s, this new development at the turn of the twenty-first century attracted the attention of the Left in the Global North and South with hopes for the resurgence of egalitarian projects for social change amid the ashes of global neoliberal capture. Unlike the NGO-driven transitions to liberal democracy experienced by both Latin America and Eastern Europe in the previous decades (Cohen and Arato 1992; Gagyi and Ivancheva 2019), alternative models of institutional design offered by democratic socialist regimes such as Bolivarian Venezuela were not copied from the developed world. They were genuinely novel models that inspired policy makers and practitioners to emerge from a stalemate of imagination or postcolonial melancholia (Gilroy 2006) that lamented the past of the welfare state that only served a small number of privileged citizens of the developed world (Clarke 2010). This was all the more needed given the normalization of the “there is no alternative” (TINA) dogma utilized as a solution to the crisis

1

2

Introduction

of capitalism in the 1970s and faced with rising cynicism: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than . . . the end of capitalism” (Jameson 1994, xii). Public higher education has been one of the sectors most deeply affected by the crisis. By now, there is an impressive body of knowledge on this process, usually centered around the decline of the public university under intensified audit, commercialization, and privatization (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Strathern 2000; Giroux 2007; Holmwood 2011; Shore and Wright 2015). Authors have critically examined how market-driven university reforms based on quantified indices of academic quality reinforce the global consensus of excellence modeled on Anglo-American privately endowed research universities (Frank and Meyer 2007; Marginson 2008; Lynch 2015). To respond to the new standards, even before the global crisis of 2008, public universities around the world have turned their backs on crisis-struck communities and followed neo-managerial incentives to commercialize higher education (Wright and Rabo 2010; Lynch 2015). Quantified audit, evaluation, and rankings have led to the deterioration of university workers’ and students’ labor and learning conditions under ever-growing debt, precarious contracts, gruesome workloads, publication, fund-raising, and mobility pressures that produce insecurity over the present and anxiety about the future (Gill 2009; Lynch and Ivancheva 2015; Hall 2018). A new wave of outsourcing and automation of academic labor, fragmentation, deprofessionalization, and stratification of the profession and the unbundling of higher education (Macfarlane 2011; Komljenovic and Robertson 2016; McCowan 2017; Ivancheva and Garvey 2022) has shifted the responsibility increasingly onto individual students as fee-paying “customers” (Tomlinson 2018) and onto the public universities to train the workforce for the private sector (Boden and Nedeva 2010). Public universities have meanwhile reneged on their social mission and joined forces with corporations in profit-seeking, income-generation enterprises (Swartz et al. 2019; Ivancheva et al. 2020). As a result, a growing reserve army of scholars and students, who enter precarious working and living arrangements, joined multiple waves of public unrest in both developed and developing countries (Cini and Guzmán-Concha 2017). Yet even the most visible critics and campaigns, which provided in-depth critique to the system, were never in a position to put forward, let alone implement, integral proposals for alternative institutional organization, curriculum, and evaluation. The production of critique around ever-growing discontent in

Introduction

3

the sector worldwide has not been matched by the production of alternative visions and scenarios for the sector. Within this framework, the higher education reform of Hugo Chávez’s government, the subject of this book, went against the dominant “wisdoms” in the sector professing commodification, privatization, and marketization of university education (Hotson 2011). The promise of free access to everyone who wished to study, the decolonization of the curriculum, the applied fieldwork with poor communities, and the attention to intersectional inequalities in the classroom and to knowledge production and training alliances in the Global South all went against the grain of “leading” developments in higher education (Murh and Verger 2006; Ivancheva 2013). This reform offered an opportune moment to reflect on one alternative university experiment put into practice. The book is based on my fieldwork in the period 2008–11 at the main sites of higher education reform in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas—the campus of the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), the Ministry of Higher Education, the office of Misión Sucre, one of the new government programs (or missions, in symbol-heavy evangelic language) for poverty alleviation—and also at spaces of intellectual debate, teachers’ training, and remote classrooms (aldeas universitarias). It outlines the historical origins and day-to-day functioning of the colossal and quixotic effort of late president Hugo Chávez’s government to create a university that challenges national and global higher education norms. In the book, I historicize the structural conditions and individual and collective agency behind UBV, which served as the vanguard institution of the higher education reform. I scrutinize not just the policy blueprints but also the individual and group histories behind the higher education policy. Through participant observation with actors engaged in the project of UBV—senior managers, academics, and students—I examine the complex, contradictory visions, policies, and practices but also the personal, political, and professional trajectories and actions that turn the alternative university model into a lived reality. I trace the impact of certain government decisions to legitimate some policy solutions and types of expertise while marginalizing others (Wright and Rabo 2010; Wright and Shore 2017). I show contingent choices that ascribe the alternative university model to the liberal hierarchies reproduced by the global field of higher education (Marginson 2008). By focusing on a single Bolivarian policy—the reform of higher education—I complement more holistic discussions of the Bolivarian revolution,

4

Introduction

vernacularly called “process” (Wilpert 2007; Ellner 2008; Fernandes 2010; Cicariello-Maher 2013, 2016), with a specialized in-depth discussion of one policy and its repercussions through the rest of the Bolivarian process. The focus on policy also allows me to discuss larger-scale legal, political, and economic changes that account for historical and contemporary developments that enabled or constrained the reform of the higher education system. In this, I challenge an established way of speaking of university reform, even within the critical higher education tradition, as somewhat abstracted from the politics and social struggles of the day. Instead of focusing on universities or higher education policy as a separate and parallel set of priorities, connected to abstract “elite reproduction” or “markets” of commodities or even assets, I explain higher education reforms as part of a larger politico-economic power within a nation-state and extended into a global arena. In this context, higher education policies and reforms are related to state politics not as areas disconnected from capitalist markets but as contested fields of power where class struggle happens in a highly acute form (Carnoy and Castells 2001). Understanding higher education in this light allows a grounded, embedded analysis that disentangles the complex balance of powers and interests behind the sector. Thus, I think of the university in a much more integral way, bridging through dialogue academic subfields that often occupy parallel discursive fields: sociology of education, sociology and anthropology of the state, political economy, human geography, employment and labor relations, social movement studies, and social reproduction theory. All of these do not neatly fit into one disciplinary field, but they all bring different textures to the sides and sites of a reform aimed at wider social change. By focusing on a single reform with deep repercussions on all aspects of the Bolivarian project for social change, the book provides a timely explanation of the human agency and structural processes behind the establishment and running of an alternative university project and, partly, of the pink tide of democratic socialism in Latin America. I place the university reform within a lineage of national and international efforts to use higher education as a catalyst for social change. Focusing on UBV—an institution of knowledge production and certification—allows me to explore forms of intellectual intervention without inflating this category. In the book I address a set of interrelated questions: What are the opportunities for and limitations to an alternative higher education project within the contradictions and confines of advanced capitalism? How are these reflected

Introduction

5

within a socialist state project in a semi-peripheral petrol state in the Global South and in which the government holds control neither of the balance of power in the bourgeois state subservient to market logic nor of the broader transnational processes of commercialization and stratification they reinforce? How do hierarchies typical of the higher education field and accelerated by processes of globalization manifest within an uneven national university field confronted with its internal gendered and racialized class dynamic? What are the ways in which such a process is experienced, negotiated, or challenged from within: first by academics and experts who are both its proponents and its main class enemy; and then by its agents, the poor, who are also subjects of its empowerment through education? To answer these questions, I examine the tension between enlightened and egalitarian tendencies in higher education, detailing processes that challenge or reinforce old and produce new inequalities. Instead of focusing on just one group, to depict the process in its full complex texture, I map the trajectories over time of the whole field with its various actors: experts, academics, staff, students, and community activists. I explore how existent and novel structural and symbolic hierarchies condition the relation of these different groups to each other and to the nation-state through its higher education policy. I show how the structural and agentive opportunities the new regime offers are limited by asymmetries of economic and symbolic power: ultimately, beyond certain redistributive initiatives, the class power of old educated elites stays strong while the success of the socialist project rests on its ability to produce affective reality and mobilize the social reproduction labor of women in poor communities. The global field of higher education (Marginson 2008) and the labor market of a semi-peripheral petrol state, with their own logic, hierarchies, and norms, also limit Bolivarian higher education policies. The resistance of traditional academics to both the massification of elite public universities and the accreditation of the new programs of UBV also sabotages the alternative university project. However, in the book I also show some aspects that are less dependent on global and systemic constraints and more on path dependencies of the political culture of petrol states and past socialist experiments. Political opportunities are missed, and responsibility is diffused by tendencies to start from scratch and build new parallel institutions every time resistance appears, to treat expertise as contingent and replaceable, and to circumvent critical feedback from sympathizers. Together with the objective structural constraints,

6

Introduction

these tendencies have reinforced the precariousness of Bolivarian institutions and frustrated higher education’s opportunity to serve as a key tool for national and global social change. In theoretical terms, the book develops three main lines of inquiry that are intricately connected but can also be read independently. I address the theory of the state behind the higher education policy and show a new version of the state operating behind the Bolivarian process. This benevolent state is not present through all-encompassing infrastructural intervention or surveillance and governance technologies (Scott 1998; Das and Poole 2004). Instead, it is omnipresent in the lives of poor communities through affective power of small objects and symbols; through the familiar bodies of local female organizers; and through the politics of fear that even this minimal presence can be easily reversed. The use of surficial rather than structural reforms, however, affects the very sources of political surplus: the Bolivarian process feeds on the unpaid or underpaid reproductive labor of women in poor communities and thus on a matrisocial kinship structure typical of poor communities prior to the Bolivarian government (Hurtado 1998). This structure is also reproduced in Bolivarian higher education: while (especially male) faculty members with traditional academic and radical credentials are championed by their students and colleagues and accreditation and promotion systems, the core legitimacy of UBV’s alternative status depends on work with poor communities brokered by (mostly female) organizers and students. In this, a radical “nobility” (Bourdieu 1998) of former student militants is seen as a key source of academic and political legitimacy for UBV. Yet neither students nor new faculty have had access to traditional higher education and student militancy. And while such contradictions reproduce the asymmetries within the Bolivarian higher education field, the politics of fear, deeply rooted in the historical suppression of the Left in Latin America, is also used to diffuse responsibility for deeper irreversible reforms and defy internal critique against the Bolivarian government or UBV’s senior management. Anthropology provides unique tools to explore the everyday reality of the institutionalization of an egalitarian policy that faces external challenge and internal critique. Using ethnographic writing, I work through the ways in which UBV’s senior managers, faculty, and students were negotiating the contradictions of the transition to a democratic socialism in their own work and life. Discussing some of these key contradictions, this book also offers possible clues

Introduction

7

to, if not fully fledged explanations of, some central internal advancements and limitations of Chavismo, which led to its current decline even before the early death of its leader and pushed many of my research participants to migrate and vote against the new president Nicolás Maduro. I also show some developments that might have already been precursors of the systemic crisis that has developed in Venezuela during Maduro’s regime. While acknowledging the external limitations posed on the mass higher education policy, the book documents some further challenges to the reform, produced by the government and its agents. Thus, this book shows how, while sparking the imagination of radical higher education policy makers and practitioners, the Bolivarian university reform has also stumbled on significant limitations and obstacles. These are only partly due to the agency of the actors engaged in the reform and to a much larger extent are produced by the structural terrain (or field) in which the reform has been set.

Field Site: Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela The principal site of my fieldwork was the main campus of UBV in the Los Chaguaramos neighborhood in Caracas. While UBV’s 2003 inauguration was occasioned by the attempted coup d’état against President Hugo Chávez in 2002, it was also a culmination of the decades-long struggle of the Venezuelan Left to offer universal access to public services to the poor majority of the petrol state (UBV 2003; Wilpert 2007). UBV initially opened its doors to fourteen thousand students at four central facilities: Los Chaguaramos in the metropolitan area of Caracas; and Maracaibo, Punto Fijo, and Ciudad Bolivar in smaller cities (Laberinto 2004, 54). However, the program for mass access called Misión Sucre, of which UBV was a central degree-granting institution, planned for much wider access: beyond the central campus, numerous local classrooms (aldeas universitarias) accounted for an enrollment of over half a million new students. The majority of these students came from marginalized poor rural and urban communities. One of many redistributive policies of the Bolivarian government (misiones) in the health, food, social, and cultural sectors, Misión Sucre aimed to provide rapid solutions to glaring social inequalities. Together with the programs for literacy (Robinson I), primary education (Robinson II), and secondary vocational training (Ribas) (Wilpert 2007), Misión Sucre made higher

8

Introduction

education de facto universal. Controlled from Caracas’s Misión Sucre Foundation, based at the Ministry of Higher Education, the program aimed to redistribute public funding to a network of degree-granting university facilities. UBV, the Military Academy (UNEFA), and the Maritime Academy (UMC) ran their own programs but also served the students of thousands of “municipalized” aldeas universitarias following the Cuban example, which took over night shifts of schools, community centers, main squares of villages, and living rooms all around the country. UBV was responsible for half the students certified through the program. It had campuses with central facilities (sedes) in a number of Venezuelan cities, and its students at sedes and aldeas received stipends. As a response to the historical struggles for social change in a country characterized by extreme social inequalities, UBV was a university with deep political roots. When oil was discovered in Venezuela in the early twentieth century, the former Spanish colony shifted from one single crop (cocoa) to another (crude), but its so-called Dutch disease economy remained subject to neocolonial global market interests served by creole elites (Coronil 1997). Even after the end of strong-man feudal regimes (caudillismo) and the 1950s dictatorship, the knowledge-intensive oil industry was served by a handful of elite public universities (Lopéz, Canino, and Vessuri 2007). In response to the Academic Renovation student protests in 1969 when the University Law (1970) created new public and private universities, a two-tier system was created under the guise of massification. A handful of prestigious but politically unruly “autonomous” universities were outnumbered by centrally controlled “experimental” ones. Because of the deep political and economic crises in the 1980s and the commitment of liberal governments to Washington consensus reforms, budget cuts across the public sector stranded massification (Lander 1996; Stephany 2006). Public universities were pushed to introduce an entry exam and fees, and the system was destined to privatization, which never happened as Left-leaning academics and students rioted at autonomous universities and joined popular protests such as the Caracazo (Lopéz 2005). This violently suppressed rebellion against price hikes in February 1989, days after the agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was signed, galvanized contention (López-Maya 2002), including a 1992 military rebellion. Its leader, Hugo Chávez, assumed political responsibility and after an eventually amnestied prison sentence won a democratic election in 1998 (Ellner 2008).

Introduction

9

The creation of UBV and its aldeas four years later came at a specific critical juncture (Kalb and Tak 2005). The new university was eventually founded after traditional universities stayed silent or supported the 2002 coup and the early 2003 strike by twenty thousand high-skilled workers in the national company Petrol of Venezuela (Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. PDVSA), who sabotaged oil production (Wilpert 2007). Staged by key commercial actors connected to chambers of commerce (FEDECAMARAS), supported by the opposition and mainstream media, and funded by US developmental agencies (Golinger 2005), these events showed that the Venezuelan rich, predominantly white, and proAmerican elite negated the will of the democratic majority. This was a chilling lesson for many left-wing academics. Initially skeptical about the new president, they eventually recognized their own values in his emancipatory anti-imperialist rhetoric and progressive policies. Ironically, by that time the autonomy that the academic Left had gained through bloody struggles in the past was used against its new projects. Entrenching themselves at traditional universities and state agencies, anti-Chavista academics and experts blocked government reforms on their turf. When UBV emerged as a parallel “experimental” university, they denied its accreditation, thus reinforcing the two-tier system. Nevertheless, the establishment of UBV had strategic significance. Accommodated in an emptied Venezuelan Petrol (PDVSA) office in Caracas, UBV’s main campus became a symbol of the Bolivarian Revolution or “process”—a name given by Chávez to the path to democratic socialism he gradually embraced. UBV addressed three urgent needs at once: to produce new loyal educated cadres, to universalize university access, and to decolonize knowledge production. Massification accelerated at an unprecedented rate. Between 1990 and 1998 the number of students enrolled in public higher education was rather stagnant, but from 1998 to 2007 it rapidly increased. In 1998 some 44 percent of higher education students were enrolled in private institutions. Between 2000 and 2007 the private institutions increased by only 72 percent, while the public ones saw 231 percent growth: by the end of this period, the latter had 2,135,146 students, of which Misión Sucre hosted over 500,000 (González Deluca 2008). By 2021 over 600,000 were reported to have graduated from Misión Sucre alone (VTV 2021). It had 1,317 aldeas (INE 2013, 94) in 2013 and 2,400 in 2021. In official documents, all students admitted into programs of UBV and the aldeas were called triumphant (triunfadores). In 2010 alone 464,368 were reported as completing their education in the aldeas of Misión Sucre (INE 2013, 102). That same

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Introduction

year, 10,159 graduated with a midterm exit as a Superior University Technician (Técnico Superior Universitario, TUS), and 44,051 graduated with a BA (Licenciatura) (INE 2013, 99). In two years’ time, the number of TUS graduates tripled to 30,679, and Licenciatura graduates grew to 63,896 (INE 2013, 99). UBV’s founding document and mission statement, the Rector’s Paper (Documento Rector), presented alternative higher education based on the principles of participative protagonist democracy (UBV 2003; Lugo 2017). It pledged to achieve national integration in two ways: economic, by giving poor students access to the labor markets; and social, by opening the university’s doors to the wider community. Its aim was to develop a model to serve the postcolonial space and the Global South. To match this ambition, UBV was based on the principles of liberation theology as adopted in the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (UBV 2003). It aimed to challenge the vertical power dynamics in the classroom between “masters” and “disciples.” UBV’s curricular design also opposed disciplinary compartmentalization (UBV 2003): all subjects were related to the envisaged structural transformation of the country, and all fields had to work toward it through the core module “citizenship project” (Proyecto Bolivariano de Nueva Ciudadania). In this mandatory module throughout their studies, students were to use their specialist knowledge in collective community-organizing initiatives in an urban or rural poor community. This was to empower the poor to mobilize and understand the value of their own knowledge, not as secondary but as a key to social transformation. UBV’s launch by Presidential Decree 2517 on 18 July 2003 and hundreds of thousands of new places opened in Misión Sucre’s programs required the recruitment of thousands of faculty members to teach the new students. To create a legitimate university, all faculty members needed to have some experience in higher education. This was a challenge in a country that had a scarcity of academically trained cadres, trained its program experts abroad, and had a limited number of postgraduate programs hosted by traditional universities (López, Canino, and Vessuri 2007). Due to their resistance to the Bolivarian project, not many university-educated Venezuelans wished to join UBV. Many treated it with contempt. UBV founders also wished to recruit politically committed people who were loyal to the government and understood the historical need of a mass higher education project. The new Bolivarian educators, often the first generation into higher education and trained at traditional universities, underwent both intensive teaching programs that often enrolled mature stu-

Introduction

11

dents freshly out of the literacy programs and intensive postgraduate training to develop academic profiles that allowed UBV to accredit its programs. Once hired, they also had to undergo an awareness-raising program (sensibilización) and a competitive job-application (concurso de oposición) process to get confirmed in their jobs. A high school diploma or its Misión Ribas equivalent was a minimum requirement for students to enroll. After submission of proof of having finished high school studies, students went through the so-called Program for University Initiation (Programa de Iniciación Universitaria), consisting of introductory courses where gaps in their entry knowledge were addressed in three mandatory units: language and communication, mathematics, and a shorter course on Venezuela in the global context (MES 2006, 6–7). The program was not graded, and even if some students were encouraged to take the introductory classes again, no one was failed. After they passed, all students were eligible to attend classes. While other students were not discouraged, most students came from previously excluded social groups who were also the target electorate of the government and beneficiaries of its social programs: workers, peasants, indigenous people, and descendants of former slaves brought by colonial powers from the African continent. UBV aimed to address historic discrimination by giving these groups, exposed to abysmal poverty, long-denied access to the education and labor markets. The first three programs UBV opened were legal studies, media and communications, and environmental policy, soon followed by social management, public health, education, politics and government, architecture, medicine, information technology, agrarian studies, and petrol studies. Students were encouraged to take computer literacy classes and to train in languages. Except for the usual English, French, Portuguese, and Italian, not only languages such as Chinese and Arabic but also sign language, Braille, and later on indigenous languages such as Wayuunaiki, Warao, Pemón, and Kariña were made freely available to students, at least at the UBV campus in Caracas (YVKE 2016). Students were also exposed to extracurricular classes in arts (cinema, dance, poetry) and to an ample range of political events. Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean identities were not only welcome but also celebrated at UBV during special festive occasions, dedicated discussions, and special attention in the curriculum to the histories and culture of their communities. The presence in almost every classroom of students with disabilities, treated with respect and assisted by faculty

12

Introduction

and peers through special programs and events, made UBV feel inclusive, not in discourse only. In practical terms, the classes at UBV’s main campus in Los Chaguaramos, Caracas, where I carried out a significant proportion of my fieldwork, took place in three shifts. The morning shifts were mostly attended by young Venezuelan and other Latin American students on a scholarship who had the resources and free time or by elderly people who studied after their retirement. The afternoon shift was attended mostly by part-time working young students and by single mothers who could afford to leave their children with a member of their family or community. Some adult learners working at the university facility as janitors, canteen staff, and in other maintenance capacities also took the afternoon classes. The evening shift was mostly attended by full-time blue- and white-collar workers. Conscious of this, faculty members tried to treat students from all age cohorts and backgrounds in an equitable manner, taking individual circumstances into consideration. The fact that students from all walks of life and people from up to three generations, sometimes within the same family, would attend the same departments and even the same classroom made for thrilling discussions. UBV and aldeas of Misión Sucre supported registered students with full scholarship. In 2009, the scholarship was 200 Bolivares Fuertes (BsF) a month, the equivalent of US$40, while the national minimum salary was 900 BsF, then equivalent to US$180. UBV’s central sedes offered free access to a canteen and further services, and students were also subject to other redistributive policies concerning health, food, and other items. To study this reality, I spent most of my days around the UBV campus in Caracas, attending classes, extracurricular activities, and events and speaking to students, faculty, staff, and senior managers. Occasionally, I would also go to the Ministry of Higher Education and related agencies to conduct interviews, go to aldeas in and beyond Caracas, or attend Proyecto trips with groups from UBV-Caracas. By the time I finished my fieldwork, some of my interlocutors had become friends with whom I would hang out for coffee or meals or attend political and cultural events. Thus, the presentation of the fieldwork that follows is one of a multisited ethnography (Marcus 1995) rather than a study of a bounded community. It shows—in the tradition of anthropology of policy—the different spaces, faces, and phases of a complex reform. I have also combined ethnographic analysis with review of historical and secondary materials, as well as a political economy based on the material realities of my field site as positioned

Introduction

13

within the global field of higher education. Thus, while I spent a lot of time in and around UBV’s key campus, each one of my ethnographic chapters works through different scales at which the reform is implemented and enacted, groups that put it into practice and embody it, and the symbolic and material environment in which the policy process is immersed. Clearly, this blueprint serves more to designate some lines of development of the institution and thus my inquiry rather than to paint, on its own, the complex picture of my field site. In the rest of the book, and the following brief summary of the chapters, I discuss some of the advancements but also serious challenges that UBV encountered from its early days. This description is important to understand what I think was a truly magnanimous effort for socially just higher education. The critical observations and points that follow are less to critique the project itself than to show the limitations that anyone who attempts an alternative university project such as UBV might face when putting such a blueprint into practice within the confines of advanced capitalism.

Book Overview The five chapters are followed by a short conclusion and a longer epilogue. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the lived reality of the university. Chapter 1 sets the dramatic and lively scene in which the book takes place: the contested public space of Caracas. Instead of locating the higher education reform solely in the university halls, I show the broader arena of the city, riddled with inequality, where UBV operates. Starting with the involvement of UBV students and faculty in the referendum campaign for a constitutional amendment to remove term limits for the president, I discuss the ways the cityscape is divided, and every document, symbol, or piece of repurposed infrastructure becomes an affective agent in a polarized political battlefield. The historical divide that scars the social tissue of Venezuela gets activated by the Bolivarian movement through a politics of fear, producing state affect: rendering the state symbolically legible while limited in effecting at least partly irreversible structural reform as an asset of twenty-first-century socialism (Mészáros 2008). Chapter 2 shows how the notion of academic autonomy—so central to Latin America’s public universities—has played a somewhat ironic role in Venezuela’s university reform. Protected by progressive student movements through Venezuela’s liberal democracy, it was first circumvented and then uti-

14

Introduction

lized strategically by the main opponents of the former militants to resist Bolivarian reforms at autonomous public universities. I discuss these developments through key turning points in Venezuela’s university mobilizations and as expressed in the trajectory of María Egilda Castellano, the mastermind of UBV and Misión Sucre. The missed opportunities to support university radicals and reform traditional universities early on in the Bolivarian process, as well as the frequent changes in the higher education policy and rotation of expert cadres such as Castellano, are telling concerning the regime’s limitation on creating sustainable institutions. Chapter 3 zooms in on the interactions between two groups of academics: the “radical nobility” of former militants from traditional universities who joined state power and UBV’s senior management; and the new Bolivarian educators. The latter lacked both traditional academic and radical credentials of the former militants, which merged into what I call “revolutionary capital.” Yet they had to perform two tasks at once: to challenge academic conventions while also accumulating traditional university credentials to remain at work and accredit UBV. Antagonized by strong rhetoric against the middle class, unmet promises for social mobility, and growing insecurity and pressures, many were pushed out of UBV and away from Venezuela. I discuss these contradictions through an ethnographic account of UBV’s faculty training program. Chapter 4 focuses on teaching and learning at UBV. Faculty members and students took pride in teaching with and being exposed to the methods of critical pedagogy, while still holding in highest esteem charismatic male academics with traditional academic and radical credentials. UBV students’ expectations for upward mobility were stifled by the unreformed job market. Yet the “hidden curriculum” of UBV worked on other levels: informal learning and class awareness raising were central to the experiences of students from poor communities and made them invest in un(der)paid community organizing work, and the outreach program Proyecto served foremost as a tool for the socialization of the state into poor communities where it had previously been absent or violently present. Female community organizers had a pivotal role in this process as brokers for UBV and other state-led programs in their own barrios. Chapter 5 discusses the emergence of a student movement at UBV that was initially desired by faculty members but was quickly dismissed and refused legitimacy as heir of the student movements from Venezuela’s twentieth-century past. Following closely the development of this movement and its

Introduction

15

paradoxical reproduction, I discuss mechanisms in revolutionary processes that suppress the emergence of imminent critique. I speak of the tendency of institutionalized radical movements to position themselves at the top of a “radical hierarchy.” Showing how the same dynamic was reproduced between Chávez himself and some members of the radical nobility of the former student Left, I show how radical hierarchies present at the rise of regimes could sabotage social change if the regime in question fails to accommodate critical feedback. Following a short Conclusion recapitulating the chapters’ main points and suggesting some key policy lessons from the book, the Epilogue presents reflections of a post-socialist (Bulgarian) scholar working in socialist Latin America (Venezuela). I have used auto-ethnographic materials from my fieldwork and work since I returned from Venezuela. I show how the studies of past and present socialisms have fallen under distant “area studies” denominators and how this reality is reflected in academic practices on the ground. Still dominant a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, politically biased and historically charged vocabularies make it difficult to do research across atavistic Cold War divisions. These persistent divides limit the opportunities to generate a learning process from cases of past and present socialisms, proliferating not only in theoretical abstractions but also in real-life challenges. While the chapters develop in sequence from setting the scene to specific advancements and challenges, and each focuses on a different group of research participants, they can be read independently as well. Each has its own set of concerns and internal logic that might be more appealing to certain audiences. Chapter 1 is concerned with the built environment and the political and social texture of the state behind the higher education policy and can be of interest to scholars of the state working on the urban/political intersection. Chapter 2 sets the historical background and trajectory of the policy and the former student militants–turned–Bolivarian experts behind it; thus, it might appeal to historically oriented readers. Chapter 3 focuses on the tension of this latter group with the new Bolivarian educators: the old guard’s hidden privileges vis-à-vis newcomers to both the academic and radical community might be of interest to scholars of class and to higher education faculty under growing workloads and productivity pressures. Chapter 4 explores the way in which a weak revolutionary state inserts itself into poor communities through female brokers and thus can be of interest to feminist scholars and community organizers. Chapter 5

16

Introduction

questions the opportunity openings and closures to internal critique to socialist regimes and thus speaks to scholars of social movement and radical politics.

Notes on Writing and Reading While the case of Venezuela is at its center, this is not a book only about Venezuela. It is a book about the possibilities and challenges confronting an alternative higher education project set against the grain of advanced capitalism. It speaks about a set of policies not as printed on a sheet of paper but as inscribed on and contested through human flesh, sweat, and blood across vibrant, virulent, and violent histories of projects with conflicting visions of how to organize the world. The book’s primary target audience is the university and higher education policy community, but it also speaks to broader audiences interested in and thinking of universities as tools for social change. By exploring critical policy lessons, the book does not offer policy evaluation in terms of judgment or assessment but as soul seeking and engaged concern in collective ways to envisage paths ahead, while taking in earnest structural and individual constraints and turning points. The Epilogue is an attempt to show through my own example and life how sometimes structural conditions subvert aspirations and limit choices. This is a very political book. It presents a critique from the Left within a field where most criticisms of the regime come from the Right, which is condescending and writes off the Bolivarian project as a whole. Rather than focus on such ad hominem attacks, the book sheds light on critical points articulated by regime insiders and given little oxygen under the paralyzing polarization and the Bolivarian imperative “not to put arms in the hands of the enemy.” While scholars in such insider positions have more recently attempted to reflect on the experience, they do so mostly within the terms of such polarization and defend the Bolivarian higher education project against ever-noisier outsider critiques rather than initiate a more critical examination of successes and challenges internal to UBV (Lugo 2017, 2019; Castellano 2019; Reinoso 2019). With these concerns at heart but also conscious of my (dis)advantage of critical distance, I point out some stark contradictions that the Bolivarian process and its higher education reform embody and that other radical programs for social change might run into were they not to learn from the Bolivarian process.

Introduction

17

Beyond these points, my own positioning with regard to research participants and some choices of how to present them within the book are important to state clearly. First, the academics and students who became the participants and protagonists of this study were a rather heterogeneous group. Depending on their position in Venezuelan society and the specific fieldwork situation in which I met them, they were positioned differentially in relation to me. At UBV many faculty members and students came from a working-class background and worked and lived in precarious conditions. They were first generation in higher education and were less traveled or linguistically experienced than myself or people in similar positions at traditional universities. Coming from an economically impoverished but highly educated family in Bulgaria and studying with a stipend at a privately endowed university in the Global North put me in a rather privileged position in respect to them. However, at the Ministry of Higher Education and among UBV senior managers, I was often “studying up” (Nader 1972): I often ended up at luxury locations or private estates of cosmopolitan, Oxbridge- or Ivy League–trained individuals with a middle- and upper-class upbringing. On rare occasions I encountered UBV faculty from lower-middleclass families but endowed with cultural capital, with whom I understood Ulf Hannerz’s (2004) method of studying sideways. My hybrid positionality allowed me to shift locations and registers in my fieldwork while also opening my eyes about many class-related complexities back home that I had taken for granted. Second, this variety of locations of my interlocutors within the Bolivarian process and Venezuelan society also impacted my ethical choices when writing. Instead of “blanket anonymization” of stories and research quotes, I chose a differential strategy. I preserved the full names of ministry experts and UBV senior managers and the circumstances of the education and career trajectories they shared. I did this because their profiles were unique and recognizable. When interviewed, they also often used well-polished and previously performed narratives of the Bolivarian process, the “party line” of sorts. It was often a challenge to get their own authentic view, and this happened mostly when I—sometimes clumsily and unintentionally—posed questions that annoyed or at least incited them into less rehearsed narratives. I anonymized and sometimes de-identified narratives of UBV faculty and students by amalgamating stories to protect their often more vulnerable and identifiable positions. That required me at times to “thin out” certain features, life facts, or character descriptors. Policy ethnogra-

18

Introduction

phy has allowed me to focus on how actors implement and enact a reform, so a focus on key characters is only secondary to the development of the policy. Unlike monographs focusing more explicitly on Venezuela’s historical and present-day development (Velasco 2015; Strønen 2017; Schiller 2018; Samet 2019; Cooper 2019; Stainova 2021), my book takes Bolivarian Venezuela as a field to explore a socialist higher education policy as I witnessed it there in 2008–11. For this book, 2011 is a natural cutoff point: the death of Hugo Chávez and the ascent of Nicolás Maduro mark a new era of the Bolivarian process and its claim to socialism and alternative development. Given the rapid rotation of cadres narrated in the book, which produced contingent policy shifts even within the period that my ethnography captures, trying to grasp from afar more recent changes without being physically present in Venezuela would be extremely difficult, and I acknowledge this limitation. I follow developments of Venezuela through my new work on migration of high-skilled Venezuelan workers to Argentina (Ivancheva and Pla 2022). The book is not timely in its commentary on the present-day Bolivarian experiment. Instead, I offer a snapshot from a specific policy and its broader repercussions for social change not only within Venezuela but also within any alternative experiment attempting radical social change through higher education. However, I also indicate, where relevant, processes that were present in the country when I was there and the effects of which have escalated ever since, producing the complex reality of present-day Venezuela amid multiplying regional and global crises. While writing the next-to-last draft of the current Introduction, violent uprisings erupted across Latin America and the Caribbean in the streets of Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Haiti, and Colombia. Since then, the electoral victories of the center Left in Mexico and Argentina, the return of Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) after the violent coup d’état, and the referendum for a new constitution in Chile have been a small consolation. Progressive projects and reforms in the region are still heavily frustrated by toxic external debt, the effects of rampant austerity, and the disintegration of welfare institutions. Rightwing governments have brought a growing population to the edge of volatile and precarious living conditions under the global emergencies of COVID-19 and climate change. The developments especially in Bolivia where those who deployed brutal violence against supporters of Evo Morales were backed by the United States and other superpowers served as a chilling reminder of the negative background

Introduction

19

against which the government of Hugo Chávez had worked in Venezuela. In an era when electoral democracy and work within existing power structures were the only viable weapons for progressive politics, socialist governments have had to play this game according to the rules that serve liberal party politics in order not to risk violent coups. Yet that has also meant abandoning attempts to change the rules of the game and granting the right of final say on their own political legitimacy to the old violent institutions that they oppose. In this sense, while the book is not engaged with the present developments in Venezuela since the death of President Hugo Chávez, I hope it exposes some key contradictions in the struggle for democratic legitimacy in which democratic socialist regimes have to actively engage. Written by an Eastern European author like myself, this book challenges the post–Cold War narratives of the “end of history” and social change as unattainable “utopia” (Fukuyama [1991] 2006). Having been born amid the ruins of “really existing socialism” in late socialist and early “democratic” Bulgaria, I feel compelled—perhaps more than other authors originating from spaces with a different political history—to show the negative dialectic between internally suffered and externally imposed limitations that socialist projects face when standing with a slingshot against the Goliath of global capitalism. I hope to challenge the conventional narratives that present socialist higher education as either an instant panacea for social change (Muhr and Verger 2006) or as nothing but a malign form of social engineering (Connelly 2000; Boyadjieva 2013). I show how state policies emerge within already existing complex local and global structures with their contingent historical dynamics that are difficult to challenge but subvert benevolent policies. The book is written in the spirit of the Angelus Novus from Paul Klee’s painting central to Walter Benjamin’s treatise On the Concept of History (2005). Benjamin speaks of an angel with a fixed stare into the single catastrophe—which he sees as the past—while also drawn toward the human future. Not unlike today, the time when Benjamin wrote his theses on the philosophy of history was all but reassuring. While global economic and ecological catastrophes are looming on the horizon, a full-on crisis in public higher education has been announced with terms ranging from “corruption” (Washburn 2008) through “ruins” (Readings 1999) to ever-more-fatal diagnoses (Wright and Shore 2017). Despite its limitations, the Venezuelan experiment is noteworthy given the infringements that many higher education systems suffer at present. For this reason, it be-

20

Introduction

comes more pertinent not to throw this experiment, despite its limitations, on the “rubble-heap of history” (Benjamin 2005) as we have done with many progressive projects in the past. It is imperative to explore its advancements and shortcomings in the hope that a radical policy and polity design is possible that expands success and defies failure.

Chapter 1

The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy

In January 2009, the Bolivarian University of Venezuela was a principal site of the campaign for the referendum on a constitutional amendment (hereafter, the Enmienda campaign). The reform of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution aimed to enable eternal reelection of President Chávez, at that point already ten years in power. Carried out two months after an expensive, expansive, and only partly successful local government election campaign in late 2008, the Enmienda campaign mobilized significant financial and human resources to guarantee the removal of term limits for the Venezuelan president. Except for holding events on campus, as the vanguard university of the Bolivarian Misión Sucre program for university massification, UBV was quite actively engaged in the campaign. The UBV campus in Caracas was a departure point of the so-called caravans of happiness (caravanas de alegria). Every weekday afternoon for over a month, a truck loaded with a sound system and a collective of DJs and dancers would lead a group of buses, jeeps, trucks, and motorbikes. These enthusiastic happenings were joined by UBV students, staff, and some faculty members. They were co-organized by the youth faction of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and the Communist Party (PCV), youngsters from Chavista cultural collectives, including the prominent Tiuna el Fuerte, as well as workers at community newspapers, radio stations, and Avila TV, the state-sponsored “revolutionary TV channel” (Lapiz Rebelde 2009). During this period, still early in my fieldwork, which started in October 2008, my attempts to do research on the education activities at UBV’s main campus in the Los Chaguaramos neighborhood in Caracas were rendered impossible. Academic activities were suspended early on most of the campaigning days. I was invited by students and faculty to join the caravans—recurrent feasts of dancing and singing while handing out leaflets and other canvassing materials to passersby. Red T-shirts, baseball caps, and scarves were generously distrib21

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The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy

uted to the caravan participants and observers. Each procession took hours, first gathering at UBV’s parking lot and then moving around Caracas. Going past concrete modern highways, the central town with its old colonial houses and churches, and the administrative and residential skyscrapers, it would end up in the tiny winding streets of barrios, the hilly poor neighborhoods with selfconstructed houses. While people along the way were approached with materials and occasional quick agitating conversation by the participants, the other main activity of the caravan participants was to paint graffiti all around Caracas. Armed with sprays—red and black, the “usual suspect” colors—the students painted countless socialist, patriotic, and anticapitalist slogans and signs. Except for shops and private houses, often churches, schools, park fences, traffic tunnel walls, and other public buildings and facilities became carriers of the pro-government sprayed inscriptions. To my surprise, this activity happened under the supervision of some UBV faculty, motorized policemen, and cameramen and journalists from national TV channels and community media. And while an opposition mayor was in charge of the city, the state budget had to cover both the campaign and its artistic assaults on public property. My initial exasperation with the interruption of the educational process for political campaigning, and the contradictory statement that the expenditure over graffiti made, soon dissipated, to be replaced with a growing curiosity. Paradoxical as it might seem, the phenomenon of the caravan paid for by public money to paint graffiti on public property was rather telling. On the one hand, it was a reminder that despite most statements to the contrary, especially in the postcolonial space, universities are not neutral institutions of knowledge production but rather form a main battlefield of struggle over power in the state (Carnoy and Castells 2001; Lyer 2019). In this sense, the caravans’ activity in democratic socialist Venezuela was not any more “ideological” than was the heavy omnipresence of EdTech and retail chain branding at the campuses of contemporary universities in capitalist democracies. Activities such as the caravans, related to political mobilization, were not a peripheral but a central part of the learning process at a “revolutionary university” such as UBV. On the other hand, activities such as state-sponsored graffiti painted over public property were a sign of the rearticulated role of state power in a postcolonial semi-peripheral petrol state such as Venezuela. By the time I arrived in Venezuela, paraphernalia, bright colors, and symbols used in the incessant ef-

The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy

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ficient campaigning of the Bolivarian government had become a material manifestation of its policies and politics. They stood for the redistribution of welfare and secured a perpetual mobilization that led to the electoral success of late president Chávez and, arguably, of his successor, Nicolás Maduro. Through this process, state agents and supporters were constantly engaged in the production and consumption of artifacts, which had become an end in themselves: direct active objects and material embodiments of the state’s presence in its citizens’ everyday life. This rather superficial but highly sensual materiality was reinforcing the spontaneous solidarity of the supporters of the president as a spontaneous emotional community or communitas (Turner [1966] 1995). It also sustained the corpo-reality of the state even as it was transfigured as one service provider among many private ones. This situation offers an opportunity to reflect on the new type of state present in Bolivarian Venezuela under the leadership of Hugo Chávez (1999– 2011). In what Venezuelans called socialism of the twenty-first century, the state was no longer the repressive machine and producer of all-encompassing total ideology that featured in theories on twentieth-century state authorities (Althusser 2014). It was not the modernist technologically oriented planning machine, making populations, nature, and space legible and handily controllable, as described by James Scott (1998) in his archeology of failed schemes of Soviet social engineering. Unlike the Romanian state under Nicolae Ceauşescu described by Katherine Verdery (2018), the Bolivarian state did not attempt to overwrite individual agency through technologies of surveillance and control. Neither was its statehood process merely the creation of the agentive practices of a bureaucratic biomass performing “culturally embedded imaginaries” (Gupta 2005, 175), inhibiting the experience of prohibitive borders (Trouillot 2001), or the “conflation of annihilating violence and paternalistic intimacy” of the maddening states (Aretxaga 2003, 406). Instead, through constant and affective experiences the Venezuelan government engaged in a guerrilla-type struggle. Through material goods and through the presence of brokers in the daily lives of local communities that I discuss in Chapter 4, it mobilized political loyalties and affections of some Venezuelans. As scholars of the Venezuelan opposition have shown, it also activated strong disaffections among those outside its affective community, who used similarly polarizing populist—albeit not popular—tactics to denounce Chávez’s populism (Cannon 2016; Samet 2019).

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The presentation of the way artifacts work in the everyday life of presentday Venezuela does not aim to cast judgment on the Bolivarian process as a whole. It does, however, expose some mechanisms that help answer the question of how in a context where being in government does not coincide with being in power within the bourgeois state, and where enduring reforms are frustrated by structural limitations, symbolic interventions and objects in the political and social space can also activate the experience of the state and its policy. And while anthropologists of policy have long argued that “the power of the state lies in its cultural forms and . . . action” (Shore 2005, 239–40), tracing how material forms are attributed meaning and turned into agents of stateness within the recurrent electoral campaigns of the Bolivarian government, such new manifestations of the state continue to create what Fernando Coronil has called the “agitated present and spectral future” of Latin American progressive politics (2011, 247).

The Polity behind the Policy Theorists from peripheral countries have attempted to write the history of states in the Global South in opposition to the narrative of modernity created in the imperial metropoles. They oppose Western utopian fiction of a homogeneous time of universal humanity and the romanticizing dichotomies such as local (i.e., premodern, non-Western, irrational) versus global (i.e., modern, Western, rational) that disqualify peripheral politics as backward (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). Partha Chatterjee has challenged this dichotomy, calling local time an encounter of Western “utopic” homogeneous time of perpetual accumulation and unperturbed movement of capital with local intense heterogeneous time (2004, 6–7). It is important to document the epistemic injustice (Santos 2016) these asymmetric encounters yield through anthropological fieldwork deeply grounded in lived reality. A way to approach this task is demonstrated by anthropologists of infrastructure, who look into the material manifestations of larger processes and relations conceptualized by Western modernity as “the state.” Such an approach attempts “to identify material traces which can be engaged ethnographically and which open up, rather than close down, further perspectives on the structures and practices through which this particular mode of power is effected and reproduced” (P. Harvey 2005, 131). A line of research has emerged follow-

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25

ing larger infrastructural projects that states utilize to extract surplus while also making themselves present and benefiting from the political legitimacy such projects provide (Reeves 2014; Harvey and Knox 2015; Dalakoglou 2017). While paying attention to infrastructure, I complement it by showing how governments achieve legitimacy not only from new pieces of infrastructure but also from repurposing and refashioning old structures in new ways. Yet beyond structural change, legitimacy is often claimed through much thinner symbolic displays of power. Research on the agentive power of little things (Appadurai 1986) has featured ethnographies of documents and other material objects and concrete cultural practices (D. Miller 1998; Calhoun and Sennett 2007): the use of language in bureaucratic organizations (Charrow, Crandall, and Charrow 1982; Goody 1986; Baumann and Briggs 1990) and the way state agents use administrative documents (Mathur 2016), letters and other artifacts (Hull 2003, 2012), and heritage catalogues (Kowalski 2007) to represent the state and create technologies of—more or less effective—control over governed populations. Matthew Hull invokes Sherry Ortner’s observation that by attributing agency to individuals, one risks reducing bureaucratic orders to individual actions (2003, 288). Instead, through ethnography of the use of files of handwritten letters, notes, and archives in an office of the state bureaucracy in Pakistan, Hull shows how authorship and autography of letters across different organizational levels help create a different, corporate agency of the state. They diffuse individual authorship and produce ritually a collective one. By transcending individual responsibility through abstraction and anonymity, they protect concrete bureaucrats from “the opacity of the present and vagaries of the future” (Hull 2003, 289). Similarly, Nayanika Mathur (2016) studies the social and affective lives of documents in the Indian paper state. Mathur traces paperwork obsession back to the colonial past and the East India Company and shows how it still “underpins action, . . . constitutes proof” and has a “power to alter lives” in modern India (3–4). Material traces of the state, including infrastructure, documents, and symbols, show different phases and faces (Navaro-Yashin 2002) and affect the ways states see and are seen by those they govern. James Scott (1998) has argued that by producing classifications and attempts to render the human and natural realities legible, twentieth-century nation-states, especially state socialist projects, have homogenized and oversimplified their complex relations, privileging and making use of such with instrumental value and producing dramatic

26

The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy

and fatal misrepresentations. Veena Das (2007) has also shown, conversely, how unreadable laws, rules, and regulations, which oscillate between rational-bureaucratic and magical, help the illegibility of the state as a source of a distant, overwhelming power for marginalized groups. Discussing the state as a power field, Pierre Bourdieu (1998) has shown habitus as state literacy, of sorts. As a set of embodied codes and dispositions, it helps those inheriting economic and cultural capital to read the terrain of state power to their advantage and makes them legible as adhering to certain class positions while also making structural opportunities and constraints legible to them. Javier Auyero and Claudio Benzecry (2017) speak of a “clientelist habitus” in the patron/client relations in poor communities: the familiar presence of brokers produces schemata in which reciprocity becomes the only way to organize political activity. Brokers become legible to the community as able to activate their relation to patrons; their activity makes visible certain routes to social change and excludes others. Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) work on political legitimacy and popular sovereignty can be used to connect these parallel debates. For Chatterjee, political legitimacy was for a long time seen as resting within the institutions and practices of civil society. In theory, civil society was seen as independent from the state: a warrant of freedom and equality in the political domain that makes “subjects” turn into “citizens” and thus forms the ethical core of the modernization of the non-Western world (2004, 33). In practice, it coincided with the old idea of civil society as “bourgeois society” that belongs to a small number of individuals with privileged social locations, that is, an organized elite domain of politics (38–39). Chatterjee discusses a new dichotomy: “citizens” against “populations.” Populations participate not as citizens active in civil society but as subjects and targets of policies of welfare that required formal representation and verification in numeric proportions, classifications, and surveillance technologies of governance. Chatterjee calls “political society,” in contrast to civil society, the public domain where subaltern populations, unable to activate civil society channels to defend their rights, conduct their politics: they often become subjected to or have to resort to violence as the only way for their demands to be heard and acted on (38–39). Following this discussion here and later, I show that in some instances the Bolivarian process in Venezuela represents a clear attempt to break up this power structure. To enhance Naomi Schiller’s (2019) metaphor of popular media channeling the state, the Bolivarian experiment aimed to channel the rights of

The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy

27

those previously stuck in political society and make them represented in and by the state. Unlike the top-down form of governance trying to classify and impose legibility as a form of control and classification, the Venezuelan government under Hugo Chávez initiated a bottom-up protagonist process (Azzellini 2010; Lugo 2017) that recognized the political agency of the poor and their right to be called citizens even though they did not have property titles or other elite entitlements. Instead, the Bolivarian state attempted to regain political legitimacy by rendering itself legible, visible, and familiar to those communities through its symbolic materiality and brokers present in their everyday lives. To secure this process was more than just symbolic; the Bolivarian government had to also dismantle class formation in the modern state structure it inherited. In this, it was extremely limited due to the state’s peripheral position in the world system because it relied on income from extraction and had no control over international trade arrangements and capital flows in which it participated through its extractivist economy (Mezzadra and Gago 2017). Historical anthropologist Fernando Coronil claimed that peripheral states such as Venezuela before Chavismo spoke from a subaltern position and thus a subjected state of being (1994, 643, 648). The impossibility to utter statements was internalized voluntarily by peripheral governing elites: “In Venezuela, the political elite remains situated in an unstable neocolonial landscape, which continually undermines national sources of identity and knowledge” (655). To preserve its political legitimacy and to obscure its weak, subjected position, the Venezuelan liberal state acted as a “magnanimous sorcerer” by producing dazzling images of social integration and replacing structural change with a magical performance that concealed the exploitation of labor and natural resources (Coronil 1997, 2). I ask how the Bolivarian state addressed these inherent limitations. My ethnography shows how the Venezuelan state led by Hugo Chávez remained effectively in opposition, a state within the state. Yet it utilized an affective materiality of visual and tangible embodiments that “implicated [it] in the minute texture of everyday life” (Gupta 2005, 375) and secured its political legitimacy. Combined with a constant reenactment of the subaltern position under an (arguably imminent) threat by mighty enemy figures such as global capitalism, empire, and Venezuelan oligarchy, this material reality produced not a state effect but a state affect. It manufactured the new symbolic counterhegemony of the Bolivarian process against the remnants of the old bourgeois state in the new revolutionary establishment. Doing this, however, through the politics of

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fear, it also obscured clear lines of responsibility when its own activities and choices prevented the implementation of enduring structural reforms. This challenged the irreversibility of reforms, which István Mészáros, theorist of twenty-first-century socialism, called the “imperative of a historically sustainable alternative order” (2008, 251).

Revolutionary (Sur)faces As did most government buildings in downtown Caracas, the twenty-thirdfloor skyscraper where the Ministry of Higher Education (later Popular Power for University Education) was located, contained a peculiar requisite of revolutionary paraphernalia. What was visible from the ground floor were portraits of Simón Bolívar and posters with President Chávez smiling from behind the friendly receptionists. A few large TV screens were hanging next to the reception on every floor. There, government employees and guests could gather and watch the national TV channel, Canal 8. Through the loud TV sets, permanently turned on, one could watch the frequent media appearance of President Chávez, government supporters, and news related to the achievements of the Bolivarian process. The building corridors and offices and the panels separating the cubicles of the officials were covered with laminated posters of Simón Bolívar, Samuel Rodriguez, Paulo Freire, Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, Fidel Castro, or—less often—other figures from the revolution’s canon. Posters of President Chávez were also present, showing him holding an indigenous child, shaking hands with workers, kissing piously the hand of an elderly indigenous woman, or sitting in his office in his official attire under Bolívar’s portrait. Under the posters, computer-screen wallpapers repeated a variation of this revolutionary theme: murals in Caracas barrios, pictures of the abovementioned “big men,” or the logo of PSUV would fill the screens. Screensavers came up with phrases bouncing left and right with animations of Bolívar, revolutionary slogans such as “Socialismo 21” or “Revolución Bolivariana,” or thematic ones such as “Bolivarian revolution in science and technology: for an innovative education” (Revolución bolivariana en la ciencia y tecnología: Para una educación inovadora). Books from the book series of the Cultural Ministry Bookstores of the South (Librerias del Sur) were ordered on shelves next to administrative documents. A few omnipresent titles were the Blue Book of Chávez, the Plan of

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National Development Simón Bolívar 2007–2013, Samuel Robinson’s volume on education, and Juan Carlos Mariategui’s Latin American Socialism. The peculiar thrill of artifacts related to the process (el proceso)—the set of reforms that Chávez and his government had undertaken since his ascendance to power after a landslide victory in the election in 1998—extended beyond this requisite. During my first visit to the ministry I faced a peculiar situation. To my questions about access to the official archive of the ministry, Marbelin Rodriguez, the academic head of the higher education program Misión Sucre, and her assistant, Euclide Larez, looked at each other rather perplexed. “There is no archive here, and we have no records,” Marbelin uttered. “But where do you keep an archive of publicly available documents and decisions made about the program, anything the public can read about how the Bolivarian policies were decided upon, what alternative ideas were proposed?” I insisted. Having focused my research on a program of mass higher education, which brought 570,000 students to the new central facilities and decentralized classrooms of Misión Sucre, I had come with the anticipation—if not worry—of being buried beneath tons of documentation. The next words of Euclide quickly refocused my concerns: “All our decisions are published as decrees of Chávez in the Official Newspaper [Gaceta Oficial]. I will put some files of these on your USB stick,” he smiled reassuringly. In an impulse not to give up so easily and obtain at least some materials related to the official history from the key discussions in parliament, public consultations, and ministry communiqués, my gaze turned toward the shelves in their office, scarcely covered with a few big files named by year. Following my gaze, Marbelin exclaimed: “Of course, we can give you some of these.” She spoke as if I already knew the content of the cardboard files. She and her assistant put the files on the ground and emptied them. Glossy and colorful prospectuses of decentralized programs of Misión Sucre and UBV quickly spread before my eyes. While I selected one of each type, printed on luxury paper, Euclide uploaded files on my UBS stick—“Here is what I have on the higher education reform,” he told me. “A lot of materials!” “Our people are so well prepared!” Marbelin added, her face beaming. I thanked him and peeked behind his shoulder. Besides the Gaceta Oficial PDF files I saw only a few files signaling the content of PowerPoint presentations. “What do these files contain?” I asked, puzzled. Euclide opened them one by one and scrolled through them quickly, some with a sound track of revolu-

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tionary chants. A few lines and abundant revolutionary slogans were written on colorful pages covered by Venezuela’s tricolor flag and pictures of Chávez and other smiling men and women posing in classrooms or in front of education facilities. Over a PowerPoint presentation’s sound of revolutionary pop music, Euclide added proudly, “These materials explain in depth the higher education reform.” Scarce bullet points with large font were dispersed among illustrations and quotes from the founding fathers of the Bolivarian Revolution and pictures of Misión Sucre facilities in different locations and communities. While Euclide and I watched the presentations, Marbelin brought me some further materials. I got a few newly published booklets: the Venezuelan Constitution, The Educational Works of Simon Rodrigues, Simon Bolivar Plan 2007–13, and different editions of “The Teachings of Chávez” (Lineas de Chávez), the transcripts of his speeches on national TV. All these formed the official policy set that painted with a broad brush the contours of the Bolivarian reforms (Lugo 2017). I also received plentiful brochures on Venezuela’s higher education achievements and leaflets on the eradication of illiteracy. Before I left their office, I also had a Misión Sucre notebook, a pencil, a few pens, a key holder, a folding plastic toy, and further leaflets. After a few more visits to the ministry, I could also boast more and bigger note- and sketchbooks, a larger number of prospectuses, and the full collection of posters of Chávez I had seen hanging on the walls. Additionally, I had a paper fan of Simón Bolívar, a couple of calendars, a red plastic bottle, a rubber squeeze ball with the emblem of a statesponsored TV program, tag laces, and a high-quality mousepad for my desktop that I still use today. I also acquired parts of my almost full revolutionary outfit: red and colored T-shirts, a long-sleeved blouse, hats, scarves, and—the most valued article in my collection—revolutionary shoes (las boticas socialistas): a limited edition distributed during the Enmienda campaign in 2009 produced in Ecuador and imitating Converse shoes. By the end of my visits the number of PowerPoint files on my USB stick had tripled, but I still had no materials on the history of the higher education reform.

Archiving the Revolution My search for archives and historical materials was not more successful at other state institutions, including the National Library, which had a few old copies of the booklets I had received from the ministry. They also held microfiches of

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newspaper archives, mostly of mainstream, opposition-led media where UBV was barely mentioned if at all. The Bolivarian University was not a better source on its own history either. While UBV was a new university, when I arrived there, it already had five years of history, a first generation was graduating, and there had been four different rectors. Interested in understanding the history of these shifts and their underpinning policy-making and political process, I wished to intersect document analysis with interviews of those who participated in the university’s establishment. To my surprise, such documents were to be found neither at the UBV library nor at its historical archive (archivo historico), which was, effectively, a student records office. The archive officers directed me to an academic on the tenth floor of UBV’s Caracas campus, where its senior management was located. “This academic had access to all we have at the archive but is not available to the public. He drafted a historical document of UBV,” they told me, encouragingly. When I met the academic, Professor Romero, he shrugged at my request: “I can’t give you the document; it is highly contentious political content in manuscript form we still have not decided to officialize . . . but there’s not much in it anyway.” I tried to reassure him—a kind man in his fifties and a professional historian—that I would consult it for my own understanding of the university and would not quote it without his permission. But Professor Romero insisted that it was out of the question to show me the document before the official publication: “I might get fired for that. It can only be issued once we are sure we don’t put arms into the hands of the enemy!” he exclaimed, adding: “I wrote it with a small team. We mostly worked based on our own memories. There is nothing left from previous rectors’ offices, so we worked out of thin air.” After I made a couple more visits to Professor Romero’s office with the same question over the next months, his personal assistant disinterestedly put the historical document on my USB stick. My excitement grew. The manuscript I opened was barely drafted with the first few pages presenting bullet points with the key well-known historical and political framework of the reform. While the past of UBV was barely mentioned, the present was sketched only through higher education conventions with the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). Further on, the document listed the campuses of UBV and the programs taught there. It enumerated the material assets of the university over the last five years of its existence: the canteen, the football

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pitch, and the parking lot, and some extensions built onto the main floors of the Caracas campus were mentioned in brief. Actors, key events in the development of the campuses, or any information about the curriculum or new lines of radical political or educational practice were missing. The piece ended with a few emotionally charged paragraphs and a famous quote of Bolívar from an 1819 speech: “the love for the patria, love for the laws, love for the magistrates, and all other noble passions that had to absorb exclusively the soul of a republican.” The document also mentioned the key normative documents mentioned above, of which UBV was a product, and a presidential speech from the official launch of the university. No key decisions or policy shifts or the intellectual input, inspiration, or history at the root of different education programs or of UBV overall were mentioned. The recurring change of authority was not spoken of or explained. Professor Romero had been right: the historical team had as little access to UBV’s history as I did. Although colonial states and new states generated and maintained archives in their attempts to order and control populations (Karabinos 2018), this practice was not pursued diligently in a former peripheral colony such as Venezuela, a part of the Spanish Empire that, unlike Britain, was not a “data-intensive empire” (Richards 1993, 4). The opposition against archives could of course be seen through the lens of resistance against those willing to control knowledge (Said 1994) and impose epistemicide or cognitive injustice (Santos 2016). However, in Bolivarian Venezuela documents were not simply resisted but considered political, and thus public knowledge of archive documents created by previous administrations was systematically destroyed by their successors. I was coming to realize that, in mundane situations, the perception of threat did not come from the confidentiality of documents but from their degree of preparedness, completeness, and representativeness. The Ministry of Higher Education and UBV officials had to prepare advertisements of the benevolent achievements of the regime, not unlike glossy brochures of businesses and commercial universities. Partly like Iver Neumann’s (2005) discussion on the rounds of editing of a Norwegian ministerial speech, UBV’s historical document was “finished” when it was considered harmless, handy, visually presentable, agreeable, and positive for the Bolivarian government; otherwise, it “put arms in the hands of the enemy,” a trope I would often hear in my fieldwork. Or as Susan Sontag (1970) said about Cuban revolutionary posters: “They convey a particular message, [and] . . . simply express (through

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being beautiful) pleasure at certain ideas, moral attitudes, and ennobling historical references.” And as much as this was familiar to me from socialist Eastern Europe, I was curious to see the omnipresence of material propaganda within a country with a democratically elected and politically legitimate socialist government. Having shared my wonder with Manuel, an arts faculty member at UBV, his answer made me realize that the stake for Chávez’s supporters was larger than the election: “You say that the graffiti painted on the walls during caravans and posters and flags are excessive. But have you ever thought of starting to count how many commercials [there] are for each one of them? We are not fighting just the opposition. We are fighting a bigger battle against capitalism, in which every commercial poster or billboard is part of their campaign against us!” The purpose of the material and visual artifacts distributed by the ministry was not that of invisible control and diffusion of bureaucratic responsibility to material objects. It was the opposite: an outward and apparent, but unobtrusive, intervention into the hostile built environment of the city. Thus, as with the caravans of happiness, my initial disappointment with the objects was gradually replaced first by curiosity and then by ardent interest in the visual and material artifacts created by the agents of the Bolivarian state. Indignantly attributing the lack of serious archives, plans, and registries of the Bolivarian process to a lack of a “proper” political culture—as speculated by many of my acquaintances from the Venezuelan opposition and foreigners whom I met— was a heavy judgment with little understanding of the context of state power or the polity behind the policy I studied. As mentioned at the outset of the chapter, in advanced capitalist and state socialist projects, the state has attempted to make the populations legible to itself (Scott 1998). The products I received from Marbelin, Euclide, Professor Romero, and other officials had another function. The agreeable, easily digestible documents and visuals, the objects that everyone could recognize and readily use in their everyday life, made the state legible to the population. Ostensible and present in offices, bedrooms, and kitchens, in cars and spaces of learning and leisure, these artifacts were partaking in the life of the communities to which they were directed. They were generously handed out by benevolent state agents to anyone who wanted to have a bit of the revolution in their house and thus produced an affective reality: a state affect (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2018).

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The Political Life of Infrastructure The visual and material presence of the state was intense not only in public buildings and the offices of state-sponsored integration projects. Huge billboards and posters with slogans of the revolution and the face of the president could be seen throughout Caracas, not only during election campaigns. They were hanging from highways and small roads, over big buildings and bridges. Parts of Caracas were virtually repainted in the colors of the Venezuelan tricolor flag—red, yellow, and aquamarine-blue, due to the barrio beautifying Misión Barrio Nuevo, Barrio Tricolor donating the three colors of paint in poor neighborhoods (Caraballo 2019)—and covered with murals sponsored by different ministries. The pro-government campaigning thus took place not only before elections: it was manifest year-round through the material presence of its politics through colors, posters, billboards, banners, and clothes. It was considered effective if it managed to keep people constantly mobilized and subversive against the vicious and all-penetrating tactics of transnational capital and its minions in the local oligarchy. Yet the battle in which the deeply rooted and structurally grounded (capitalist) production images and consumer goods were subverted through a newly emergent (socialist) production of images and commodities seemed limited without the counterpart of structural transformation. Despite the excessive materiality, it was strange to see how minimal the actual infrastructural changes were in the built environment, building interiors, and the urban landscape that would correspond to these transient and removable affective artifacts. Reconstructions of city centers or large-scale infrastructural projects of new roads or buildings had not materialized massively during the Bolivarian process. Leaving the building of the ministry, UBV, or another official building, one entered the streets of Caracas, which were swamped with commercial shops and glaring advertisements and worn-out commercial and residential buildings. A new highway was constructed to the airport, a new train line reached out to the satellite town of Cua, and a cable car (metrocable) was built up on one central barrio hill but did not reach any further peripheral barrios. The metro map of Caracas had indeed expanded, but in effect just a few new stops had opened, all the others shown in dotted line. The cable car on a barrio hill visible from downtown Caracas did not reach farther or more remote spaces in starker need of infrastructural renewal. The grandiose plan of construction of 290 miles of railroads around the country (Reuters 2009) had been stalled a year

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later (Suggett 2010). The new program launched to construct two million new houses in the next seven years (Boothroyd 2011) has been advancing, but slowly, over the following years. The agitated presence of the state via its red flags, T-shirts, scarves, and other artifacts and products such as leaflets, booklets, graffiti, and murals would rarely be seen once you left Caracas or even in the southeastern wealthy parts of the capital. There Chavista symbolism was present only around the metro stations at registration points of the National Electoral Council (CNE) or the electoral “red points” (puntos rojos). And while there were numerous government buildings in some rich neighborhoods, there the socialist symbolism was meager and non-imposing, and red-dressed people could rarely be seen. People living in the rich neighborhoods of the city also did not—and for the most part did not really need to—enter Caracas’s administrative and historical city center. I met some of these middle-class Caraqueños who had not visited this space at least since Chávez had come to power in 1999. They never walked, had never taken a metro or a bus, and would avoid the pedestrian areas and encounters with rank-and-file Venezuelans by driving on the busy highways connecting wealthy parts of the city. The only places where one could encounter these often highly educated and wealthy Venezuelans were meetings in topend shopping malls, private fitness clubs, expensive private parties, language schools, embassy gatherings, and rooftop bars on well-guarded skyscrapers. Beyond these exclusive spaces, they traveled in air-conditioned, highly secured cars with dark windows. Many of them would have never visited a barrio and would be terrified for anyone who did so or took public transport, except, of course, for their drivers, nannies, or housemaids who lived in these same barrios. In this complex and antagonizing environment, documents and other parts of the material environment were attributed significance in the political life of the Bolivarian community. In the main building at the UBV campus, four elevators led up to all the floors of the building, each holding eight to ten persons. Each day, at specific peak hours within each of UBV’s three shifts, the elevator queues would reach up to thirty to fifty people: a typical picture in most Venezuelan public institutions. The luxury elevators designed to transport a handful of Venezuelan Petrol senior managers, located in the building before the Bolivarian government came to power, were not fit for such intensive traffic and were wearing out. Technicians would sometimes make the elevators work selectively, for example, having them stop only on even or odd floors.

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Yet already around the Enmienda campaign I encountered a peculiar tendency of students and faculty to complain about elevators, which escalated after the campaign. The elevators’ misconduct was blamed on agents of capitalism and the Venezuelan oligarchy. “This is done by infiltrated enemies of the revolution,” political science student Miguel told me while we were waiting in line for the only working elevator one early morning. I also overheard the conversation of a group of women adult learners heading up to a class on the seventh floor. The buttons that they tried to push were not working, so we all ended up at the second floor, then took the elevator, which took us randomly up to the fifth floor, and then eventually all the way up to the tenth floor. After a second round stopping on these same floors again, the women opted out for the last floor and walked downstairs, speculating about the reasons for the elevator’s behavior: “It is because some of the students here vote for the opposition,” one of them suggested. “Yes, they sabotage the elevators,” said another one, and to sound even more authoritative, she added, “That is what the rector said!” While the actual involvement of the Venezuelan opposition and its supporters in the sabotaging of the elevators remains at least one possible explanation, the elevators’ story was, at that point in my fieldwork, indicative of something else as well. The elevators stood for the politics of fear among Chávez supporters: the enemy within—realistically feared, but little known. This fear was based on both historical experiences of police violence and mutual sabotage between conservative and progressive factions of parties within poor communities and the memory many of them had of the 2002 coup. These memories were used in constant repetition and amplification of paranoid tropes among government supporters against the infiltration of the archenemy in every aspect of their everyday existence. Such fear, mobilized from the Right in regard to reporting crime as a problem of Chavismo alone (Samet 2019), could, of course, be based on real-life experience. While mobilizing loyalty on deeply rooted historical grounds, it sometimes served as an apology for (in)action of the side that mobilized it. Blaming all malfunctions of infrastructure and of the political process on enemy figures helped create a political legitimacy for Chavismo and dispel responsibility for the political durability or irreversibility of its reforms.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Reform This tendency of Chavismo to dispel political responsibility became very clear during the Enmienda campaign. The referendum on the constitutional amendment that would allow the end of term limits of the Venezuelan president in February 2009 followed two lost election campaigns for the Bolivarian movement. First, in December 2007 a constitutional referendum that presented the eternal reelection of the president as one among sixty-nine articles proposed for change was defeated: 51 percent voted “no” in a turnout of 54 percent of voters (El País 2007). Aggressive opposition campaigning notwithstanding, the low turnout was a sign of the loss of support from the popular bases of the Bolivarian movement. A second blow for the government, the local elections on 23 November 2008, were not entirely lost by the PSUV established by Chávez and his supporters. Despite the strong and expensive campaign and the overall victory of the newly formed PSUV throughout the country, Caracas was lost to an opposition mayor. Furthermore, four out of five of its counties were won by opposition candidates, including Sucre, which, unlike the other three boutique and middle-class areas, contained one of the biggest barrio agglomerations in Latin America, Petare (El País 2008). This was a serious symbolic loss, as Caracas, a metropole with over four million population, contained the majority of urban poor in the country, who were the main target and beneficiaries of the social reforms of the government. The loss in Caracas was reflected on and grieved over at a number of public events, including at UBV. Most Chávez supporters saw this as a clear message: “This election campaign was not the expression of real participatory democracy. It was a result of old structures staying in the new order—of representative democracy at its worse,” Diego Vásquez, a political science lecturer, told students at a public gathering at UBV. “We are reproducing the old system of representative democracy because we have kept the old bourgeois legal framework,” added Professor Luis Damiani, the vice-rector of UBV. Multiple student assemblies were held, mostly reiterating that people did not participate because they had internalized the principles of the old regime in Venezuela. Yet, while dissatisfaction concerning the lack of protagonist democracy was voiced about the local elections and blamed on the opposition and the capitalist system, the main conclusion drawn by President Chávez and PSUV was that the balance of power was right to win a new referendum for eternal reelection of the president as the only guarantee of the continuity of the Bolivarian process.

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Timid critiques that came from public intellectuals and students alike voiced concern that local elections had coincided with the peak of the world financial crisis but were quickly discarded by pragmatic interventions. PSUV’s stance—voiced several times in my interviews as well—was its old strategy to call elections as a sign of deepening (profundización) of the Bolivarian process (Ellner 2004). As Héctor, a student of political studies, told me, “We need the guarantee for going deeper. Chávez is the only guarantee. You will see, after the referendum all will change, and we will radicalize.” With this argument, any voices raised against the expenditures of the campaign were discarded as an assault against Chávez and the movement. Any critical comment against the government from within was deemed “weapons handed to the enemy.” The official decision confirming the referendum was announced in late November 2008, immediately after the elections. After a brief debate at the National Assembly, it was approved and scheduled for 15 February 2009. PSUV started a rapid campaign for the referendum: state officials, party functionaries, faculty, staff, and students were encouraged to join canvassing tours around Caracas and elsewhere. Rallies (concentraciones) of people dressed in specially printed red T-shirts and scarves and carrying flags, banners, and all necessary paraphernalia of the revolution were permanently seen around Caracas. The puntos rojos info-points mushroomed, emerging at each of the larger squares or metro stations, playing loudly the newly compiled music of the campaign with the slogan, “Uh, Ah, Chávez no se va!” (Uh, Ah, Chávez is not leaving!). This slogan, chanted by Chávez himself on the tenth anniversary of his first electoral victory in December 2008, was repeated by his supporters as an incantation of people’s support for the president, especially in the Christmas period, when it rhymed the new Chavista brand of Christmas greeting, “Uh! Ah! Feliz Chavidad!” (Happy Chávez-mas!). The main reasons to vote “yes” for Chávez in the referendum were posted across websites and in leaflets. The central leaflet of the campaign, printed in huge type, listed ten reasons. It started by stating that the referendum was constitutional, an initiative approved by the National Assembly. It explained that the reason to do it in 2009—four years before the next presidential election— was to leave the president the necessary space to work in peace toward the solution of pressing social problems. This central campaign material emphasized that the real beneficiaries of the Enmienda were the people (el pueblo), and the real losers of a “no” vote—the leaflet went on—were the members

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of the opposition, who would be prevented from starting a war of exhaustion against the government. To support this thesis, the leaflet enlisted a number of achievements and acquisitions that would be lost if Chavismo did not win the referendum. Under the title “What We Shall Lose” (Que perderiamos), the list enumerated the following (Observador Juvenil 2009): • •

• • • • • •

• •

•

The social policies and the communal councils The benefits that the revolution and Chávez have brought to the people during these last ten years: for example, education, health, food, employment, social security, and all the nationalized companies The just distribution of petrol revenue for the well-being of the people The sovereignty and independence of the fatherland (patria) The peace and stability of our country The Bolivarian Constitution The protagonist and participatory democracy The continuity of the Bolivarian project of national liberation for which so many Venezuelans have lost their lives since the War of Independence and up until now The dignity of and social justice for each single Venezuelan without regard to origin, sex, race, or ethnicity The continuity of the process of progressive change and the integration of the Latin American continent whose nations see in Venezuela an example to follow The right of expression for all

At first glance the list represented a rather clear message of the priorities of the Bolivarian movement. It not only drew on present-day Venezuela but also recalled the genealogical link between the Bolivarian Revolution and all struggles for peace and justice in Venezuelan and Latin American history. It spoke of the importance of keeping social reforms and the general course of the country toward human rights, minority rights, and rights of expression, which were perfunctory in the Venezuelan liberal democracy preceding the Bolivarian process. It also pointed out the necessity to keep the sovereignty of the postcolonial country that had been jeopardized by all previous regimes. It mimicked what Robert Samet discussed as the core of populist subjectivity: the subject not as a bearer of rights but “a bearer of wrongs,” with injustice providing the impetus for democratic subjectivity claimed through struggles for enfranchisement (2019, 255).

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The opposition’s role as the agent constantly provoking instability in the country was indeed proven in the 2002 coup. The integrative and diversitysensitive policies of Chávez concerning minorities and the freedom of speech given to the opposition were undisputable advantages of his rule over previous regimes in Venezuela (Wilpert 2007; Ellner 2008). Yet the government’s main resource was increasingly crude oil—through an export industry still very much dependent on contracts with big antagonist powers such as the United Kingdom and the United States. The achievements were also modest, and the threats of imminent loss were not underpinned by legislative reform that would make the policies irreversible or at least difficult to remove in case an electoral loss occurred. However, the list was suggestive on yet another level. It indicated fear of loss of achievements rather than visions for deepening the process as the only reason for voting “yes.” While fear is a frequently used tool in campaigning, the fear of loss of the Bolivarian missions among all that was enumerated was somewhat ironic. For instance, the misiones such as Misión Sucre for higher education, had in fact been introduced later in Chávez’s rule—after the 2002 coup. They had all been initiated by a presidential decree published in Gazeta Oficial. And while whole working sections of ministries and whole ministries were formed just to support the policies (e.g., the Ministry of Higher Education), since the Bolivarian government had come to power 1999, they had not become a part of the new legislation of the country. To take education as an example, even in the Organic Law of Education (August 2009) the education-related policies Misión Robinson I and II (adult literacy and sixth-grade education) and Misión Ribas (high school–level education) were not put into the law save for two mentions in marginal articles alongside policies for ordinary schools (MINCI 2009). By the time of the 2009 referendum, it was becoming clearer that the new policies never gained sufficient legitimacy for the whole society and were resisted in opposition-led areas with significant autonomy from the central government. The example of higher education is quite telling about the difficulties and resistance the government encountered in its attempts to reform and decentralize the existing universities. The attempts to introduce such reforms with no coercion in 1999–2003 were met with extreme resistance by opposition forces within the established universities. The creation of UBV and its aldeas signaled a decisive split within the public system of higher education. University autonomy, established as a value in the Cordova reform and won in myriads

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of struggles of the university Left in Venezuela throughout the twentieth century, was now used by conservative forces (Moreno 2008). Created in true hope for the integration of el pueblo, UBV and Misión Sucre soon started suffering on an institutional level the same stratification that the government tried to abolish through education for all. Until 2010 the majority of degree programs at UBV and Misión Sucre were not accredited by the Office for Planning and Budgeting of the University Sector (OPSU) (Colomine 2009), and this concern put significant pressure on UBV faculty to show their traditional academic credentials while teaching under heavy workloads. As a result of this and further persisting inequalities, UBV and aldea graduates were neither admitted to postgraduate courses at the traditional universities nor able to find jobs, including in the public sector. This split reproduced on a new level the two-tier university system by adding another sub-layer of stratification. While the value of education at the new Bolivarian institutions could not be measured through the conventional methods of evaluation typical for rankings, political learning and mobilization regarding the “alternative university” were also curtailed because of the “revolutionary hierarchy” in which new generations of protest could not challenge the radicality of an older generation of revolutionary fighters heading the university reform.

Reflections This high level of suspicion and the superficial level on which reforms could be performed can be explained through the past of the country. As UBV faculty member Javier Tafalla reasoned concerning the deeds of his colleagues “burning documents” or at least having them disappear and not archived, which he did not fully approve of: “It is not only about institutional memory. The colonial governance did this, and so did the alleged democracy in Venezuela—a brutal police state. Any evidence means trouble!” In the revolutionary canon these conditions in the past were often publicly commemorated in speeches and public events on key occasions. Dangers coming from home and abroad were recalled in two ways. Past events in the history of Venezuela, such as the killings of underground guerrilla fighters during the 1950s and 1960s, were coupled with stories of more recent massacres that had been kept secret from the population. These had been brought to light by forensic anthropologists who excavated mass graves of victims from the past: peas-

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ants and indigenous people killed fighting for their land, as well as murdered urban guerrilla and ordinary rebellious citizens from the time of the Caracazo (Linárez 2006). These forms of suffering were presented in close connection with cases of imperial aggression—especially of the US military—around the world. The annual commemorations of the attempted coup against Chávez in 2002 were symbolically connected to events such as the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, “softer” interventions as in El Salvador and Honduras, as well as the NATO intervention in Iraq (and later in Libya and Syria). The shared history of oppression created solidarities with further struggles at home and abroad: the fight of other Latin American countries against right-wing authoritarian regimes such as those of Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia that left thousands of victims but also many asylum seekers—some accommodated in Venezuela as the only liberal democracy in the region, despite its anticommunist politics of exile (Ayala 2020). These were read along the same lines as contemporary struggles such as that of the Palestinian people, as well as radical grassroots movements in the present-day capitalist world. Local business and knowledge elites were, thus, seen either as bystanders to the torture of the poor or as constant perpetrators together with foreign military forces against progressive social change. This process is of course also part of a bigger picture. Stepping into power in 1999, President Chávez inherited a state that had transformed significantly because of the neoliberal reforms in the 1990s that reduced public expenditures and the public-service sector beyond proportion (Lander 1996). All public institutions—universities and hospitals included—were targeted by privatization or simply withered away under the competitive pressure of private organizations (Lander 1996; Moreno 2008). The Bolivarian government undertook the difficult task of rebuilding these institutions and re-creating trust among the population by undoing the wrongs committed against them in Venezuela’s past (Samet 2019). It engaged in an effort of state rebuilding. Armed with oil, it attempted to regain slowly its power and legitimacy. Yet with the attempted coup in 2002 and the Pentagon-supported petrol strike a year later, these hopes for reconciliation were short-lived (Golinger 2005; Gill and Brown 2020). As John Gledhill (2008) noted, in the past political regimes in Latin American resource-rich countries have never really used national states to perform redistribution that would allow a significant improvement of their subaltern

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population. The Bolivarian government went against this tendency, despite the threat of a coup and “soft” power assault from the liberal polity against a new “inconvenient” socialist country (Gindin and Panitch 2013, 9). It did that against the negative framework of foreign and national mainstream media, which designated it a “failed state”: a myth created by right-wing think tanks, NGOs, international financial organizations, and governments to justify neocolonial intervention in the Global South (Ghani and Lockhart 2009; Ross 2013). Instead of “rebuilding a failed state” and reproducing Venezuela’s subalternity, the Bolivarian government entered a process of state transformation by attempting to rebuild welfare institutions and trust in the state’s benevolence. The story of higher education reform discussed in the next chapters shows how difficult this task has been. Led by pro-Western values, traditional elites and public institutions resisted reform by the new government. To counter this resistance without using violence that would delegitimize it in the eyes of the international community, the government was left with little choice but to create parallel structures. The redistribution programs, the so-called Bolivarian missions, were used to offer health care, education, allowances for single mothers, care for people with disabilities, and more recently public housing (Ivancheva and Krastev 2019). Still, their creation did not mean the destruction of the large private sector (Aporrea 2009b) and did not allow for reform within the core institutions of public health care and education. Instead of creating a serious contestation of dual power (Ciccariello-Maher 2013) in which the new democratic institutions would gradually gain control and the existing ones would “die a natural death,” these two forces remained in constant unequal competition. This ultimately meant that the Bolivarian missions stood for second-class institutions that had little to no chance to compete against the hegemonic old structures in their respective fields. Beyond continuous grassroots struggles for autonomy, within the Bolivarian process dual power meant little more than the creation of a parallel institutional universe and a rich material culture to represent it. Through it, the Bolivarian state successfully reached out to and became “implicated in the minute texture of everyday life” of subaltern communities (Gupta 1995, 375). In regard to three omnipotent enemies of Chavismo—capitalism, empire, and the Venezuelan oligarchy—it still had little structural power to influence a deeper transformation of old state structures. Against this background, I show a different “face” (Navaro-Yashin 2002) of the Venezuelan state behind the higher education reform. Unlike other social-

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ist states, the state in twenty-first-century Bolivarian Venezuela did not create new totalistic ideologies, overseeing and omnipotent plans, violent border monitoring, and prohibitive violence to sustain a state effect in the life of its citizens. Instead, this softer, weaker, and less territorially present state could use its superfluous construction as persistent and tangible affective reality. Without a paper trace of documents as testimony of its difficult development, its symbolic materiality made abstract power legible, tangible, and spatially identifiable. These incarnations and corpo-realities of the Bolivarian states came not only through power brokers in communities but also often through objects, artifacts, “finished” documents, and graffiti on buildings in which the imaginary of the state received its visual, material, identifiable references. Coupled with the historically justified politics of fear, this affective reality produced the amorphous but amicable physical dimension of statehood, crucial for creating political legitimacy. Through it the state required and acquired submission, and state performance gained agency in which the state became incarnated and fleshed out even more than in its human actuality. In the absence of archives or any serious documentation of the government policies, save for the publications in the Gazeta Oficial, the PowerPoint presentations and the glossy leaflets became the main source of information about the actual work of different institutions within the state. The production of propaganda, as it is called in Spanish with no negative connotations, was an important part of the function of the state. Simply positive and happy, the visualizations of growth followed each other with quotes from and images of Simón Bolívar, Chávez, the people, grassroots movements, and new cosmetic rather than infrastructural changes. They held a simple message: the state takes care. Widely distributed around public offices—aldeas universitarias, community clubs, and municipalities with Chavista mayors—they created the thrill, the affective, material, and incorporated reality of state care and presence. Not embedded in the concrete structures of reality, this affective reality of the Bolivarian process lived through its representations in artifacts, making the Bolivarian state legible to society. Thus, to understand Venezuelan policy in the democratic socialist governments of Chávez, one needs to understand the state institutions behind them on two levels. On the one hand, after the neoliberal packages of the Washington consensus were signed, the role of the state in the oil-rich country was quickly reduced. It became one more, often slower and more dysfunctional, service

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provider in a context where the majority of services were privatized. The reduced state administration remained in power in the national petrol industry, but the country remained in the hands of local big business and transnational corporations up to the late 2010s (IE University 2018). These new institutional arrangements allowed the Bolivarian movement to occupy or squat in the reduced, hollowed-out ruins of the state as an emptied building. The walls were repainted, posters were hung, and the offices refurbished with red flags and paraphernalia. New content and organization were provided to the poor marginalized Venezuelans living in the barrios and remote rural areas, who were invited to become not just beneficiaries but also protagonists of this new environment. The dwelling of what was called the Bolivarian “revolution” or “process” was used as a vantage point: from there the government and its active supporters could frequently attack a powerful eternal enemy—capitalism—which still owned the other buildings around the squat. While in a centralized core country such as France cultural capitalization had become a technology of space production rather than a technology of pure symbolic accumulation (Kowalski 2007), in Chávez’s Venezuela the latter prevailed, activating an aesthetics of superfluity (Mbembe 2004) that retained its theatricality and spectacle (Guano 2002), simulating a performance for the public sphere: a space of shared enjoyment, consumption, and sensual communion and a shared pedagogy of public teaching (see also Sontag 1970) also expressed in the concept of the “Teacher State” (Estado Docente) used by Chavismo to explain the new position of the state in society. On the other hand, this peculiar conjuncture has allowed the government and its experts and supporters to retain a posture of permanent opposition. While a whole system of new institutions has been created to provide urgent quick-fix solutions for the majority living in poverty, the old structures were left untouched. In terms of higher education this means predominantly that the old traditional public universities, dependent on governmental funding, were still considered to be the only source of legitimate academic knowledge at home and abroad. They rendered a “second-class” status to the new Bolivarian institutions. Negated rhetorically as antagonistic to the Bolivarian process, they remain impermeable to government-induced reform. This situation, however, seems to have a certain advantage for the government. The fear of the persistence of the capitalist class in clandestine conspiring power, and the constant reassertion of the high risk that it would intervene

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and remove the new governmental programs and all achievements of the process, was used as powerful imagery to keep the new government in power. It portrayed the revolution as being not just a process but “in process,” that is, as a shared affective reality whose effectiveness could be judged before the final victory over the antagonist forces. Helped by its symbolic representation, it appeared and appealed as a militant subculture acting subversively against capitalist domination without taking full hold and responsibility over power mechanisms. Without changing relations of production or structural realities, the Venezuelan state under Chávez acted through a sensual omnipresence that kept his government in charge of this affective state as long as it could keep its symbolic appearance and petrol reserves. However, it was not producing enduring reform, what István Mészáros has called “coherent strategies which cannot be reversed at the first opportune moment, in contrast to past failures due to the acceptance of the ‘line of least resistance’ and the concomitant defensiveness of the socialist movement” vis-à-vis the constant threat that old structures of the inherited system will surely be revitalized, as witnessed in Soviet-type societies in the twentieth century (2008, 253).

Chapter 2

The Rise and Fall of Academic Autonomy The University as a Historic Battlefield

In May 2009, as a response to the sudden drop in oil prices, the government of Hugo Chávez initiated layoffs and budget cuts in the public sector, including a cut of 6 percent to the budgets of all public universities (YVKE Mundial 2009c). A thousand-strong crowd gathered at the Central University of Venezuela. Headed by UCV’s rector, Cecilia Garcia Arocha, it comprised students from UCV and the University Simón Bolívar, two strongholds of reaction against the government. Many students were wearing T-shirts displaying logos of two radical opposition parties, A New Time (Un Nuevo Tiempo, UNT) and Justice First (Primero Justicia), and of the TV network Globovision, infamous for its bitter reporting against Chávez and its support of the 2002 coup (Oliver 2007). Despite their sympathy for parties in favor of a free-market economy, neoliberal austerity, and a shrinking public sector, the students and faculty protested against the budget cuts. They marched toward the Ministry of Higher Education, where Rector Garcia Arocha and Ricardo Sanchez—a leader of the Federation of University Centers (FCU) and functionary of UNT—were invited to join a press conference with Minister Luis Acuña. The meeting ended abruptly when student members of a small left-wing group from UCV, called March 28th (M-28), interrupted their rector. They had been staging counterprotests to support the government’s budget cuts, claiming that the university budget was not efficiently spent. The rector left the meeting indignantly, saying that all debates should take place at UCV. The M-28 leaders were hailed by the public media for their call for efficient budget use (YVKE Mundial 2009b) but denounced by opposition-supporting students as assaulting academic autonomy. As former student leader, Yon Goicoechea (2009), wrote, “I have never seen a student asking for governmental intervention into their university, and for that matter, in the university autonomy.” 47

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This was a heavy gauntlet to throw down. Student activists during Venezuela’s liberal democracy who later aligned with the Bolivarian movement and activated its higher education reform and other student movements throughout Latin America had fought for academic autonomy in countless bloody battles throughout the twentieth century (see Einaudi 1963; Figueiredo-Cowen 2002). It was a guarantee that softer liberal democratic governments with strong police states in Latin America continued to oppose authoritarian regimes: campuses could remain strongholds of the clandestine Left, and student movements would not be repressed. Also, former radicals in Venezuela protected academic autonomy as an ideal even when they faced a difficult dilemma: with the ascent of President Chávez to power this ideal was instrumentalized by their political antagonists to resist structural reform and to reject any form of state intervention into traditional universities’ matters (Ivancheva 2017b). It was, then, ironic that the student movement representing the opposition was the one that used academic autonomy to attack government austerity, while Bolivarian students saw it as a tool used by traditional universities to resist the inclusion of poor Venezuelans into universities. Protected by the government for its historical and political significance but without a challenge to its present-day implications, a liberal concept of university autonomy was used against the government’s policies in defense of poor students’ class interests, shielding instead privileged academics and students at traditional autonomous universities from public accountability. Taken to its logical conclusion, such use of academic autonomy perpetuated the two-tier higher education system existing before the Bolivarian government came to power and was averse to its overall egalitarian anticapitalist stance (Ivancheva 2013). Not unlike in other domains, such as journalism, however, as Naomi Schiller has spoken of freedom of speech used by community media (2018, 201–3), Chavista faculty and students had to navigate the overall use of this term by opposition forces to challenge the Bolivarian project while also at times considering its historic and present-day implications for their struggle. To explore these tensions in both their structural dimensions and the individual and collective agency that they reveal, I recount the history of academic autonomy and its relation to higher education reform in Venezuela. I show how it has played out during a number of key episodes in Venezuela’s political and academic history: Generation ’28 and the fight against the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship; the university reform after the Academic Renovation (1969–71);

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the establishment of UBV and Misión Sucre after the Movement for University Transformation (2001); the coup d’état and the petrol strike staged against Hugo Chávez’s government (2002–3); and the subsequent shift between Misión Sucre and Misión Alma Mater (around 2010). I show these not as static changes of the direction of state policy but as turning points (Abbott 2001), when certain choices made under contingent and often volatile circumstances come to shape institutional design and policy outcomes in the long term. In this line of thinking, the dynamic of the Venezuelan higher education reform under Chávez cannot be understood without one of its central tenets, academic autonomy, and outside a bigger struggle for universities as a key battleground of class struggle (Carnoy and Castells 2001). Paying formal tribute to academic autonomy, subsequent governments in Venezuela’s recent history have circumvented it through different maneuvers of institutional redesign of the higher education system. Meanwhile, with the ascent of a progressive social project to power, despite its emancipatory potential, a liberal concept of autonomy as individual and institutional freedom from public responsibility has increasingly been used by traditional academics to resist any reform that challenges their privilege, while the freedom from market forces and (neo)colonial capitalist interests (Lynch and Ivancheva 2015) has not been discussed. To understand higher education policy shifts in Venezuela and beyond throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we need to focus our attention both on offices of policy makers and student and academic struggles. To this effect, I supplement the discussion of the shifts between turning points in higher education state policy and historical narratives of the student discontent with a closer focus on the individual trajectory of an activist-academic through these historic episodes. The trajectory is one that to a large extent reflects the recent history of higher education in Venezuela: that of María Egilda Castellano Ágreda de Sjöstrand, the first rector of UBV. Castellano’s path from a student and academic opponent of Venezuela’s Fourth Republic (1958–98) to the corridors of Bolivarian state power mirrors the trajectory of many leftwing intellectuals moving from critical opposition to Bolivarian government appointments. Her shifting job positions in the first ten years of the Bolivarian administration (1999–2009)—as vice-minister of education, then as a rector of UBV, and later as an academic adviser for the new Alma Mater program—reflect the contingencies from which policy processes have been enacted within the Bolivarian process.

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The frequent changes in state higher education policy and of Castellano’s career as a policy maker while maintaining her ideals of inclusive higher education and academic autonomy are telling of the key challenges and contradictions faced by many academic intellectuals and experts who joined the Bolivarian process. Their insistence on non-coercion even in the face of extreme, violent adversity and their attempt to create democratic legitimacy to foreground an institutional design happened while their legitimacy depended on the traditional academic establishment that challenged the existence of the institutions they designated as illegitimate. Castellano’s individual trajectory as part of the student struggles for academic autonomy, and later as a government official trying to preserve these ideals while attempting progressive reforms under an increasingly authoritarian Bolivarian government, helps us understand this process. As occurred for many members of the former student Left who joined President Chávez’s government through its higher education reform, her unflinching acceptance of old ideals challenged by the new political conjuncture produced an unintended outcome. It reinforced a two-tier university system that perpetuated inequality despite its egalitarian, transformative policy design.

Revisiting Academic Autonomy The meanings of what constituted academic freedom have changed in different historical epochs and geographical areas according to their specific university models. Originally, in late medieval universities across Europe, it signified the relative freedom from secular or religious authorities for faculty and students alike (Altbach 2001). It was reinforced in the nineteenth-century Humboldtian university model as freedom of teaching (Lehren) and learning (Lernen) within the confines of scholarly disciplines (Altbach 2001, 206). Such freedom did not protect the academic community from broader social and political issues as it did not extend beyond the university gates, and neither did it mean any special protection for dissenting faculty or students (206–7). Under the Napoleonic public university model, developed in the same era and dedicated to civil service education, universities were central institutions to train and reproduce the elites presiding over the state. Academics were public servants accountable to power rather than science. Authorities had an indiscriminate right to intervene in university operations (Enders, de Boer, and Weyer 2013; Sam and Van der Sijde 2014).

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It was in the Americas at the end of the nineteenth century that the individual and guild privileges and the public service aspect of the university institution were combined in an extended definition of academic freedom. Under the insistence of the public relevance of scientific knowledge, and the service function of higher education, the university community was seen as responsive to broader issues in society (Einaudi 1963). Protections of the academic community in public life beyond the ivory tower were seen as vital. In the United States this meant research faculty were entitled to special protections of freedom of public speech and writing on all topics; throughout Latin America, under the influence of the Córdoba Reform in Argentina of 1918, this was carried a step further (Altbach 2001). In Córdoba, and later through student discontent and public reforms across the continent, progressive students and academics demanded protection of the financial, legal, and political autonomy of universities and protection from police forces entering their campuses. This reform introduced some of the key principles of public higher education in Latin America: free access, democratic co-governance, transparent recruitment, and applied academic knowledge through outreach (extensión) (Tünnermann Bernheim 2008; Ivancheva 2013, 2017a). Thus, the concept remained stretched between distant or even somewhat controversial definitions. On one end stands a narrow definition of individual or institutional freedom premised on an adherence to the scientific or disciplinary ideal. On the other extreme, academic autonomy has had strong institutional connotations that require not only students and faculty but also university institutions to be accountable to the public by serving official authorities or by openly confronting powers-that-be (Altbach 2001; Traianou 2015). These definitions now find hybrid manifestations in different contexts. The broader concept has been central in places where academic communities are involved in struggles for national liberation or against authoritarian dictatorships (Altbach 2001). The narrower one is professed in contexts where the academic community is not seen as a politically relevant actor but its right to free speech is regarded as unquestionable (Lynch and Ivancheva 2015). Being focused on politics, both these versions have not been seriously engaged in discussing the intervention of market forces into higher education (although see Vatansever and Kölemen 2022). Since the collapse of the Socialist Bloc in 1989 the broader definition of academic autonomy has mostly been absent (Altbach 2001) or featured only in a

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limited sense in policy documents as academics’ “right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine,” to freedom of teaching, discussion, research, publication, and uncensored critical speaking of the institution or system in which they worked (UNESCO 1997); or as “the freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions” (UK Government 1988, Provision 202[2]). Such individually focused conceptualizations of academic freedom are still present in public and academic debates in relation to new illiberal governments’ measures against liberal academics and universities (Ignatieff and Roch 2017). Individual institutions’ and academics’ rights to be independent from any regulation, paradoxically, are also defended by the opposite conservative camp as they defend the right of misogynist, racist, and other controversial opinions to be platformed at university campuses (see, e.g., Simpson and Kaufmann 2019). While the latter discussion mostly takes place in advanced capitalist democracies, the former happens in the postcolonial or post-socialist space and in (semi-)peripheral economies where universities and academics play a more prominent political role (Lyer 2019). Yet both discussions omit the question of what project of statehood or public interest is represented in specific regulatory initiatives. Both also hail academic freedom as a privilege granted to universities and their faculty, without requirement that they serve a positive transformative social project. A new discussion of academic freedom has challenged both the broad and narrow definition of academic freedom (Moreno 2008; Lynch and Ivancheva 2015; Traianou 2015; O’Keefe 2016; Ivancheva 2017a). While agreeing that freedom should be granted to academics and students, authors express concerns with the way discussions of academic freedom elude the question of marketization of university education. And while UNESCO (1997) insisted that academics, like all other citizens, are expected to “enhance the observance in society of the cultural, economic, social, civil and political rights of all peoples,” these authors have questioned how exactly the university institution serves the public: under which circumstances universities should claim academic autonomy and under which such freedom could be challenged. These discussions revolve around the campus politics of no-platforming, in which activists are making sure that universities are not granting freedom of expression to those who harm the most vulnerable with their inflammatory positions (O’Keefe 2016) and around the

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question of how marketization challenges academic autonomy in advanced capitalist democracies (Lynch and Ivancheva 2015). What has been ostensibly missing from such discussions is that in certain contexts, such as Venezuela under the presidency of the late Hugo Chávez, speaking of freedom from the state conceals the discussion of freedom from the violence of the market (Ivancheva 2017b). Here, the national government was committed to use the university to promote social justice and inclusion, but academic autonomy was weaponized by the opponents to prevent a deep structural reform that would allow universities to serve the public. Read through a liberal lens, academic freedom—a progressive ideal used to promote democracy and political activity for transformative social change uninterrupted by the repressive state apparatus—has been used to defend the status quo, subverting the Bolivarian project for redistribution and social justice through higher education. The Venezuelan case that I narrate in this chapter through its historical turning points, student mobilizations, and the individual trajectory of former student activist–turned–Bolivarian policy maker María Egilda Castellano, demonstrates the limitations of the concept of academic freedom when it is used to perpetuate market logic in higher education, bestowing individual or guild privileges to a tiny elite against a project that benefits the many, not the few.

The Old Rector of the New University I first saw María Egilda Castellano at a UBV event in February 2009. Students had organized a debate about the relevance to the university’s future of the Rector’s Paper (UBV 2003) produced by a team she had led in 2003. In the elevator taking me up to Simón Bolívar Hall, where the event was to take place, I bumped into a tiny woman in her early sixties with fair hair and blue eyes. I recognized Castellano’s face from the black-and-white photo published alongside an interview she had given to the Spanish journal Laberinto (2004). She was wearing an elegant suit, and her delicate stature and formal style were in contrast with the informal atmosphere of UBV. Castellano made her entrance into the hall quietly and unobtrusively. The hall, a very large room lined with blue chairs facing a stage, swallowed up her tiny figure as she sat in the first row, surrounded by people but visibly on her own. She was approached and greeted by a group of mature students who affectionately called her “Profe.”

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In his welcoming message to Castellano Vice-Rector Luis Damiani, replacing Yadira Córdoba, who was campaigning for the constitutional amendment referendum, identified the Rector’s Paper as one of “utmost importance for the development of UBV” and warned the audience that UBV risked reproducing the model of traditional universities. He repeated his favorite slogan, “Let’s municipalize the university fully,” promoting the creation of a network of local classrooms without campuses, as first envisaged by Castellano. His words signaled one of the reasons the Rector’s Paper was being discussed. Earlier that month one of the numerous presidential decrees published in Gaceta Oficial (2009) had announced a new set of regulations (reglamento) for the university that gave UBV more autonomy and thus concentrated power in the hands of senior management. The regulations were seen by some students, faculty, and members of staff as violating the principles of planned economy and horizontal decentralized governance promoted by the Rector’s Paper. UBV senior managers described the decreed document as a way of protecting the university’s autonomy vis-à-vis the new government reforms, including the launch of dozens of new universities within Misión Alma Mater, which did not follow UBV’s decentralized model. Yet Castellano’s own involvement in the Alma Mater program was not mentioned. The meeting itself also left no space for discussion of the Rector’s Paper or the regulations: resembling an end-of-the-year show it featured student bands playing soft guitar rock and covers of revolutionary hits, interrupted by performances of other students praising UBV as a gift of President Chávez to the people without a mention of the Rector’s Paper. Castellano herself was given time to speak two and a half hours into the show and told by the facilitators that she had to cut her talk short. She skimmed through her long, richly theoretical PowerPoint slides, but the increasing hum from the audience, by then seated for a good three hours in the hall, showed little focus on her presentation. She sat down during the rest of the program and disappeared into the crowd. The opportunity to discuss the Rector’s Paper or the new contention revolving around academic autonomy in the regulations or Misión Alma Mater was missed. I next met Castellano for an interview we held at the common space on one of the floors of the Ministry of Popular Power for Higher Education. She told me in more detail how her professional and political history was related to that of the Bolivarian process and its higher education reform. Castellano had entered politics following a path typical of intellectuals at the ministry and in UBV’s

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senior management. Having studied sociology, history, and comparative higher education at UCV, the oldest autonomous public university in Venezuela, she became a member of the youth section of the Communist Party of Venezuela (JPCV). She also participated in the Academic Renovation: the Venezuelan chapter of the global wave of cultural and political uprisings around 1968, in which academic autonomy was a key ideal for which many lost their lives. When speaking of this period, and later when extending it into the present day, Castellano used “we.” To my question about whom this collective pronoun stood for, she said it was people like herself who came from the student movements in the 1960s, went through university education and academic careers at UCV, and were, at the time of our interview, part of the government’s higher education or kindred reforms. This shared trajectory was key to the historical role of the notion of university autonomy as an ideal of the Venezuelan and Latin American student movements. For them, as a normative ideal it presupposed engagement with the students’ social and political reality, as was used by Latin American Left-leaning student movements to resist dictatorships. It was also a key tool throughout the twentieth century for students to demand the nonintervention of the state bureaucracy or police forces in the administrative, political, financial, scientific, and territorial matters of the university. Students like Castellano back in the 1960s and progressive academics like her later in life saw autonomy as a weapon in their struggles with repressive governments (López and Hernández 2001; Moreno 2008). Yet a deeper look into this period shows that autonomy was sometimes used in Venezuela’s recent history to circumvent the transformation they fought for.

Academic Renovation and Its Aftermath: University Autonomy Violated The Academic Renovation was a sustained occupation of autonomous universities in Venezuela in 1969–71 that promoted the principles of the Córdoba Reform of 1918 (Tünnermann Bernheim 2008): democratic co-governance of universities by students and faculty; university autonomy in financial, legal, territorial, and political terms; an extensive public service function of universities; and free access to higher education. As in the rest of Latin America, where the concept refers to the relation of the university community to broader political issues (Einaudi 1963, 636), Venezuela was no exception. Student activists from

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the so-called Generación del 28 (Generation ’28), who protested against the rule of Juan Vicente Gómez in 1928 (Rojas 2005, 91), created three key parties while in exile: Acción Democrática (AD), Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV), and Unión de Reforma Democrática (URD). When these parties joined forces with conservative party Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI) against the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948–58), universities became the last bastion of free speech and criticism. Nonetheless, in 1951, autonomy was banned, and many faculty and students were dismissed (Moreno 2008, 363). After the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez and the Pact of Punto Fijo, which laid the grounds of the new liberal polity (Ellner 2008, 58–60), one of the first laws the new government passed was the University Law of 1958, which granted administrative, financial, and academic autonomy to universities (Moreno 2008, 364). Yet the government did not legalize the communist PCV and made Venezuela a drilling field for multinational companies, a key factor in the isolation of communist Cuba from the rest of the continent (Ellner 2008). The Workers Pact in 1961 and the closure of UCV in 1966 during so-called Black December further soured the relations between university radicals and the state. This led to the intensification of the underground partisan (guerrilla) activity facilitated by the territorial autonomy of universities as a consequence of the Academic Renovation (Ellner 2008, 61–62). University autonomy was vital as it allowed campuses to become oases of the underground Left, safeguarded from police intervention. It was also seen as a prerequisite for reform generated by and for the university: to take part in social transformation, the university had to transform itself (Cadenas 2008). During the Academic Renovation, in line with the Córdoba Manifesto, Venezuelan students demanded democratic co-governance, free education for all, transparent recruitment, innovative teaching, and academic knowledge for the benefit of the poor (González Deluca 2008, 80; Méndez 2009). Beyond these claims, set as a local manifestation of the May 1968 events in France and the “Global 1968,” the Academic Renovation shared the tactics of student protests in the same era: it entailed strikes, occupations, and sit-ins at UCV and other public universities. It began at UCV in June 1968 and culminated in the occupation of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics (FACES) in March to October 1969 (Méndez 2009). The Renovation was also an expression of its time: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the US ongoing fight in Vietnam, and

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the repressions of student protest in France and Mexico showed the violent face of both liberal and state socialist polities. When the Venezuela Academic Renovation itself was brutally suppressed by the military occupation of UCV in Operation Kangaroo, academic autonomy was first violated and then legally circumvented (Méndez 2009). Some students and young faculty members were dismissed (Cadenas 2008). To circumvent the demands the Academic Renovation movement stood for, higher education reform was undertaken by the cabinet of COPEI under Rafael Caldera—a former student activist from COPEI. The amended University Law of 1970 clearly showed that his government did not hold autonomy in high regard. The university autonomy stipulated in the 1958 University Law was retained in the new law (Gaceta Oficial 1970, Art. 9), but with significant limitations. Police were granted the right of “vigilance over the campus” (Art. 7), a “privilege” that the state used in the following decades, causing the deaths of many more students (Moreno 2008, 360, 363–64). The National University Council (CNU) was given the right to make decisions instead of university senior managers and to change its governing bodies to “harmonize” planning and organization (Gaceta Oficial 1970, Art. 20). Under pressure from big business and the Catholic Church, the proponents of the law created a new binary system of public universities (Moreno 2008, 364–65). The old universities were called “autonomous” and all new ones “experimental.” The latter operated under the direct rule of the government according to regulations set out in the law. Technological colleges, pedagogical institutes, and university institutes were introduced to allow shortterm vocational training of professionals fit for the labor market. Private universities mushroomed. To catch up with the competitive commercial global field, autonomous universities facing austerity tried to sell or rent out public facilities and to introduce student fees and entry exams (352). Although the Academic Renovation resulted in limited autonomy, it also signaled a détente and new line of conflict in Venezuelan politics (González Deluca 2008, 78–79). Caldera’s pacification helped the Left come to terms with its past and enter electoral politics in the 1970s, its stance shifting from Stalinist to Eurocommunist (Lopéz and Monzant Gavidia 2000, 106). The new University Law hindered mobilization, but it was not the only reason that no student movements emerged before the 1980s. The 1970s were a decade of political stability. Crude oil prices were peaking, and the oil industry was nationalized, allowing for modest redistributive policies. Employment in the informal economy was

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stagnant for the first time before and ever since (Leary 2007). Political concessions were granted to the national and international Left, but also to domestic and foreign capitalist elites (Coronil 1997, 246; Ellner 2008, 71–72, 76). Having rendered academic autonomy only partially relevant, and only for a few old universities, the COPEI government of Rafael Caldera and its successors in power created a parallel system of higher education institutions in 1970 and thus partly silenced discontent around the exclusive character of higher education. The Venezuelan university system also participated in a global neoliberal higher education restructuring. Beginning in the 1980s, autonomy acquired a new meaning in the context of new managerialism that changed—though not necessarily diminished—the role of the state in university management. The growing political and economic role of universities and their alleged inability to regulate themselves were used as a rationale for new forms of control, both internally (though management and evaluation) and externally (through policy and audit). As the liberal freedoms of territorial and political sovereignty were being discarded, university autonomy was monitored and directly linked with performance, efficiency, competitiveness, and accountability (Enders, de Boer, and Weyer 2013, 5; Nokkala and Bacevic 2014, 704). These reforms were slowly but surely introduced in Venezuela, starting with the 1990s systems of evaluation and promotion for faculty members, who had to prove their competitiveness in the global academic market (Ivancheva 2013). Within a decentralized two-tier system of public higher education, academic autonomy was regularly violated by the state and the market alike. By the early 1980s the effects of the Dutch disease economy gradually set in. Venezuela’s huge international debt soared as a result of the international monetary crisis (Coronil 1997, 245, 287). An IMF agreement pushed the government to increase prices, restrict wages, and cut public budgets. Standards of living and employment opportunities decreased (Lander 1996). An Organic Bill of Education proposed the privatization of the university sector. A new individualized student admission system threatened to abolish free admission. Reduced state subsidies destabilized the public school system and made student access to the university more limited (Moreno 2008, 365, 370). A new wave of student movements followed against the increased privatization and decreased quality of university education and campuses, the increasing austerity, the overall militarization of public spaces, court trials and police violence against students, and frequent police raids on campuses (López and Hernández 2001, 632–33).

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And while the senior management of autonomous universities was still in the hands of progressive forces, affected by persecution and lacking consensual strategy for social change, Left-leaning academics were taken by surprise by the mass mobilization that swept through Venezuela in 1989 (López 2006, 80). A second agreement with the IMF committed the country to neoliberal shock treatment through deregulation of the market, brutal austerity, and further privatization of industries and services. A popular rebellion, El Caracazo, caused by the increase in the prices of home consumption gasoline produced from Venezuelan oil ended in a bloodbath with hundreds, if not more, of disappeared and dead (Coronil and Skurski 1991). After the Caracazo, two failed military rebellions took place. While the popularity of Hugo Chávez, the leader of the first rebellion, was growing in the late 1990s, left-wing students struggled against the Proyecto Ley de Educación Superior (PLES, Bill of Higher Education). Influenced by a 1994 World Bank report, PLES introduced admission fees (Art. 10). It encouraged private enterprises to become involved in the financial bodies of universities and introduced a system of self-financing through loans (Art. 11; Moreno 2008, 369). In August 1998, the members of UCV’s Marxist student group Utopia were beaten by the police as they marched naked to Congress to protest against PLES, their bodies painted in blue (los azules) (Calderón and Niño 2006). Due to the changed dynamic in the following months that led to the arrival of Hugo Chávez to power through sweeping victory in the 1998 democratic elections, PLES was eventually abandoned.

The Movement for University Transformation: Turning Points and Lost Chances As many other former student activists did, María Egilda Castellano left organized politics after the Renovation with a sense of disillusionment with the state of the Venezuelan Left, fragmented after decades of armed struggle. After finishing her PhD, she held the position of lecturer at her alma mater, UCV, from the mid-1980s. She remained active in academic movements for university reform. In the early 1980s Castellano spent an extended sabbatical in the United Kingdom at the Open University, the experimental university for lifelong education that served as an inspiration for UBV. Back home, she observed from a distance the way Chávez appeared in the media in 1992 after an attempted military rebellion against neoliberal president Carlos Andrés Pérez.

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Along with other left-wing intellectuals, Castellano had her reservations, but in 1999, when President Hugo Chávez formed his first cabinet, she was offered and accepted an appointment as vice-minister for the university sector in the Ministry of Education headed by Héctor Navarro (1999–2002). In 2002 she became vice-minister for academic policy in the new Ministry of Higher Education, and in 2003 she was selected by the president to design UBV. In her words, she saw the Bolivarian project as “a unique opportunity for a deep transformation of Venezuela” and its leader as “a man of firm political will who understands the people’s needs.” President Chávez’s initial “Third Way” politics and his military, nationalist, and religious background did not immediately attract the radical Left students and academics to his side. Some former guerrilla fighters, including Theodoro Petkoff and Pompeyo Márquez, and other members of the reformed Left joined their longtime enemies from AD and COPEI to oppose Chávez’ s rule (Wilpert 2007). Still, the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution stipulated that “education is a human right and a fundamental social duty; it is democratic, free of charge and obligatory” (Art. 102). It presented university autonomy as vital to the planning, organization, preparation, and updating of research, teaching, and outreach programs of all universities. The university campus was presented as “inviolable” (Art. 109). In 2001 Chavista legislators drafted forty-nine law decrees rejecting the interests of big business. The Laws of Fisheries and Aquaculture, the Law of Agrarian Land, and the Organic Law of Hydrocarbons challenged the interests of big fisheries, large land-monopoly owners (latifundistas), and foreign corporations, granting control over the means of production to fishermen, landless peasants, and the state. Education was not part of this legislation, but a decree on science, technology, and innovation was passed that caused an outcry from the opposition media and academics in defense of academic autonomy because it required that science be used in the struggle against poverty (Gaceta Oficial 2001). Two conflicting Organic Education bills were discussed by the National Assembly, but no consensus was reached on the municipalization of higher education and on the question of the Teacher State, issues that required an education system dedicated to the public interest (CoMisión 2001). The Bolivarian government also tried to address inequalities within the existing institutional framework: redistributing resources regionally, filling redundant student positions with new students, enabling exchange between universities, and reintroducing extensión

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as applied fieldwork with communities (Laberinto 2004, 52). These reforms antagonized lobby groups within the business sector, the Catholic Church, and conservative academics. Previously opposed to autonomy, they used it to resist reform (Moreno 2008, 374). As vice-minister in 1999 Castellano commissioned a study whose results signaled extreme stratification and weakening of the public sector of higher education in both its organization and content (Castellano 2002). The country lacked an integrated system of higher education; educational qualifications were not easily transferable between institutions. “Social exclusion and segregation were also a grave problem,” Castellano recalled during our interview. The results of this survey, confirmed since by more recent research (Morales Gil 2003), showed the increasingly elitist and exclusive nature of the higher education provided by the autonomous public universities. In the 1990s the sector of secondary education had been partly privatized, and it was mostly graduates of private secondary schools who entered higher education. There were drastic cuts in public funding for universities. The concentration of 90 percent of all universities in the coastal area meant that access was hindered for students from the rest of the country. With regard to their content, Castellano told me, “Universities became ‘mills of professionals’ without ethics and social sensitivity.” With the portfolio of a vice-minister for higher education, between 2000 and 2002, Castellano attempted to reform the existing universities. In her interview with Laberinto months before she left the position of rector of UBV (Laberinto 2004, 52), she mentioned three of these attempted reforms: the academic networks, quality with equality, and national and international integration. During our interview in 2009 she explained these policies in great detail that was absent even from her later reflections on UBV (Castellano 2019). She told me that her team wished to create new regional centers that would bring together facilities, computers, laboratories, and services to be used by all universities in remote areas. All faculty members were encouraged to complete a PhD. A Law of Communal Service required students to do applied work with communities. The ministry tried to introduce new standards of student performance that placed more responsibility not on the individual student but on the school environment. Low-income students received grants. Entry exams in Spanish and mathematics were made less demanding, reducing the use of complex vocabulary and material not covered in many poorly subsidized public schools.

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Except for the published survey analysis (Castellano 2002), no information about these programs is available today to the public, nor is it examined historically as a possible way ahead through a smaller number of small-scale but scalable projects and mobilizations in the traditional universities (e.g., Programa Samuel Robinson 2001; see discussion in Ivancheva 2017a). In 2009 Castellano explained: “The older projects were not continued. I don’t know why. [From 2003 on] all efforts were simply concentrated on UBV.” In 2004 she had said, “The universities were very slow and resistant. They did not act with the rapidity that the revolutionary process required” (Laberinto 2004, 52). Moreover, since Chávez’s ascent to power, the ministry had been operating within an extremely polarized society. A progressive Bill of Higher Education was angrily opposed in 2001 (MTU 2001a). Without adequate explanation, education experts called the reforms “ideologized” (ideologisado) (García-Guadilla et al. 2006, 14). Actors formerly opposed to autonomy used it as a mechanism to resist the government’s intervention (Moreno 2008). By the time of the Enabling Laws in 2001, members of the Left were increasingly wary of the use of academic autonomy in defense of the old system. A campaign to promote progressive reform started at UCV with the internal university election in 2000. Around that time, university radicals organized around the Utopia group, repressed in 1998, and challenged both the social democratic and conservative candidates. Over the next year, UCV’s corridors, canteens, and library were often blocked by students protesting bad facilities and the lowering of democratic standards of UCV (Sánchez 2011, 9–10). Tensions escalated on 28 March 2001 when the faculty and students took over the Session Hall at UCV. Their manifesto, Proyecto de Refundación Universitaria (Project of University Reestablishment), opposed the elite vision of the university and the formal representative democracy at UCV. It demanded an immediate democratization of the university, free education for all, and instruction enabling students not only to work in private firms but also to address social problems (MTU 2001a, 2001b). MTU was attacked violently by the opposition-supporting senior managers and faculty but was not taken seriously by the government either (Alcaldía de Caracas 2011, 14). President Chávez remained silent until the very last days of the occupation, when the occupiers’ energy had run out (Rivas 2011). When he did react, he reproached the protesters. Chávez announced that two of his ministers would work as mediators between students and authorities, but both were rejected

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by the radical Left as “the Right of Chavismo” (Rivero 2011, 20). He then called on university authorities to be open to change, listen to the students, and bring about a consensual solution that is “definitive and peaceful,” and he asked students not to succumb to desperate actions (Gil 2011, 43). His reaction was a disappointment for the participants in MTU. It also came too late. On 30 April 2001, an ugly clash ensued. “UCV gave a lesson in violence” (Sánchez 2011, 10). Academics armed with bats and pipes attacked their students and colleagues. Many were wounded or hospitalized (Alcaldía de Caracas 2011, 10, 16). Students from MTU were not allowed to sit exams. Some students and faculty were dismissed. In the following months the movement split internally (Rivas 2011), causing a rift within the Left. Former radicals from Bandera Roja (Red Flag) went against MTU (Arias and Domínguez 2017). The government’s decision not to support the protests of Left-leaning academics and students turned a good opportunity into a missed opportunity. Vice-Minister Castellano was quoted at that time: “Given the resistance of the autonomous universities, all universities in Venezuela will have to become experimental” (BR 2001). Thus, ironically, when UBV was designed and later when it opened its doors, it was created as an experimental university—the model that post-1970 governments used to limit autonomy in the sector. The 2001 episode revealed a central contradiction inherent to any struggle for university reform: that between academic autonomy and the public function of the university. It showed that under a more progressive government academic autonomy could challenge academic privilege and make it impossible to reform the university as an instrument of social justice and redistribution. Against this background one can understand why the Bolivarian government decided to establish an alternative set of parallel institutions rather than reform the old traditional ones. Castellano’s conviction that opening parallel Bolivarian institutions was the only way forward was shared by other ministry experts. Yet, while Castellano described the creation of UBV in 2003 as a continuation of all the ministry’s previous reforms, it happened only after all their efforts to reform traditional universities had been met by resistance. The events from the spring of 2001 were already revealing some of the continuities from past reform and of the challenges these new institutions would face. They were a symptom of, rather than a cure for, the great social polarization in Venezuela during the first term of the rule of the Bolivarian government, which ultimately lead to the coup against President Chávez in 2002 and the paro petrolero (pet-

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rol strike) in 2003. MTU was the last sustained campaign in which a significant number of left-wing students promoted a vision of the university as a transformative agent in the spirit of the Academic Renovation.

Coup d’État, Petrol Strike, and the Establishment of Misión Sucre and UBV The disappointment with Chávez experienced during the MTU campaign was short-lived. In 2002 an attempted coup headed by the chambers of commerce and supported by private media reaffirmed the Left’s sympathies for the president. Despite the deployed violence and media isolation, the self-appointed opposition government survived only two days (Wilpert 2007, 22–23). When the same actors staged a general strike, with nineteen thousand high-skilled workers walking out on the national oil industry (PDVSA) a few months later, it became clear to the government that Venezuela had for too long been dependent on science and technology produced abroad or by foreign-oriented Venezuelan academic elites (Vessuri, Canino, and Sánchez-Rose 2005). The silent complicity of the autonomous universities with the coup against the democratically elected president was rather telling. They were granted freedom and security and not asked for public accountability of their work. Policy makers who worked for the government realized the urgent need to create institutions that would train new cadres who could serve the government in the struggle to counterbalance state control over education and science in the increasingly exclusive public universities. These two imperatives were the key impetus of the 2003 inauguration of the UBV and the mass higher education program Misión Sucre. After 2002, the president gifted the building of PDVSA to the new university. As it was PDVSA’s highly skilled cadres that carried out the oil strike in 2002–3, this gesture was a symbol of his turn toward twenty-first-century socialism. With a mass exodus of educated cadres from traditional universities and the commercial sector to enter the ranks of the UBV faculty, left-wing intellectuals aligned with the Bolivarian process and accepted its leader. “Crossing the road” from UCV to UBV—as UCV was located across a busy highway from UBV’s campus in Caracas—gained symbolic meaning. Yet it also left a bitter taste of defeat among the former student radicals. UBV was created as an experimental university: the very euphemism introduced by the Caldera government as part of its 1970 re-

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form and meant to subvert academic autonomy, which former radicals now had to use to their own advantage. The older traditional higher education structures he put in place were not abolished but utilized, despite awareness of the twotier higher education system they produced. Creating parallel institutions instead of reforming the old ones allowed the academic adversaries of the Left to get entrenched in its former battlefield (Ivancheva 2013). Talking of this period, Castellano told me, “Reforming the traditional universities was, for the time being, impossible.” The newly founded UBV was given one of PDVSA’s former administrative buildings, now abandoned—a symbolic act that had the feeling of a fresh start amid the ruins of a capitalist corporation. Under the pressure of the huge demand for university placements reflected in a nationwide census, Castellano and her team of sociologists and teaching experts had established the Sucre Program, which granted university access to half a million Venezuelans. They established UBV and the Misión Sucre to address two needs at once: the education of new government cadres and the incorporation of huge numbers of people into higher education. As mentioned previously, and visible in the following two tables produced by the ministry, between 1990 and 1998 the number of students enrolled in public higher education was somewhat stagnant, but from 1998 to 2007 it rapidly increased. In 1998, 44 percent of higher education students were enrolled in private institutions. Nine years later, three-quarters of the students were enrolled in the public sector, and Misión Sucre and UBV accounted for one-third of enrollments in that sector (MPPES 2008; MPPEU 2009). While UBV’s establishment was celebrated as a success, it also signaled a setback. Created in a country with few academically trained cadres, many of them hostile to the government, the new university had to produce at once new teachers and new students, new state bureaucracy, and radical antielitist education. The academic accreditation of UBV and Misión Sucre depended on the approval of the Office for Planning and Budgeting of the University Sector (OPSU) and the National University Council (CNU). OPSU was staffed mostly with tenured opposition sympathizers, and the majority of the members of CNU were rectors of Venezuelan public universities, militantly opposed to the Bolivarian government. While the national system of accreditation was carried out according to the quality standards imposed by traditional academics on the CNU and followed by OPSU, by 2009 UBV and Misión Sucre could not secure accreditation

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Table 1. Number of students enrolled in higher education institutions in Venezuela Institution type

1990

1998

2007

Private and public

513,458

668,109

2,135,146

Private

164,087

291,002

567,832

Public

349,371

377,107

1,567,314

Source: MPPES 2008.

for the majority of their programs. Their graduates were required to redo their undergraduate work at traditional public universities in order to be accepted for postgraduate studies at those institutions, which retained the majority of the master’s and PhD programs.

Continuities, Ruptures, and Departures While facing extreme adversity from outside, UBV and Misión Sucre were not experiencing internal stability either. I had heard two different stories about President Chávez’s decision to dismiss Castellano as rector. Some faculty members claimed that her vision of the university—expressed in the Rector’s Paper— was “too postmodern.” The proposed decentralized structure and the pursuit of local knowledge through applied fieldwork with communities clashed with the ideas of centralized planning and production promoted by members of the government and the UBV faculty. Another version pointed to her refusal to give priority in admission to UBV-Caracas to members of the Francisco de Miranda Front (Frente Francisco de Miranda), a militant youth organization linked to the Bolivarian movement. Neither version was confirmed by Castellano, but a combination of the two seemed to have seriously shaken her position, reflected in the Rector’s Paper. The insistence on decentralized structure, academic autonomy, and the pursuit of local knowledge through the outreach project (proyecto) appeared very different from a more rigid centralized project for a state-planned system of higher education. The next two rectors—Orietta Caponi and Andrés Eloy Blanco—were remembered mostly for the bureaucratic consolidation of the university. Orietta Caponi was recruited from the university where Chávez himself complete his master’s degree, Universidad Simón Bolívar, mostly a stronghold of right-wing academics but one known for its high ranking, especially in political science, and training experts in quantitative social science. Although Ca-

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Table 2. Distribution of students enrolled in higher education institutions in Venezuela Institution type

1998 (%)

2007 (%)

Private universities

16

10

Private CTs and IUs

28

17

Public CTs and IUs

11

8

Autonomous universities

20

14

Experimental universities

25

27

N/A

24

Misión Sucre

Note: CTs = technological colleges; IUs = university institutes. Source: MPPES 2007. Source: MPPES 2008.

poni had followed a different trajectory than Castellano, her own proclaimed vision of what the university should be was in line with the Documento Rector. In her essay on the revolutionary university (Caponi 2007), she stood against the dominance of the abstract, technical, and cognitive measures of success and failure of the university. She also claimed that while it was to be a public university, the revolutionary university should still leave the day-to-day decision-making autonomy to the students, faculty, and communities. Caponi insisted that all professionals trained at the university worked for the state for a period of time and cherished the idea of university decentralization. Thus, Castellano’s replacement seems more explicable because of a conflict of interests than ideology alone. From what I understood from faculty and students at UBV, the history of the university can be divided very much along the lines of its different rectorships. Castellano and her team were remembered by the first groups of faculty and students as having shown much creativity and hard work. Her fourteen months as rector were a period of energy and initiative: no power hierarchies and no departmentalization of knowledge according to disciplines were in place, and students, faculty, and staff cleaned or decorated the corridors together. Oriana Caponi’s time as rector—the shortest of all—was barely remembered by my interlocutors, except for the growing administrative bureaucracy and the compartmentalization into Programs of Undergraduate Studies (Programas de Formación de Grado, PFG) that aligned the curricula with disciplines. During the time of Andrés Eloy Blanco—a former professor at UCV and later a rector of a university institute—the university’s senior management was consolidated as a separate unit, with a strict division between students, academic staff, senior managers, and workers, with the triumvirate of rector,

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vice-rector, and secretary on top. Maintenance workers were hired on flexible contracts, and voluntary engagement came to an end. By the time Rector Yadira Córdoba headed UBV in late 2007, criticism from within had started to rise that the university went against the principles of the Rector’s Paper. Meanwhile, by 2009, the new Bolivarian institutions of higher learning were part of a two-tier system of public higher education. Access for UBV students, many of them women and adult learners from poor communities, to the job market was also compromised. In 2004 national companies, public radio and television, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands were being asked to provide apprenticeships and jobs for the students (Laberinto 2004, 53–54). In 2009 Castellano noted that the cooperation agreements were being neglected. Most large employers, such as PDVSA, turned their backs on UBV and Misión Sucre students and employed graduates from traditional universities. While thousands were graduating from UBV, only a handful of positions were listed in the job database of the ministry. UBV students could not secure postgraduate placements without going through accredited programs of higher education, and consequently their chances of securing stable income or recognition were limited. Faculty were also targeted by increasing performance pressures. To accredit UBV’s programs, the government had to upgrade the academic profiles of its academics. Having just completed BA degrees at traditional universities and teaching full-time, most UBV faculty members had to complete postgraduate studies and accumulate fund-raising, research, and publication portfolios (Ivancheva 2013). Faced with the challenges posed by the accreditation of UBV and Misión Sucre, which required the consolidation of their governance and their certification as academic institutions, the Bolivarian government shifted its focus to a new program, Misión Alma Mater. Initially a teachers’ training program, by 2009 Alma Mater had become the ministry’s key policy program (MPPEU 2009). The program envisaged a rapid transformation of twenty-nine accredited public technical colleges and university institutes into polytechnic universities and the establishment of fifty-two new institutions. Several new universities were to specialize in health, petrol, security, languages, telemetric science, agrarian science, economy, physical sciences, basic sciences, and tourism. The program also featured a university of the arts, a workers’ university, a university for the people of the Global South, and seventeen territorial universities focusing on the industrial needs of poor regions.

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Before I started the interview with Castellano, who was now an academic director of Misión Alma Mater, she confessed that although UBV was her dearest intellectual project, she had not followed its development. She had “heard that it was going against the Rector’s Paper.” Castellano expressed her confidence that Córdoba was the right person to lead UBV but also said that “once a river runs out of its bed, it is not easy to bring it back on course.” According to Castellano, Alma Mater provided a “new framework for all Venezuelan universities.” Picking up where Misión Sucre had left off, it followed the model of “municipalized higher education for all” and retained the local classrooms of the Misión Sucre as “part of endogenous nuclei.” Yet Alma Mater did not involve a municipalization of big universities such as UBV. Its focus was creating new universities under the direct control of the central government. Castellano saw Misión Sucre as a preparatory stage, “the first response to exclusion.” According to her, the two programs were very similar. A closer look at the two programs, however, reveals a different picture. Alma Mater abandoned some of Misión Sucre’s most important features. While UBV aimed to follow the Cuban example in municipalizing medical education (see Campillo 2008) and creating a small number of big universities centrally controlled by their senior managers, with local classrooms around the country, Alma Mater created a large number of small universities with hierarchically structured administrations controlled directly by the ministry. UBV’s emphasis on social sciences and community service was also not in line with Alma Mater’s short-term technical training programs, instrumental to a future planned economy. In the latter, the ideal of local knowledge gave way to an emphasis on Venezuela’s participation in the global competition for creating a “knowledge economy.” With Alma Mater, the government seemed to have also offered an alternative to UBV and Misión Sucre’s model of a decentralized network of local classrooms that provided lifelong community-oriented learning. Brought to its logical conclusion, Alma Mater reinforced the asymmetry of quality and quantity: experimental Bolivarian universities and underfunded and understaffed aldeas were pitted against better-endowed universities aligned with the global academic order.

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The Defiance of Academic Autonomy? While many left-wing faculty members fled the autonomous universities, the students there remained increasingly exposed to antigovernment rhetoric. Despite the fact that 70 percent of all students in autonomous universities came from middle- and lower-middle-class backgrounds (Bermúdez, Martínez, and Sánchez 2009), they became even further alienated from the Bolivarian process because of the government’s anti-intellectual discourse. The shift of student activism to the Right became obvious by the next student mobilization in 2007, when opposition students contested the decision of the government not to renew the license of RCTV—a private TV broadcast network that supported the 2002 coup. The protests developed into a successful campaign to vote no at the first constitutional amendment referendum in 2007 (Garcia-Guadilla and Mallen 2010, 73). Calling themselves Generation 2007, these students were alluding to Generation ’28 and the student protests in 1958, implying they were also fighting against a dictatorship (Aporrea 2007; González Deluca 2008). Using the Cold War rhetoric of human rights, “liberty, equality, and democracy,” they opposed “a single line of politics” under what they deemed to be an “authoritarian” regime (Aporrea 2007). In the spirit of Eastern European dissidents such as Lech Wałęsa and Vaclav Havel, who supported the Venezuelan opposition by proxy (La Nación 2008), the students insisted that they grew up in a culture of antipolitics, which was against ideology and against “the false choice between socialism and death in a country where . . . all people want to live and live free” (Bolívar 2007, 145; Goicoechea 2007). They called for “national reconciliation” (Goicoechea 2007) and denounced as “depraved” all forms of official politics of President Chávez, whose legitimacy they questioned by calling him “the golpista [the mutineer] who installed himself unlawfully at the Presidential Palace Miraflores” (Aporrea 2007). While they defied parties, their leaders soon ran for office as representatives of key opposition parties (Bermúdez, Martínez, and Sánchez 2009, 81, 95). The Students for Freedom, as they called themselves, invited Bolivarian students to public debates on issues such as private property, freedom of speech, and the meaning of socialism. Yet when one of their leaders, Yon Goicoechea, was awarded the Milton Friedman Liberty Prize of half a million US dollars, the connection between his movement and circles in the United States and Venezuela involved in the 2002 coup became clear. The initially amicable encounters

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ended with antagonizing discourses and violence (Garcia-Guadilla and Mallen 2010, 74–76, 88; Ciccariello-Maher 2013). In addition, opposition-supporting students appeared incapable of speaking about topics beyond liberal rights. Equality was stipulated not as one of economic and social conditions but as “equality of opportunity and before the law” (Aporrea 2007). Unlike the liberal version of equality professed by the Students for Freedom, the Bolivarian students related to the classical Marxist topics and rhetoric, their discourse dominated by terms such as “class struggle,” “exploitation,” and “alienation” and the recurrent topics of inclusion and collective popular power against individualized rights (Bermúdez, Martínez, and Sánchez 2009, 88). They did not shy away from politics and insisted on social and economic rights before human rights, as “those who live in scarcity, die of hunger, without education, without a roof over their heads, do not really exercise human rights” (Aporrea 2007). The students who supported the government declared themselves against autonomy because they saw it opposed to the interests of the people of Venezuela: “You will not tell the people of this autonomy, which is the class privilege of the rectors of the universities [and not] one promoting education for the country” (Aporrea 2007). Although the Bolivarian government had shown respect for academic autonomy during the MTU campaign, by 2007 students at Bolivarian universities saw it as a tool used by traditional universities to resist the inclusion of poor Venezuelans in higher education. The autonomy of traditional universities was used to erode the legitimacy of both academics and students in Bolivarian structures. Protected by the government without any significant challenge to its implications, the liberal concept of university autonomy was used to defend class interests and to shield academics and students at autonomous universities from public accountability. It perpetuated the existence of a two-tier higher education system, promoting neoliberal incentives despite the overall anti-neoliberal stance of the government (Ivancheva 2013). Such growing polarization did not allow UBV and its aldeas to become a locus of social change through redistribution and social justice but were pushed to stand in defense of the government, eschewing critical correctives from within. Meanwhile, in the middle of my interview with Castellano, there was suddenly loud music playing in the foyer where we sat. Her colleagues appeared in a visibly elevated mood. A woman exclaimed, “He’s staying; he’s staying!” Castellano got up and embraced her. The two women were soon hugged by a

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man in a suit, all three bouncing about happily. Bewildered, I sat there watching the three professionals doing a victory dance in the middle of their workday at the office, celebrating what appeared to be the triumph of a sports team or of a candidate in an electoral campaign. Castellano turned to me, her face radiant: “Chávez had to take austerity measures against the crisis. Today he decided which ministers to fire. We were afraid our minister would go, but he stayed— we go on!” The interview was taking place at the same time as the protests of the opposition-supporting students against austerity. Austerity was going to affect Bolivarian institutions even more than traditional ones, but under growing polarization, a protest staged against these policies of budget cuts was going to be seen as putting weapons in the hands of the enemy. Still, the victory dance was a sobering reminder. The governance structure behind higher education under the Bolivarian government had undergone numerous metamorphoses since Chávez came to power. In 1999–2001 it was called the Ministry of Education with a vice-minister of higher education. In 2002 it became the Ministry of Higher Education. In 2007 it was renamed the Ministry of Popular Power for Higher Education, and in this ministry in 2011 “University Education” replaced “Higher Education.” From 2002 to 2010 a host of ministers had occupied the seat—Héctor Navarro, Samuel Moncada, Luis Acuña, Edgardo Ramirez, and Yadira Córdoba—many of them for less than a year. The fourth rector of UBV in less than five years, Córdoba was subsequently replaced by Luis Damiani and then Prudencio Chacón, just within the couple of years following my fieldwork in 2008–11. The rector had changed once every year or two ever since. All the other high-ranking officials at the ministry whom I interviewed in this same period had been reassigned. Against this background, María Egilda Castellano’s career shifts within the Bolivarian government under the leadership of President Chávez seemed in line with the strategy of cadre rotation. It showed the contingency of agency within the Bolivarian institutions, where responsibility was diffused and institutional sustainability was reduced to the proliferation of parallel structures. Given the need to incorporate poor Venezuelans and to create new kinds of knowledge, research, and teaching, the constant change of direction and focus of the reforms jeopardized not only radical social change but even milder forms of redistribution. Instead of becoming instances of dual power subverting traditional institutions or perpetuating irreversible structural reforms, the Bolivarian institutions retained second-class status within a two-tier system subjected to local

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and global hierarchies of prestige and accreditation. It was not inevitable that they retained a low status: they could be sufficiently supported in their research and teaching to enable them to outcompete the older universities. Operating as parallel institutions dependent on the recognition of traditional universities protected by academic freedom, however, they had to beat the latter at their own game, performing up to traditional standards rather than to alternative pedagogic and political ideals.

Reflections Read against the background of the higher education reforms and student mobilizations in Venezuela’s recent history, the decision not to initiate a confrontation in the key arenas of struggle and instead to create parallel structures can be explained within the broader political context of the Venezuelan and Latin American recent past. It was conditioned by the history of political violence and brutal military intervention backed by foreign powers against left-wing regimes in the Global South. In the case of twenty-first-century Venezuelan democratic socialism, speaking of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been made historically impossible in the aftermath of twentieth-century state socialism, which turned forceful intervention into waves of arbitrary violence. At the same time, the failure to use the resistance of academics from traditional universities to confront the opposition and the violent 2002 coup has made the new parallel institutions transient and liminal. Victor Turner (1995, 94–95, 177) spoke of three distinct stages of ritual creating a new structure. The first period is marked by the creation of antistructure built in opposition to the dominant structure in society. In the second, “liminal” stage, structural norms are relaxed and new forms of solidarity and spontaneous community are created among the participants. In the final stage, “reincorporation,” the social system is reestablished and previously dominant figures and norms take up their central position again. Bolivarian higher education reform started as a contestation of traditional universities. Giving mass access to education, it created dignity, solidarity, and possibilities for economic and social participation for the poor, the importance of which is enormous. Yet a major challenge is not to confuse this liminal moment of empowerment with an ultimate victory and recognize that the global field of higher education has incorporated the new institutions into its hierarchy.

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The reform’s retreat from the central arenas of political confrontation and economic struggle and the gradual subjection to traditional measures of success and failure have challenged Venezuela’s ability to create a replicable alternative university model. UBV, Misión Sucre, and Misión Alma Mater were constrained by the structural conditions they were designed to address. The decision to leave the autonomous universities unobstructed compromised the government’s and popular movements’ struggle against structures of reproduction of elite privilege from which their antagonists benefited. Swift cadre rotation and the tendency of the government to start new reforms from scratch rather than put more resources behind the existing ones challenged the development of the Bolivarian higher education subsystem while allowing the broader system of public higher education to go back to its old equilibrium and reproduce the inequalities that the Bolivarian institutions were created to challenge. Thus, since they did not provide an enduring model on a national level, the new experimental institutions were not resilient enough to provide an alternative to traditional institutions that conformed to the standards of a homogenizing global field of higher education and of an unreformed job market hostile to the graduates of UBV and Misión Sucre’s aldeas. The next two chapters develop these points. At the same time, while the Chávez government’s colossal effort at social integration through higher education is undeniable, it reveals new contradictions that could become a stumbling block to progressive higher education reforms in Venezuela and elsewhere. The stories of María Egilda Castellano and of her most cherished project, UBV, reveal how rapid political rotation of experts in the government and the constant shifts of decision-making power contribute to the precariousness of the alternative structures. The decision to start from scratch every time resistance appears and to dismiss people in power positions is not confined to intellectuals or to higher education but speaks of an approach to both individual and collective agency and knowledge as contingent and replaceable. Castellano’s trajectory is that of an individual trying to reconcile these contradictions in her own biography. Despite the constant change of institutional framework, she continues fighting for a mass higher education and science accessible to all that will benefit not only individual students but also society as a whole (Castellano 2002, 2019). She has tried to implement these principles working in different if not incompatible frameworks—the reform of traditional universities, the creation of a parallel decentralized system of higher education, and the opening of new, centrally controlled specialized institutions

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for the training of technical cadres. Yet her constant relocation generally prevented her from taking the reforms she initiated further and required adaptation to new state projects. Moreover, the Bolivarian government’s decision not to support academic radicals in their fight to reform traditional universities in 2001 but to open parallel institutions of higher learning instead followed a peculiar example in Venezuela’s history. It was similar in structure—though different in content—to the reforms of the first government of Raphael Caldera and COPEI after the Academic Renovation. In this earlier instance, the former student Left secured university autonomy in their universities, but the government created parallel institutions to challenge the power of traditional public universities. Since 2001 the autonomy secured during the renovation was used against the progressive government by actors who supported the parties whose governments had circumvented academic autonomy in the past. In this conjuncture, and given the former militants’ support of academic autonomy and international pressure that fed into the coup d’état (Wilpert 2007), the Bolivarian government had little option but to also open parallel space for new structures, leaving the old institutions unobstructed. The creation of parallel higher education institutions, instead of addressing the ever-growing stratification within existing ones, polarized the sector even further. Antigovernment academics and student movements at autonomous public universities weaponized a depoliticized ahistorical liberal notion of academic autonomy to defend their privilege. The events around the emergence of MTU mobilization and the developments in its aftermath also revealed the paradox of autonomy in contemporary societies. Academic autonomy has been framed as a tool of struggle against state interference. This interpretation obscures the ways in which universities have become complicit with much more direct forms of intervention by the market. While it is true that in liberal democracies the state has functioned as a tool to accomplish modernization projects, mass higher education has been used as a redistribution mechanism to quell conflict and defend capital from labor (Gindin and Panitch 2013). The events in Venezuela’s recent history pose the question of whether academics should be cushioned against all demands from states at any price, or whether some projects for social management should take a democratically legitimate upper hand and, if so, which ones. As the response of academics in traditional universities during MTU and the 2002 coup has shown, the freedom not to respond to state pressures when states

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are subjected to the demands of powerful groups can become a questionable stance when power is taken by governments that express the public interest of marginalized majorities. In such cases, the insistence on academic autonomy can be easily confused with a special status of state-sponsored academic work that exempts it from contributing to the public interest. Given the gradual commercialization of Venezuelan public higher education typical of the neoliberal era that preceded Chávez’s rule, the demand of traditional academics to keep their autonomy (i.e., to remain free from the influence of state power) manifests a larger contradiction. It rejects science and education as public services but allows them to follow market norms and foreign direct intervention.

 

Chapter 3

Evaluation Matters Teachers’ Training at an Alternative University

It was the fifth day of a week-long course of teachers’ training for academics at UBV. Divided into four working groups (mesas de trabajo) and split into five discussion groups (nucleos), the UBV faculty were doing on-the-job training to pass from adjunct status to full faculty member. Held at the campus of University of Workers of Latin America (UTAL) outside Caracas, the course was offered to faculty members who joined the university in one of the first cohorts and wished to remain in permanent employment. After submitting their application materials earlier in the academic year, the cohort of faculty had to undergo sensibilización training. After listening to lectures and participating in group discussions, they had to produce group presentations, which formed a part of their overall evaluation. The last part of this job reapplication was the submission of an individual essay in their field of teaching, which they had to defend before an academic jury. The campus of UTAL was located in the National Education Center Simón Rodriguez on the outskirts of San Antonio de Los Altos, a satellite town south of Caracas. It was home to several smaller universities and institutes scattered around steep hills. The modern cloister-type building had a canteen and a small bar, ample corridors lined up with the classrooms, and a large lecture hall on the ground floor, as well as numerous small study rooms and dorms that took up the building’s upper floors. During the training week, UBV faculty listened to lectures in the mornings, met in discussion groups in the afternoons, and then gathered for debates and presentations in a few larger working groups in the evening. On the evening of the fifth day, a special guest had come to listen to the presentations at the mesa de trabajo I had joined. Pedro Pablo Linárez was a former member of the student movements at the Central University of Venezuela 77

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and of its faculty for decades. While still teaching at UCV, he was also a distinguished professor at UBV. Highly respected by the UBV faculty, Linárez was arguably one of Venezuela’s best forensic anthropologists. He had discovered and excavated several mass graves where members of the student and underground Left were buried during the period nowadays referred to as the Venezuelan “Fourth Republic,” or liberal democracy. A man in his sixties with dark gray hair and a beard, Linárez was dressed in a cream-colored linen costume consisting of trousers and a tunic with a colorfully embroidered collar. His stature in the room was that of academic, political, and personal authority. Once he entered, the faculty members, all his juniors in academic position and most in age, toned down their nervous buzz and arranged to start their presentations. All members of the five small discussion groups—each comprising six or seven members—were sitting around tables scattered in different parts of the room, facing the front. The facilitator—a member of the Academic Direction at the UBV campus in Caracas—was standing with his back toward the blackboard, where he sometimes jotted down key terms. Linárez observed the discussions from a chair next to the door. The essays were presented on the day’s topic, “Critical Hermeneutics.” Thais, a young woman from the nucleo I had joined as a participant-observer, started first. A lecturer in social management from UBV-Caracas, she diligently yet passionately read out loud: “The Bolivarian current affirms critical hermeneutics as the constructive and holistic knowledge that upheaves this same knowledge from the analytical to the synthetic level, and vice versa, which means to say, from the macro to the micro, and from the micro to the macro; in the field of dialectics, with its effects and contradictions, it is most important, vis-à-vis the contradictive actions of human beings, to discern the outlines of reality and in this process to construct a new imaginary of the new Bolivarian republican by disencumbering him from the nectar of the ideology of liberal bourgeoisie.” Once she had stopped, the room remained silent in anticipation of Linárez’s reaction. He did not say anything, yet the furrow between his eyebrows had gotten deeper. The room gradually livened up with the applause for our nucleo. Then the moderator of the working group called on another person to do a presentation. A senior female faculty from UBV-Caracas, Ariel Vega, who had gained the affection of her colleagues over the previous days with her witty comments and expressive humor, started presenting the work of her group.

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Using a PowerPoint presentation including long excerpts of similarly complicated vocabulary, she proclaimed, finally, UBV’s pioneering role in the global class struggle against Eurocentric academic epistemology. At the end of this speech, Pedro Pablo Linárez suddenly stood up, interrupting the applause. Evidently out of patience, he said that what he heard so far was surprising and disillusioning as a format: “We cannot criticize the traditional university as if we were not a part of it; as if it were them and not us who erred.” Glancing at the faces around the room, he stated: “I expected you to use your own words, to speak of your own experiences, and your own revolutionary practice. Instead, you are reproducing the esoteric language that separates us from the people, alienating our people [alienando a nuestro pueblo].” A few people clapped hesitantly; the rest of the room sank into silence. “Why do we speak of ‘hermeneutics’? This is a true rupture in communication, a recolonization that uses the language of the Right to describe the grave social reality of the poor. And it is the ethos of the poor we need to learn, to speak their language!” The words of Linárez struck a chord with me. In the days before this occurrence, while participating in the group work, my frustration had been steadily growing. I had been waiting to hear some reflections of the firsthand experiences of faculty members in the classrooms and in the barrios. I had anticipated the training as a space where faculty members’ experiences from their practical work could enter into dialogue with theoretical concerns in critical pedagogy and radical epistemology. I had hoped the sensibilización course would give me—the foreign anthropologist attending class sessions and doing interviews with faculty, students, and senior managers—a space to witness the deep personal reflections of faculty members of their classroom practice as they merged into an interesting synthesis. I had expected this to be an opportunity for them to share both excellent practice and difficulties of their work. Instead, across the nucleos in our mesa de trabajo the reflection was reduced to using jargon: both the heavy theoretical vocabulary of the academic articles and the turgid bureaucratic lingo of the official normative documents they were reading. My attempts at intervention in the group discussions and suggestion of changing the methodology of work were politely disregarded by my groupmates. Thus, for a few days I had been listening with growing impatience. For this reason, my first reaction to Linárez’s speech was that of relief and renewed interest in what was happening in the room.

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The silence was tense for a few moments. A few participants looked at each other in a somewhat confused fashion, but most looked down, seemingly embarrassed. The scene resembled that of schoolchildren scorned by a beloved but feared teacher. At that point, the silence was broken by Mariana Morales, a lecturer from a remote classroom in the Great Plains, Los Llanos. A woman in her forties, she had dominated her nucleo with her imposing figure, vivid gesticulations, and deep voice. She had now stood up and faced Linárez, who had again taken in his seat by the door and looked a bit surprised and somewhat nervous. With one hand on her hip, the other on her chest, she said: Listen to me, Professor, and listen well. I work as a municipalized lecturer of Misión Sucre in Los Llanos. To go to the remote aldea where I teach each week, I must walk for hours in rubber boots through a river, and then climb the mountain with the help of a mule. I am a community organizer; I work with communities. I don’t use this awkward vocabulary you are using in the academic world. It is new for me, and my head has been aching over the last few days. But I was told that this is the way to get trained in revolutionary theory so that I do my job better, with clearer understanding and consciousness: so that I can understand “the weapons of the enemy.” And I came here, and I have been trying to get this into my head. I pay respect to this theory, and it is damn hard and a real pain to understand and remember. So why don’t you just give us some credit—us people coming here and trying to learn—for having advanced in understanding and using this vocabulary? Why do you insist instead on making us feel we’ll never get it right anyway?

The applause this time burst even before the speech was over. With a few exceptions the UBV faculty members were celebrating. A young lecturer from the language training department in Caracas stood up and said it was time they stopped treating the people with contempt—“Poor things, they don’t understand”—because, she reasoned, “language is out there to be learned, and everyone can learn it.” Linárez looked embarrassed. He sat down and kept silent until the end of the session. My own embarrassment perhaps exceeded that of Linárez. I realized two powerful mechanisms at work, which I had failed to recognize until that moment. On the one hand, Mariana’s opposition went not only against the lack of recognition of her effort to learn theory, which was not a part of her everyday practice. Her voice was raised against much larger contradictions central to the power structure in the Bolivarian higher education field. Pedro Pablo Linárez and Mariana Morales represented two distinct, if not opposite types of experi-

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ence of the academics and actors involved in the Bolivarian process. Linárez was a representative of the mostly male-dominated Latin American academic Left with its specific charisma: his intellectual and student movement background, his dress and conduct were all speaking of his position within what I shall call—in a gesture to Pierre Bourdieu’s term of state nobility (1998)—the “radical nobility” of the Bolivarian process. This experience of socialist intellectuals with a radical past who are close to state power provided Chavismo with Left lineage from within the radical academic movements described in the previous chapter. With his presence Linárez validated both the genealogy of the past struggles and the high academic acclaim. Morales, on the contrary, was part of the huge number of female community organizers within the Bolivarian process whose insider access in poor communities was instrumental for the state to gain legitimacy there. The hierarchy between those two types of symbolic capital clashed in the moment of opposition between Mariana and Linárez: a conflict that has been pertinent to the Bolivarian process and would potentially reemerge in any regime that uses reproductive work, academic credit, and revolutionary charisma to attract support among the vast majority of the population. On the other hand, Morales’s vigorous opposition to Linárez exposed another contradiction within the Bolivarian process, which I had failed to recognize up until that moment. Coming from the Anglo-Saxon academy, I had expected that the UBV faculty lived up to the same academic standards I had been socialized in and had taken for granted. It had become natural to me that the mastery of academic jargon was only recognized when you learned it so well that you could do without it. Thus, until that tense moment at the teachers’ training in UTAL, I had not realized that the same requirements and the same diachronic order of learning and unlearning did not apply to my interlocutors, the rank-and-file faculty at UBV, the new Bolivarian educators. On the contrary, their legitimacy stemmed from doing both synchronically: they were to master the traditional academic vocabulary while navigating and championing the cultural and social codes of their own students and marginalized poor communities to which many of them also belonged. They had to strive to be recognized academics and internalize the academic structure, while expected to, in Audre Lorde’s words (2018), dismantle the master’s house with the masters’ tools.

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Evaluation Matters The question of intellectuals’ participation in social change has been discussed throughout the twentieth century along the lines of their class interests and claims to political power. Intellectuals can broadly be discussed as “social actor[s], who ha[ve] . . . a differentially specialized engagement with forms of knowledge and their social extensions” (Boyer and Lomnitz 2005, 107). While often originating from the bourgeois or aristocratic class, these actors also often diverge in tastes and lifestyles (Jennings and Kemp-Welch 1997). They were often ascribed to the middle class: an empty signifier marked by a broadly differential income and living standard but similarly aspirational character and experience of downward mobility worldwide since the 1980s (Chauvel and Hartung 2016). In what is called “New Class” debate, Lawrence P. King and Istvan Szelényi (2004) have documented three positions intellectuals have been seen to take with different political effect. Besides insistence that intellectuals are nothing but “turncoat bourgeoisie” (Trotsky 1973), a second interpretation saw them as a qualitatively new class with its own class interest and the possession of technocratic knowledge, present in both capitalist and socialist states (Gouldner 1979; Konrád and Szelényi 1979; Đjilas 1983). A third interpretation saw them as “free floating” with no attachment to a specific class but potentially siding with one or another (Mannheim 1952). On the question of political participation, intellectuals were seen as producing and controlling the power of knowledge (Foucault 1984), interpreting or legislating knowledge for the public (Baumann 1995), serving the formation of a proletariat avant-garde while working for the intellectuals’ own abolition (Lenin 1992), or emerging, at least in part, from within popular classes (Gramsci 1971). In core countries, these debates took place where intellectuals were gradually marginalized from politics, but in the peripheral regions of the world system, intellectuals often joined political struggles and state power (Bozóki 1999; Torres and Schugurensky 2002). Yet their projects were often sidetracked into autocratic forms of government (Ordorika 2003; Ellner 2008). While peripheral states have become the gatekeeper to all forms of cultural capital (N. Miller 1999, 45), intellectuals were drawn into public activity and science became increasingly dependent on foreign audiences and networks (Petras 1990), romanticizing yet silencing the concerns of the communities they were supposed to aid with their work (Lomnitz 2001). With the emergence of Pink Tide Latin America, there was also an upsurge of what Mabel Moraña has called “popular intellectualiza-

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tion”: a refusal of intellectuals to be positioned or perceived as leaders but a repositioning as mediators between power, knowledge, and formerly silenced subjectivity (2010, 19). Scholars have claimed the emergence in semi-peripheral contexts such as Latin America of plural intellectual spheres with organic ties to subaltern classes (Eyal and Buchholz 2010; Moraña and Gustafson 2010). Most discussion of intellectuals still omits the analysis of institutions that produce and reinforce their distinctions. Pierre Bourdieu’s words related to France remind us that “the educational institution, which played a critical role in the reproduction of the distribution of cultural capital and, thus, in the reproduction of the structure of social space, has become a central stake in the struggle for the monopoly on dominant positions” (1998, 5). Higher education has its own place within the specific division of the social world into a variety of distinct arenas or “fields” of practice such as art, education, religion, and law and others each with their own unique set of rules, knowledges, and forms of capital. While fields can certainly overlap, Bourdieu saw each field, including that of academia, as being relatively autonomous from the others and having its own struggles for position as people mobilize different forms of capital to stake claims within this particular domain. Yet the autonomy of higher education, as is that of all other fields, is only relative because they are all subordinated to structural, that is, economic power. Bourdieu specifically called academics the dominated fraction within the dominant class, and academic intellectuals in the French academic field he called “the state nobility.” Their proximity to the power elite could be explained through forms of “symbolic capital,” which conceals a combination of cultural and economic capital, attainable through elite origin and education (Bourdieu 1997). Bourdieu also spoke of a “dialectic of consecration and recognition”: certification means official recognition and attainment of symbolic capital (1998, 104). Bourdieu’s (1998) discussion of fields of power, particularly in relation to universities, has been extended by thinking about the global dimension, especially in view of the internationalization of higher education. Simon Marginson has discussed the “dynamic and uneven global flows of people, technologies, media and messages, information and knowledge, norms, ideas and policies, finance capital and economic resources” (2008, 304). These flows occur within global patterns of difference that constrain or shape them, such as language diversity, pedagogies and scholarship, uneven development, and a variety of organizational systems and cultures. To study the interplay between these flows

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and patterns of difference, Marginson suggests the use of Bourdieu’s theoretical insights around issues of individual and institutional position taking within an ensemble of positions in a relationship of mutual exclusion, and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, the consent given by the majority of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by a dominant group. According to this consensus, as Marginson (2013) noted in his more recent work, higher education has traditionally been a stratified positional quasi-market with a monopoly over scarce excludable resources (credentials and networks) that benefit only groups who could afford access to a few prestigious institutions. More recently, global rankings have been weaponized to organize a rather heterogeneous field according to existing divisions legitimating such privilege. Since establishment of the Carnegie Classification System, the US News and World Report issue on “America’s Best Colleges,” and the launch of Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), university rankings have become the organizing principle and horizon of aspirations of universities (Hazelkorn 2015, 1). However, rankings have long been criticized for ignoring the complex nature of higher education institutions, reflecting divergent contexts and political-economic environments, value systems, and demographically diverse populations (Ivancheva 2013; Hazelkorn 2015). They have been challenged for ranking institutions according to scientific achievements relevant to academic research rather than teaching (Marginson 2013; Hazelkorn 2015); for ignoring disciplinary diversity at the expense of quantifiable measures of scientific output; and for introducing a West-centered, research-driven model of science that renders locally relevant knowledge and pedagogic practice invisible (Ivancheva 2013; Lynch 2015; Lynch and Ivancheva 2015; Guzmán Valenzuela and Gómez 2018). According to such critiques, mostly English-language prestigious institutions in the global hubs of knowledge production can be found at the top of the rankings, recruit fee-paying foreign students, and obtain external funding (Hazelkorn 2015). These high-ranking universities do not expand to meet all possible demand but remain exclusive precisely to keep the overall demand high, while giving privileged access to their prestigious credentials and networks mostly to the children of the upper class (Marginson 2013, 363–64). Mirroring the classical Marxian discussion of exchange and use value, higher education remains dominated by the logic of capital rather than the logic of social relevance I have outlined elsewhere (Ivancheva at al. 2020). Using

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the categories determined by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot (2006), these two institutional logics represent two conflicting visions of higher education today. The logic of capital relates to the combination of three grammars of justification: fame (rankings and metrics), domestic (kinship and class-based credentials and access), and market (commercialization of higher education). The logic of social relevance combines the other three logics: industry (embeddedness in production, employment, and society at large), social justice (education as a form of social redistribution and equity), and inspiration (the innovative pedagogy) (Ivancheva et al. 2020). An experiment such as UBV, set to fit the logic of social relevance, remains subject to the logic of capital by having to fit the global higher education field. The organization of this field produces forms of subjection into a peripheral positionality often created at a symbolic level, requiring “peripheries” to “catch up” with “global norms,” that is, a hierarchy of worth dictated by traditional distinctions (Ivancheva and Syndicus 2019). In the case of the Venezuelan academic intellectuals related to the Bolivarian government and its higher education field, the traditional credentials are present due to their education but are concealed under a peculiar form of symbolic attainment, which I call “revolutionary capital.” Within the Bolivarian process, this form of capital is produced by the combination of militancy in past student movements and access to traditional institutions of higher learning, which was, at that time, a privilege of a chosen few. These distinctions, which UBV initially promised to suspend, became increasingly important, given that within the global field of higher education UBV could be accredited as a university only if it obeyed traditional ranking of excellence, that is, if it could present a critical mass of academics with traditional university educations, publications, and fund-raising portfolios. The new Bolivarian educators who joined UBV needed to accumulate such credentials while coping with heavy teaching workloads and a complex student body. This subtle mechanism also allowed the members of the radical nobility—graduates of the traditional public universities and members of the former student Left—to maintain dominant positions within the Bolivarian higher education field. Thus, inequalities were reproduced in the core of the Bolivarian university subsystem. To understand how this sort of reproduction has occurred, Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction of elite distinctions can be augmented through the discussion of how even at times of radical social change, old structures tend to reproduce and consolidate. As occurred in most other socialist experiments, Venezu-

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ela under Chávez was set during what anthropologists call a “liminal” phase (Turner 1969, 95) and some sociologists call “unsettled” lives (Swidler 1986, 278), characterized as an attempt to reset the old structures of society. In such periods, norms are relaxed and group boundaries are redefined, creating solidarity among protagonists of social transformation. Actors involved in such processes are in a constant and acute competition with antagonistic social-organizing models. New strategies of action often draw on existing ones (Swidler 1986), and the anti-structures consolidate into structures that precede them soon after the spontaneous communitas or communal spirit of the liminal phase is overcome and new institutions start being produced (Turner 1995). This framework is useful when speaking of higher education in a semi-peripheral country such as Venezuela that has the economic resources to produce alternatives but is also interpellated into the hegemony of the core, represented by specific certification from traditional institutions and subjection to metrics of excellence and success. The Bolivarian experiment in higher education tried to do away with such subordination. Yet both on sector and institutional levels, the alternative experiment UBV had to be responsive, if critical, to the centrifugal forces of the national and global academic field that spread norms produced in central states in the world system and imposed them through liberal hierarchies dictating what a “proper” university means (Ivancheva 2013).

The Radical Nobility: “The Same Struggle, All Along” “It has been the same struggle, all along.” Bernardo Ancidey looked me in the eye as he said these words. With his leather jacket, sweater, and beard the former student radical from the UCV would not fit my expectation of a director of student performance at the Ministry of Higher Education. Yet, having met his coworkers in high-ranking positions at the ministry, I would have been surprised to meet a polished, corporate-style, slick-suited manager that would have seemed more likely at most public institutions worldwide these days. “I was a student representative in the Legal Studies department at UCV and a student leader [dirigente estudiantil] of the Federation of University Centers. This was in the 1980s when some of the bloodiest battles with the state took place.” He looked aside and uttered with sadness, “Many of our comrades died. If you walk around the UCV campus, you can see the plaques with their epitaphs.” Ancidey added that the liberal governments were not afraid to violently suppress pro-

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test. “We were fighting for the same that we are fighting for now: against the privatization of student accommodation and services and for mass access to higher education.” I was introduced to Ancidey by Edgardo Ramírez when Ramírez headed the foreign affairs division of the ministry. Later he became the minister and went on to serve as a diplomat and member of Parliament. Ramírez, an easygoing and chatty law professor at UCV, came from the same county as Hugo Chávez, Barinas in the flatlands, Los Llanos. In contrast to his polemical appearances on Channel 8, he was very approachable. I met him in his large ministry office overlooking downtown Caracas, where he took time to show me on a large map spread over his table the locations of key student movements during the Fourth Republic: “Do you know of the Academic Renovation in 1969? Good! Afterward in the 1970s student activism was in decay; the Left was weak and fractured. But in the 1980s new movements mobilized, trade unions, but also students. . . . And now when you walk around this ministry, every floor has student militants.” Ramírez spoke to me of his own student activism at Ezequiel Zamora National Experimental University of the Western Plains (UNELLEZ), where students mostly from Los Llanos studied to stay close to their rural families who were often engaged in agriculture and stockbreeding for local latifundistas. He recollected the difficulties for JPCV and feminist and ecologist movements to reorganize social democratic AD-dominated student unions. “Students were the only force to defend the peasants,” he said. Then in his enthusiasm he smiled and made me walk with him up and down the corridor and the stairs—his leg in a splint after a football injury. While walking the stairs, he told me, “Juan Barreto, the former mayor of Caracas—he was a student leader in journalism at UCV, and so was the current mayor of Libertador—Jorge Rodriguez—in medicine. His father was a militant of the Communist League and was killed by the police: a UCV square is now called after him. And here, at this ministry, it is all full of former dirigentes from the 1980s: Bernardo Ancidey was in legal studies, Humberto Garcia in mathematics, two floors under . . . one floor below, two floors.” At this point I started to complete the picture: “I know from our interview that Carlos Alzualde militated in the movement Plancha 80. And ministry advisers María Egilda Castellano, Eduardo Medina Rubio, and Rigoberto Lanz were active during the Renovation.” “You see!” Ramírez was radiant.

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I heard many more statements such as those of Ancidey and Ramírez during my interviews with academics and officials at both the ministry and UBV. The hopelessness of the struggle, the shattered illusions, as well as occasional persecutions and death haunted their past. The socialist tendency of the Bolivarian movement—a coalition between left-wing militants and members of the army—was predominantly related to a student Left (Corrales 2007). Their battles for legitimacy and social change had been numerous: the underground militancy of the forbidden PCV throughout the 1960s; the process of decentralization and university reform Renovación Academica (1969–71); the 1970s election campaigns on behalf of a recently decriminalized but also steadily fragmented Left; the 1980s–90s struggles against austerity, privatization, and commercialization of higher education and health all helped create a shared identity of one of the discreetly, yet harshly repressed Left movements in Latin America (López 2005; Ellner 2008). Besides their past involvement in the student movement, the intellectuals working in expert positions at the ministry and the UBV’s senior management had high academic credentials. They often had a degree from traditional universities in Venezuela or prestigious universities abroad. Before Edgardo Ramírez took the position of minister in 2010, the succession of ministers, vice-ministers, and advisers at the Ministry of Higher Education and OPSU came from graduate studies at universities such as Oxford (Samuel Moncada), Cambridge (Luis Fuenmayor Torro), Manchester (Héctor Navarro), the Sorbonne (Tibisay Hung, Rigoberto Lanz), and Complutense de Madrid (Luis Damiani), among others. Even those who had studied at UCV such as Maria Egilda Castellano had already earned a PhD, specialized abroad, and established an academic career before entering UBV or the ministry in senior management positions. The combination of their academic expertise and their radical credentials gave them the privilege of time—time together, time in the struggle, time in education. As Pierre Bourdieu (1997) insists, the accumulation of embodied cultural capital achieved through education (cultivation, Bildung) and its links with economic capital requires a labor of incorporation and costs time: time that cannot be delegated or transmitted. The members of the radical nobility—the group combining cultural and economic capital under the new capital brand of revolutionary capital—had accumulated time in traditional education and in the radical movement. Combined, it legitimated their participation in key positions of decision-making in the Bolivarian government. Bringing their symbolic

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credit to the new university, however, also deepened the division between them and the new faculty.

The New Bolivarian Educators The profile of the majority of those who joined UBV as teaching staff was neither that of traditional academics nor former student radicals. To match the huge demand produced by the rapid intake of UBV and aldea students with a supply of faculty, at least initially the only requirement for UBV faculty was to have formally graduated with a bachelor’s degree (licencia). Hired from the graduates of traditional universities, the majority did not possess any postgraduate qualifications. To help the accreditation of their programs, they were to start postgraduate studies (master’s or PhD) alongside their new job with the university. They had to complete or be close to completion by the time they applied to keep their job four years later, through the job (re)application process. Meanwhile, they were given the title of assistant professor and were treated as colleagues of more senior researchers in anticipation that they would finish their master’s and continue with a PhD; initially this was possible only at traditional universities, as UBV had only started to develop its graduate programs. In this framework, the intensive sensibilización process happened in the fourth year of their appointment. Faculty members from across the country would gather to discuss methodological, epistemological, and pedagogical issues related to their work to help them prepare and defend a critical essay (informe critico) reflecting their own practice in relation to the mission and vision of UBV. They had to submit it together with diplomas, a curriculum vitae, and a list of publications while working full-time. With few exceptions, usually among those freshly out of university or already holding an academic job, UBV faculty members I met during my fieldwork had professional or practitioner experience outside academia. Often first generation in higher education, they had entered universities with the hope of a stable professional career and a decent income. Chemical engineers, schoolteachers, public servants, social workers, and lawyers were frequently encountered profiles. Dominica Mendoza, a professor in politics, whom I interviewed in the narrow crowded staff room of that department, detailed how she chose a career track that eventually led her to UBV: I entered the department of social work at UCV but was also training to be a secondary

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schoolteacher as a second major. As someone from barrio La Vega, a daughter of a bank clerk and a truck driver, I was the lucky exception and not the rule. We, students from the humble classes [clases humildes] were never at the same level as those from middleclass backgrounds. They had books at home. When I entered UCV, I went to a library for the first time in my life. And the injustice: UCV faculty took the level of middle-class students as a starting point to build upon, and not ours. Students from the popular sectors were offered no guidance [acompañamiento]. Many of us did not graduate but quit, disheartened. At UBV we stand the chance to make up for the injustice and inequality that students as ourselves encountered at traditional universities. It is not about uniformity: we offer acompañamiento. We guide people from different backgrounds and make sure they are treated according to their level: an equitable education.

Dominica completed both degrees simultaneously and was working as a teacher during that time. She said that the possibility of joining UBV came as a surprise and relief as an opportunity to bring justice into the lives of students from similar backgrounds as hers. Samanta Vásquez from the department of social management, ten years older than Dominica, was also among those students from a working-class background who stayed at the university and finished their degree. Yet her path was hardly an even one. Coming from barrio San Augustin, she was also the first one in her family to enter university. “I was surprised I was accepted in sociology, as it is difficult to get in. There, you need to choose your specialization in the last year. I was really interested in research but entered organizational sociology instead—I thought it gave better career prospects, a career in HR. Nobody advised me otherwise.” As did Dominica, Samanta emphasized that she lacked any academic guidance, and the possibility to undertake an academic career seemed remote. She detailed her convoluted career path—shifting jobs in the sector of human resource management: “I hated it. It was an invaluable lesson as you see how the system works from within, but there was no social value to it.” She loved teaching and started a teachers’ training course at a technical college in Caracas, but she got discouraged: there seemed to be no guarantee a degree would lead to academic teaching. She became an HR manager, changing different locations around the country. Ten years into that career, she received the news about the new university UBV hiring faculty. “Once I landed this job, I knew it was my dream job.”

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When I did my fieldwork at UBV, Dominica and Samanta were recognized by their colleagues as excellent academics. Their trajectories, however, are telling of the type of lived experiences of education and work of most UBV educators even at the big-city campuses. Many graduates of traditional universities such as UCV from underprivileged backgrounds never felt at home at those universities. An academic career was not presented to them as a viable option: instructors offered little or no encouragement or guidance, no sense of a level playing field. Changing teachers’ positions in the case of Dominica and geographical positions and careers in the case of Samanta landed both of them an academic position only once UBV opened. And they faced new challenges. They came to a place where they had to compete once again according to the rules reinforcing the privilege they were deprived of: to accredit UBV programs, they needed to upgrade their academic qualifications and researchers’ credentials while teaching full-time. Meanwhile, they had one extra hierarchy to fit in: that of the radical nobility. The acquisition of both the traditional academic credentials and of revolutionary capital required what Bourdieu (1997) calls conversion: for this, however, neither time nor the economic capital to make up for it were available to the new Bolivarian educators. UBV faculty members embraced and admired the radical past of their superiors at UBV and the ministry. Being radical was seen as intrinsically related to a past in the organized student Left: a past many of the more junior UBV faculty members did not share as students from working-class backgrounds and not socialized with the often middle-class-dominated radical groups at public universities (López 2005). Their lack of such radical credentials was not only a source of admiration to senior academics and managers but also of personal humility and sometimes shame. Dominica, who ran for elections and engaged in localized resistance against the Left-turned-Right student organization Bandera Roja, claimed she had “a reactionary youth” when compared to UBV senior managers with a past in the student movements. Javier Tafalla, a faculty member in social management, was a student representative at his UCV department in the early 2000s but found his experiences incomparable to those of what he called the academic militants in the 1960s–80s: “As [a] former UCV rector once said, rightly, the generation of students before us, in the late 1990s was called the ‘Generation Moron’ [generación boba]. They lost it all but were at least in a big symbolic struggle with the establishment. Our generation was called ‘X’ [gener-

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ación X], as in the 2000s the struggle was lost, and universities were middle-class bastions.” Pressed to accumulate academic credentials, many new UBV faculty members started looking to UCV and its graduate programs, “where real science is made,” as Javier insisted. UBV remained inferior to UCV both in terms of the radical past and conventional academic excellence: UCV was still the place where most ministry experts and UBV senior managers taught in the past. Some even worked at another job while at UBV, including its then rector Yadira Córdoba and Vice-Rector Luis Damiani, while rank-and-file faculty were not allowed to be employed elsewhere. Some UBV faculty members experienced this as double inferiority. Javier claimed he admired Vice-Rector Luis Damiani and called him the intellectual father of UBV: “No one from our generation has these capacities that the former student Left at UCV had: to combine academic excellence and revolutionary militancy. At UBV there is a lack of respect for academic excellence. When UBV colleagues speak against UCV, I can’t believe it! In this country, the only true university people [universitarios] are at UCV. Damiani still teaches there!” While the value of teaching at UBV could not to be measured through the conventional methods of evaluation typical for rankings (Parra Sandoval et al. 2010; Ivancheva 2013), the divisions also meant the persistence of a certain hierarchy of symbolic capital: one that would conceal other forms of economic, social, or cultural capital that were part of the old system of distinction and prestige. UBV faculty members were seen and saw themselves as insufficiently academic or radical in comparison to those who came from a middle-class background a generation before them and had gained traditional and radical credentials at the old universities and their student Left. UBV educators were supposed to do two rather mutually exclusive steps at once: to simultaneously upgrade their formal credentials according to the traditional lines of the academic hierarchy and to gain exposure to and practice radical critique and critical pedagogy that would allow them to challenge the inadequacy of the formal credentials, while continuing with the certification. And while the new Bolivarian educators humbly admired their elders and those with a better standing in the academic-cum-radical hierarchy, it seemed that this hierarchy depended on class-based revolutionary capital that excluded them a priori.

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The Importance of Being a Radical Arriving at the awareness-raising course at UTAL for their training, everyone was given a Welcome Pack. Along with the main reader recently published, it contained copies of the National Plan Simon Bolivar 2007–2013, Chávez’s Blue Book, Juan Carlos Mariategui’s Indo-Afro-American Socialism, and Simón Rodríguez’s Pedagogical Works. Faculty members had brought along a textbook on popular pedagogy in Latin America edited by Damiani and UBV’s academic director and teacher training coordinator Omaira Bolívar, which UBV educators jokingly called “Our Bible” (Damiani and Bolívar 2007). The reader, a five-hundred-page A4 volume, was titled National Plan of Education of Educators—UBV XXI: for reinvigoration and consolidation of popular power for education of the vanguard of socialism in the twenty-first century. The cover was a collage—a clenched fist holding a rose emerged from within a crowd wearing red T-shirts at a PSUV rally, People’s Power (poder popular) written on its wrist. Next to it was the image of the class pyramid of capitalist society from the newspaper Industrial Worker. Divided into six sections, the reader started with the Rector’s Paper. The lectures based on the reader’s content took place every morning. In the afternoons participants were divided into their large mesas de trabajo, each of around fifty individuals, subdivided into four or five smaller reading groups that met in the afternoons. The evenings were dedicated to group presentations, such as the one that took place when Pedro Pablo Linárez was in attendance, within each large working group that culminated in reading group presentations the last day as part of the final evaluation. The introduction to the course was given by an invited lecturer, Luis Bigott, professor of anthropology and education at UCV and a former student activist and militant on the Left. His presentation focused on the enemies of the Bolivarian process and ways ahead in emancipatory dialectical knowledge. The enemies were political parties, commercial chambers, co-opted trade unions, the clergy, and the military sector during the Fourth Republic; and the Global Capitalist Empire, the United States, represented by the denationalized technically savvy upper-class agents or its Venezuelan equivalents who misused the national resources through the neocolonial model of knowledge. These were featured next to Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei, the analytical-deductive method, and physics experiments that produced, in Bigott’s words, the denationalized mentality (mentalidad desnacionalizada) of technologically and sci-

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entifically versed academics and of the decontextualized ahistorical scholarly knowledge: a trope often used to defend UBV from pro-Western elites in their colonial subservience to power (Reinoso 2019). To these Bigott juxtaposed the Bolivarian aldeas-trained critical educator, imbued in socialist ethics of the 1960s–70s movements and struggling for an inclusive society and a socialist productive model based on a new geopolitics of energy cooperation with “comrade nations” such as China, India, Russia, and Iran. This knowledge, grounded in a dialogue with communities, understanding not just scientific and technological advancement but also popular religiosity and pedagogic principles of Simón Rodríguez and Simón Bolívar, had to foreground the study of the dialectical-concrete method and the new radical research methodology. The new socialist scholar, according to Bigott, had to obtain a nationalized consciousness and be historically reflexive and culturally active. She or he would dexterously study a community through procedures as a preliminary project, a primary diagnostic, plan of empowerment, and collective work aimed at solving the community’s problems. The product, an organic intellectual, would then be the one who facilitates the zero-sum game between empire and the poor community, educated by the community but also empowering the community to fulfill its potential. The training started with a clear drawing of the genealogy of the Bolivarian movement, originating, the narrative went, from the university Left of the country in the four decades of the Fourth Republic. The first day this genealogy was not just reestablished but also incorporated for the audience by the organizers and the special guests who had all been student and junior faculty militants at UCV in the decades of the liberal democracy. The two organizers, Luis Damiani and Omaira Bolívar, sat at the rostrum in the lecture hall. Two other places were taken by the two honorary guests: Yadira Córdoba, rector of UBV, and Luis Bigott. Bigott was part of Renovación Academica in 1969. Córdoba had been a pupil activist and student leader in the 1980s. The fifth chair, initially empty, was filled after Bigott asked, “Who in the room has the longest record of student Left militancy?” After some lively deliberation, Cecilia Gómez, a female lecturer and former JPCV member at UCV, took the honorary chair. A division was also drawn in epistemological terms. Following Bigott’s provocative introduction, during the next three days Vice-Rector Damiani gave a series of lectures that culminated in a long lecture on radical methodology. Those undergoing teachers’ training attended Damiani’s lectures with respect-

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ful curiosity and confessed not to have learned radical epistemology before. A legal sociology graduate from Complutense University in Madrid, Damiani was famous among generations of Venezuelan sociologists who were introduced to the discipline through his critique of positivist epistemology. Damiani’s article “The Methodological Diversity of Sociology,” featured in the reader, contained chapters of the last reprint of his book The Dialectic Model of Social Research (Damiani [1996] 2014), including sections on “The Dialectic Model of Karl Marx” and “The Most Recent Dialectic Models of Social Research.” The section on Marx discussed Marx’s vision of reality as dialectic totality, the role of and relations in production, his theory of science and scientific method of research and exposition, and his critique of ideology. On this basis, Damiani analyzed the subject-object relation, the role of experience, and the relation between theory, history, and praxis, with an emphasis on Latin American history. He championed a dialectic research model developed by Frankfurt school authors. The detailed bibliography contained mostly works of US, English, and Spanish white male authors published between 1970 and 1990. Having presented the critical context of radical epistemology in the morning—the colonization of science and elite reproduction at universities—the sociologist presented the “positivist model of science,” “the one which,” he said, half-jokingly pointing at me in the second row, “Mariya, our colleague from Europe performs in her study.” I was taken aback by his words and even more so when he drew on the blackboard the outline of a thesis that resembled a PhD thesis structure I had myself not been asked to follow but knew that many of my colleagues in the Anglo-Saxon academy did: “Theory, Methodology, Historical Context, Hypothesis, Analysis, and Conclusion.” Damiani called this “linear” model of research positivist and said it was based on the work of the isolated Subject wanting to know the Object: “S-O” he drew on the blackboard. “This model of knowledge we need to refute. It is wrong and alienates the people we study!” he exclaimed. He then crossed over the S-O sign and wrote “S=O”  “S=S,” explaining how researcher and community should dissolve into a singular subject. After a long break filled by amicable witty jokes from UBV colleagues about my positivist inclinations, Damiani continued his lecture to discuss radical research methodology. He drew a tube-like rectangular plane with a number of small points freely floating in it. He drew the eye of the observer outside this sphere he called “the sphere of history.” The points he called “concrete historical

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events.” The lines he drew between them were relations between these different events, which the observer was to study, expose, and act on. Damiani’s sketch, which I copied diligently from the blackboard in the seminar room, represented the historical-materialist method of history. The eye of the beholder was that of the historical materialist, who would observe key historical moments (circles) in their continuity, connected with the links of material history and class struggle. In this way, it looked for continuities between events in global history that had remained isolated. Perhaps consciously, it was reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of Angelus Novus observing past moments of history, but unlike it, the researcher described by Damiani had a transformative agency. The lecture course, the new research model proposed by Luis Bigott, and the social science methodology offered by Damiani could be seen as an attempt to both remain in the best practice of the traditional academy and to propose a critical epistemology. They recognized a revolutionary lineage of Marxist, predominantly white and male, key works from scholars based in metropolitan colonial centers of science and knowledge production. Thus, while the new UBV educators had to learn to criticize the modes of academic knowledge, they also had to be able to conduct and present social research in the same way as their two instructors, both affiliated with and renowned scholars at the traditional UCV. The “newbies” possessed neither their cultural nor their revolutionary capital gained at UCV that legitimated both traditional and radical research. The importance of the past in the academic and underground Left in Venezuela resurfaced over the next few days. Without my asking, my group of lunch buddies, faculty in the Caracas campus in their late twenties, as I was at that time, all started introducing me to other members with a past in student movements. As a result, a few times at lunch or dinner, they ended up inviting former student militants to our table: Gabriel Briceño from the state of Lara was a former member of a Catholic group in the student Left in Universidad de Oriente in the East; Juan Rendón from UBV Barrinas was active in the UCV student Left in the 1980s, and Rodrigo Suárez from UBV-Caracas was a member of a 1990s Leninist group there; and Ariel Vega, a colleague of Rodrigo in Caracas, came from the feminist movements at an elite private university. All former student activists were deeply respected by their fellow colleagues, and their “revolutionary ethos,” discussed by Damiani, was alluded to in informal contexts and training sessions.

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Contesting Traditional Academic Norms The attempt of former student militants to reinforce the rules of the academic game met resistance by UBV faculty. During their training, the faculty managed to temporarily overturn the power structure of the radical nobility and maintain their own spontaneous solidarity (Turner 1995), generated by their lively conversations in reading groups, at the canteen, and evenings at the small kiosk where they joked, sang, danced, and chatted after the intensive days of training. UBV faculty found a playful way to create new forms of self-assertion, which they called “aesthetic-ludic.” Discussed in the university’s Rector’s Document (UBV 2003), this aspect of Bolivarian higher education had been removed from the teachers’ training program but remained part of its informal repertoire. The songs sang every night mixed campfire refrains, indigenous and folk tunes, and famous Latin American rock melodies. A female professor from UBV Punto Fijo was asked to recite her poem, which started: A little boy was born with a star on his forehead the name of the boy was Hugo Chávez Frias and he was to become a star of a nation.

A young female professor from Barrinas with a ukulele accompanied the performances of her colleagues. Between the songs and poems, people chanted “U-U-U- Be-Ve”: a refrain mimicking yet countering, I was told, UCV’s chant “Uce-Uce-Uce-Ve.” The ludic informality was present even in the most serious part of the teachers’ training program—the final presentations of the groups. By the third day, a growing frustration accumulated with the thick five hundred pages of reading materials and the realization that the collective essay would count toward concurso outcomes. “We have no time to use this beautiful opportunity to read and reflect!” Thais from my reading group burst out that evening when we were all too sleepy to continue the group reading and had to gather early in the morning before breakfast to finish the collective essay. Members of other groups shared similar frustration: “This evaluation process castrates all the creative energy of this wonderful meeting,” Javier said tiredly over dinner. “We’ve even performed division of labor! Imagine, Marx is turning in his grave!” Ariel exclaimed in reply and repeated this in the working group: “We are not here to cram. Let’s just tell the story, group by group, of our journey together, Monday, Tuesday, then

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Wednesday.” While pronouncing the days of the week, she made graceful little leaps around the room to show the progress from day to day. “Because who can say on a Friday that I deserve fourteen or fifteen points? Is that the way a Revolutionary University evaluates its faculty?!” A round of applause was followed by a spontaneous and noisy group hug; all faculty jumped and shouted “U-U-U-BeVe!” The news quickly spread to other groups. Thus, on the final day of training, to the great surprise of the instructors, UBV faculty performed a rather artistic program. With the exception of a handful of study groups who made a serious theoretical presentation, most groups prepared performances. A group dominated by faculty from Barrinas, including Mariana Morales, told the story of the previous days through slides that exposed contradictions in the work ethics of their colleagues and themselves. The intensive partying and mass queuing at the canteen was contrasted with the sleepy atmosphere in the discussion groups; the beautiful isolated natural scenery around UTAL was opposed to the reality of people in run-down Caracas barrios; a photo of Damiani seriously indicating the sphere of history on the blackboard was juxtaposed to his joyful ethos, dancing and singing at the café. The presentation ended with a quote on the role of contradictions in dialectic history. Similar presentations followed. A group pushed their colleague from Punto Fijo to recite the poem she had written about Hugo Chávez as telling of the new socialist man. The members of my study group narrated our group name maraisa: an indigenous word from tribes in the Orinoco delta, from where the mother of Gabriel Briceño, also part of our group, originated. According to Gabriel it signified “My other I: the other person whom I treat as myself” in the tongue of his mother’s indigenous ancestors. We all played out how the group gradually clicked together at work and party time, “conforming to the constitution of a new friendship,” dissolving epistemic borders. In a similar vein, Ariel’s group performed a scene in which a blind colleague from Zulia was initially jostled by her colleagues, each shouting “I,” “Mine,” “Ego” as expressions of an egoistic society. The scene ended in a group hug saying, “We,” “Ours,” with Damiani’s scheme—S-0, S=0, S=S—to signify the rupture with alienating coloniality of science. UBV faculty subverted the requirements of serious academic conduct as constitutive of the Bolivarian higher education field. The joyful practices were their way to reflect but also to relax after exhausting low-paid academic work in overcrowded classrooms that did not give them time to catch up on their

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academic or radical credentials that the teachers’ training sessions professed. The training at UTAL was a place to bond and build a spontaneous community, based on solidarity and understanding of shared values. In line with the revolutionary ethos and its revolutionary capital, those who did not have a past in the Left were showing they could be subversive and rebellious: the newbies showed the old guard heading UBV that they had learned their lesson. However, when we left for Caracas and other campuses on the last day, the spirit was low. UBV faculty shared with me that they were anxious because they feared the outcome of this concurso would disqualify them despite their best efforts. They were going back to a world where other rules applied: the rules of the academic game set by the standards of the global higher education field. To pass their job interviews, they had to master the standards of academic promotion and recognition valid for scholars from traditional universities endowed with academic capital, working under lighter workloads, with a less numerous and complex student body, and with no requirement to be subversive radicals as well. Their rebellion had been short-lived. And due to economic austerity imposed by the 2008 crisis, those who reapplied for their jobs in 2009, despite complying with the requirements, were given fixed-term contracts instead of permanent ones. Ariel, Javier, Thais, Rodrigo, and other colleagues I met at UTAL were left angry. Some, such as Javier, got jobs at traditional universities. Others such as Samanta left academia for good.

Traditional Academic Norms Reestablished The field on which Bolivarian academics were competing was a complex one. Founded to present quality through equality and social relevance (UBV 2003; MES 2006), UBV and Misión Sucre were designed to address the systematic exclusion of most Venezuelans from higher education. They stood, however, little to no chance of competing in academic rankings against multidisciplinary universities in Venezuela, let alone the Anglo-American private research intensive ones. The core indicators of quality of the two most respected university rankings—the Chinese ARWU and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE)—do not correspond to those of UBV and public universities in Latin America. In the ARWU quality equals the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, the number of articles published in Nature

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and Science and those indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution. The THE ranking has more qualitative indicators, such as a large reputational survey where anonymous respondents in privileged positions comment on the research environment, faculty/student ratio, citations, and industry innovation at universities they are familiar with (Ivancheva 2013). UBV, on the contrary, was set up against such evaluation metrics, so no alternative evaluation system has been in place. As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere (Ivancheva 2013), following UBV’s design, one could speculate what quality would mean. It would depend on a number of factors difficult to quantify: the ability to transcend faculty members’ power position; the understanding of cultural codes of human beings living in conditions of misery; the experience and capacity of being a good community organizer. The ratio between faculty and students could matter only as much as faculty can engage the group in collective community organizing in marginalized areas. Learning and teaching could be assessed not by the students’ research output and recognition by prestigious awards of merit but through their effective and efficient social work with communities. The language of any work and publications would be local—in the case of Venezuela, Spanish, or perhaps an indigenous language. Academic publications should be cowritten with research participants in a jargon-free comprehensive style, published in popular (not necessarily indexed) journals that reflect real-life problems and their collective organizational solutions. Once the new university with its aldeas was set in motion, certain pressures had emerged that made it accept the mechanisms of evaluation created out of and against its own reality. Beyond the internal job reapplication, the so-called Program for the Promotion of Researchers (PPI) was demoralizing for UBV academics. PPI (1990–2009) was adopted as a national mechanism for promotion of research excellence. It was designed and executed by the National Observatory of Science, Technology, and Innovation (ONCTI) with the aim to promote nationally conducted research through a financial incentive. A committee of academic peer reviewers ranked academics on six levels, Candidate, Researcher Level I–IV, and Emeritus, and in different disciplinary fields (ONCTI 2009, 11). To apply, scholars had to show proof of a completed university degree, research work, conference attendance, and publications. If successful, they received a

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bonus of one to four minimum salaries as a monthly complement to their salary (Pericchi 1996). The Bolivarian government attempted to reform PPI after 2002, changing the age and qualification limits for Level I to accommodate unconventional researchers into a new category, “contribution to the formation of human talent”; and restrictive citation indices from the Global North were diversified (ONCTI 2009, 6, 13–14). Yet scholars at traditional universities still had more credentials and publications to satisfy PPI norms (Bozo de Cramona et al. 2009), which also had an underpinning principle of research as an individual rather than collective pursuit (20). As a result, in 2011 the new Program for the Stimulation of Researchers (PEI) presented a qualitatively new approach to attestation, evaluation, and ranking. In PEI, scholarship was assessed according to its “innovation” and “contribution to the satisfaction of the needs of Venezuelan population,” and publications were reviewed according to their content (1). Thesis supervision, industrial research, introductory classes, and other forms of applied knowledge were to be considered a form of academic merit within the PEI (2). Researchers were divided not in a linear but in a nominal manner into two “Innovator” categories (A-B) and three “Researcher” categories (A-B-C) (4–6). At the same time, however, the introduction of both the job reapplication process at UBV and PEI was an alarm for UBV and Misión Sucre academics. While the job talk tried to provide equitable entry of faculty into the craft and PEI provided a “certification” of types of knowledge produced out of the academy, both also left a host of unresolved issues for the alternative university. Held up to traditional academic principles, through mimetic isomorphism they could enable the return of traditional hierarchies of academic excellence to subjugate the alternative university (DiMaggio and Powell, 2000) and push its standardization toward the dominant institutional forms in the global field of higher education (Shore and Wright 2015). If no solid alternative assessment were developed, the alternative university could become associated with a laissez-faire academic production in which any measures of quality could be relativized to an extreme. The necessity for UBV to think in advance and plan for such contradictions and contingencies would need to be considered by any university policy aimed to catalyze transformation.

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A Downwardly Mobile Class While the academic credentials of UBV students and faculty were not treated as sufficiently advanced outside the university, they were becoming part of a growing downwardly mobile educated class. They were experiencing the backlash of unmet expectations of upward mobility through higher education and living in increasingly precarious conditions. This process happened on both a symbolic and material level. Instead, a rather simplistic reading of the Marxist training at UBV sometimes resulted in anti-intellectual discourses among students and some faculty. Reflecting the speeches of Chávez, politicians, and government media, it antagonized not just opposition supporters but also some of those working for and within the Bolivarian process. Susana González, a faculty member in environmental studies who left her position at UCV to head a program at UBV, told me during our interview at her UBV office: “I am sometimes afraid that all this discourse of Chávez against the middle classes is no good. You see, I am middle class. I come to work and hear my students shouting how they are going to deal with us till the last blood drop. I am getting afraid that if something happens to him [Chávez], they will come down from the barrios and we will be the first ones they will kill.” Susana’s parents were Spaniards who migrated to Caracas in the mid-twentieth century, running away from war and poverty. Susana said that the family did not have much, but her parents worked hard as small-shop owners to provide for her and her siblings and made a lot of sacrifices so that they all obtained a university education. “We were brought up, me and my siblings, with the idea of education as a first value,” Susana said proudly. The privilege of higher education still allowed Susana and her husband, who worked at a traditional university, to give better chances to their children and enroll them in one of the few good state high schools. Most of Susana’s colleagues did not have such privilege. They enrolled their kids at cheap private schools with the hope they could get good grades and enter traditional universities. Among the children of UBV faculty members who were at the age of entering university at the time I was at UBV-Caracas, none were enrolled at UBV or its aldeas. Those who could not enter UCV went to private universities such as Santa María. Thus, even UBV academics had few illusions that the system has indeed changed, that the education at traditional universities and UBV were not equal. Susana’s consideration of herself as a member of the middle class was not shared by many of her colleagues who came from a working-class upbringing.

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They openly admired them as the “good people” or the “fierce people” (el bravo pueblo) and spoke of them as the courageous proletariat. Susana’s words that faculty members were becoming a target of the hostile discourse against the middle class expressed the intersection of two increasingly dominant narratives at the university. On the one hand, the use of phrases and slogans such as “death to the bourgeoisie” and “fight the middle class to the drop of blood” were not infrequent in student speeches. They were also often said in a milder form by some faculty, including those coming from a middle-class upbringing themselves. On the other hand, even those who did not side with Susana’s narrative increasingly expressed growing concern with violence on the streets of Caracas. Formerly confined to barrios, it now affected all neighborhoods. The rising fear and attendant moral panic that alarmingly high crime in Caracas had created was often reflected in conversations among members of the middle class who did not support Chávez (see Cannon 2016; Samet 2019). The main worry about increasing crime and insecurity in the country has been discarded as part of the media war against the regime. Among those who supported the opposition and those who voted neither for the government nor the opposition (the “ni ni” circles), the stories of recently experienced horrors of crime were a daily conversation topic. Among Chavistas, and unless it was a personal story one was telling, it was received with an uninterested look and shoulder shrugging. Whoever publicly expressed concern with violent crime was often scorned by other Chavistas or their own bad conscience that they were putting arms in the hands of the enemy by feeding into the opposition’s discourse. The professional and educated citizens in Caracas were acutely aware of the crime rates and increased cases of robbery. Living in less protected highrise blocks of flats in neighborhoods that were often the target of robberies and had become less secure than in the past, many started limiting their own moves within the city or tried to leave altogether. The movement of everyone was restricted by unwritten curfews and no-go area designation. UBV faculty members were also targets of crime. Alegria from politics and government at UBV-Caracas told me that her car was stolen while she was threatened at gunpoint in front of her house in a new development on the outskirts of Caracas. “I gave him the key, was shivering. What was I to tell him: ‘I am a socialist; I work at UBV that is dedicated to give education to the poor? That would have worked just fine, I am sure,” she said, smiling with sad irony and imitating her own shivering.

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Javier, a former faculty member at UBV and initially a Chávez supporter, told me after leaving the university that the son of his best friend was killed in a car robbery. After expressing my sympathy, I asked what the police did. “Why should he go to the police?” Javier angrily asked me: “Every year thousands of Venezuelans are murdered, just a tiny number of the cases are resolved, and almost none of them end in a trial.” Remembering a motif of the movie Bowling for Columbine by US left-wing director Michael Moore, he continued: “We have twice the number of US murders per year, with less than one-tenth of their population. A revolution? Yes, but why don’t they find a way to deal with violence?” In this, Javier referred to a process that scholars have seen as a new form of vulnerability of Latin America’s progressive cycle: a growing economic precarity expressed in worsening life standards, violence and insecurity, and indebtedness (Gledhill 2008; Gago 2017; Mezzadra and Gago 2017). In this process, progressive politics is subverted: subaltern populations remain criminalized while the lower middle classes become increasingly guided by the politics of fear, which is used by the Right to justify its claim to power by circumventing democracy (Gledhill 2008; Cannon 2016). The subject of living standards was also increasingly becoming an issue for my informants from UBV. They had modest lifestyles and with very few exceptions bought their clothes from cheaper shops in downtown Caracas or lowerend shops at shopping malls. They rarely wore clothing from foreign franchises, even if those were present in Venezuela. And while certain new fashion was created through revolutionary and “cool” urban markers such as Converse shoes, ripped jeans, and guerrilla scarves and hats, many of the faculty were not dressed in the hip fashion of traditional academics or the yuppie attires typical of professionals working in private firms. At the same time, however, UBV academics were also experiencing a certain downward mobility in geographical terms. Their salaries did not allow them to travel and make excursions around the world that academics and professionals were known for. Except for taking advantage of subsidized cheap goods and services, Bolivarian educators wished to be exposed to consumption and leisure that made members of this class middle-class subjects (Yeh 2012). “I don’t want to always be poor! I want my family and friends in my barrio to have access to middle-class consumption; all people should be entitled to it,” Alegria once told me. Even if such aspirational concerns were disregarded as petit bourgeois, the faculty’s economic situation was still dire. Those who did not come from Ca-

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racas had to live at the homes of relatives or rent rather expensive rooms and share a house with the landlord or landlady. Those from Caracas who did have a flat often shared their sleeping room with their children or siblings. Many had to rent the children’s room to strangers: usually single men or women from the countryside who did not have a family in the city. Given the significant housing crisis in Caracas (Ivancheva and Krastev 2019), this was the only option for many young families in order to get by. Many of my interlocutors among UBV faculty were paying a mortgage to commercial banks so they could afford a flat, a car, or their children’s education. Alegria and her husband—an engineer— lived almost entirely from his salary. A staff member at the university who did not receive tenure with the job talk that followed the teachers’ training process that same year received the minimal salary of 1,200 BsF, which hardly paid the basic food they bought—rice, corn flour and bananas, and ham and veal from time to time. While at the beginning of my fieldwork they planned a divorce, they were forced to come back together if she did not want to live at her parents’ home in a remote barrio in Catia. By the time I left, they were awaiting a second child and then followed more than 3.5 million Venezuelans who were migrating to another Latin American country.

Reflections The UBV teachers’ training program formed a central part of the concurso de oposición at UBV and established a relation between members of the radical nobility and the Bolivarian educators. This complex and multilayered training process aimed at establishing a hierarchy of academic excellence in a traditional and radical sense and producing an academic who could excel in and subvert the rules of traditional academia. In this process faculty members were required both to internalize the academic structure and to negate it as rebellious members of the permanent anti-structure to the “bourgeois establishment.” Yet academic excellence is still determined by two remnants of the old system: the male revolutionary charisma and its canon of theory and conduct; and the rules of academic evaluation and employability set by world ranking and citation systems that position Western research-intensive universities as a main reference point of excellence. At the teachers’ training program, UBV faculty could temporarily subvert both the academic and the radical establishments. In the process that followed, their ludic conduct was made irrelevant and their aca-

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demic production was measured on traditional standards. To accredit degree programs, UBV’s senior managers and experts from the ministry—themselves recognized in both the radical and the academic hierarchy—had to gradually work for the evaluation and institutionalization of UBV or let it linger as a second-class institution. Against this background, the power field reflected by the Bolivarian higher education reform displays two trends. First, there was a new level of stratification within the field based on distinctions stemming from both traditional academic credentials and revolutionary capital: the combination of the two forms can be called, following Bourdieu, the new “radical nobility” of the Bolivarian process. A hegemonic consensus was created around this complex distinction, which made it difficult for younger faculty with less academic and radical credentials to oppose it as an expression of what it was: class privilege transferred from the former regime into the new one. Brought to its logical consequences, this also meant that the remnants of the logic of capital in higher education, especially when it came to elite distinction, were still overpowering the logic of social relevance (Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating 2019) despite the egalitarian design of the new Bolivarian institutions. In the next two chapters I discuss further aspects of this process, shedding light on how this division became even more apparent when it affected the learning experiences and opportunities for professional success of UBV students from poor communities. This process was specifically gendered, classed, and—to a much lesser extent but still importantly—racialized, with those who had been militants at traditional universities, and thus had received exclusive education in the past, still gaining the upper hand in decision-making. Second, the combination of unmet aspirations and a growing precarity among rank-and-file faculty members of UBV was slowly but surely producing dissatisfaction. This meant that during my fieldwork a decade ago, many were already experiencing an increased anxiety of never being able to fit within the academic profession, accompanied with experiences of growing distance from symbolic spaces and economic options accessible to faculty working at traditional universities. They also ended up symbolically antagonized by the anti-middle-class discourse of their students and the regime itself. Yet they felt silenced by the unwritten radical hierarchy of the regime. Their past in the student Left at traditional universities added a specific value to the biography of the academics who headed the higher education reform but did not subvert

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their own traditional credentials, many times gained at prestigious universities abroad. This dichotomy created not just a class-based but also a generational split within the Bolivarian movement. Both in terms of division of labor and in terms of spatial location, the reform aimed at eradication of inequality but created a strict hierarchy and placed the members of the radical nobility as a dominant class within the Bolivarian higher education field. This situation was hardly a conscious choice but an unintended consequence of the specific historical and political conditions and of liberal hierarchies imposed through the dominant global field of higher education. Still, together with the growing economic precarity of rank-and-file faculty, it posed a serious political challenge for the future of UBV and its standing as an alternative university.

 

Chapter 4

The Children of the Revolution and the Matrisociality of the Benevolent State

On every Saturday afternoon during one semester, I would meet up with UBV faculty members Miguel Delgado and Esperanza Márquez and their students at the Plaza Sucre metro stop in Catia, the central hub of a barrio agglomeration in the west of Caracas with a population of one and a half million. Buses started from this busy commercial square full of street vendors, businesses, and bakeries and led to numerous sectors of Catia. The mini-buses or jeeps had to maneuver carefully to bring passengers up the steep barrio hills. The sector we visited, which I will call María Lionza, was located quite far away from Plaza Sucre, built on an almost vertical hill. Taking numerous convoluted small streets and overtaking speedy motorbikes and cars that seemed about to flip into the abyss at any moment, the jeep would stop nearby at a cement wall. Beyond the wall was the basketball playground (la cancha), the only public space in the neighborhood. A little path, the single artery of traffic in this part of the barrio, divided its upper and lower part. Newly built single-story tin and, rarely, brick single-level shanty houses uphill contrasted with the more stable brick constructions with their own yards, floors, and balconies downhill. This division was typical for hill-built barrios: the first settlers’ houses were more established and better connected to infrastructure, and the new ones were freshly hand-built by newcomers (Karst, Schwartz, and Schwartz 1973). During the rainy season, as in many other barrio sectors, the precariously built upper houses in María Lionza sometimes slid downhill, dragged by mudslides, and thus affected the lower barrio sector where electric wires were exposed and were dangerous to all inhabitants. Rubbish was also a significant problem, as residents had no choice but to dump it downhill because no truck came to collect the containers across the sector. 108

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All of these problems, together with the fact that Yunier, a student from this UBV group who was the spokesperson of Maria Lionza’s community council, were the reason that this barrio sector was chosen by Miguel and Esperanza for their case study. Following the rationale of the UBV proyecto fieldwork with communities, they and their students visited the neighborhood with the belief that the problems could be addressed by community self-organizing aimed at isolating risky areas and preventing new excessive construction: “If they show up, they can help themselves; the government will see them as an organized community and help!” Miguel had told the group during each trip uphill. As in previous field trips, during this visit the UBV group remained frustrated with the low turnout at the assembly. As this visit also coincided with a visit from a community organizer from the Ministry of Energy, Rogelio, who was there to set up a working group for energy (mesa técnica de energía), Miguel and Esperanza tackled the problem head-on. They initiated what they called jokingly Misión Convocatoria: a collective stroll across the barrio sector, calling all community members to come out to the common space. Split into two groups, with a faculty member in each, and Rogelio and myself assigned to a group each, the two groups went one up- and one downhill from the common space. We knocked on each door, asking people to come to the community council assembly with UBV and Rogelio, a request previously made by Yunier. Not many opened their doors, even if we could hear TV sets or domestic fights going on. Only an elderly woman followed us to la cancha and said hastily, “Sure, I will sign whatever is needed!” To this Rogelio said respectfully but firmly “Señora, we are not here to collect signatures. The community should mobilize because you all share an urgency about certain problems.” When she left, Miguel exclaimed, “This community desperately needs a megaphone!” As it was getting later, the handful of community members gathered by Yunier’s side. His mother, Milagros; his older sister, Yulkensy; and members of the local council were all asked to sign three participation sheets: one for the community council, one for the Ministry of Energy, and one for UBV. We had to list our full names, ID card number, address of residence, email address, and phone number. UBV students and faculty and Rogelio and I did the same. While we were signing, Miguel spoke patiently but authoritatively about the need to mobilize: “The community is idle; it needs to get organized,” he nodded in grave concern. Esperanza warned that if problems with the garbage and electric wires were left unresolved by the community, the next flood could lead

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to fatalities. A few of the active community members expressed self-criticism. To break up the heavy atmosphere, Miguel and Esperanza suggested that perhaps we should change the approach: communities, Miguel said and students confirmed in a more elevated mood, mobilized by sharing food and drink and having a good time (compartiendo). Thus, the conclusion of Misión Convocatoria was to return to the community for a sharing party in a fortnight. Esperanza and Miguel also asked me to teach qualitative research methods—as Miguel said, “Interviews and focus groups, because, you know, I have a degree in law, and Esperanza is public administration; we never had such training on how to do qualitative research.” As a result, over the next two classroom sessions, I taught the students interview and focus group methods and methodological topics. With Esperanza and Miguel’s active involvement, students designed questionnaires with open-ended questions to inquire into the history of the community and families living there and to identify issues community members perceived as impediments to the improvement of their living conditions. The students—three mature students in their forties and two youngsters, among them three women and two men, including Yunier—used Yunier’s local knowledge to organize the logistics, meticulously counting households in the sector and purchasing drinks and snacks. I myself promised to bake a carrot cake. There was also a meeting scheduled with Rogelio, who was to return to set up the mesa técnica that same day, so the plan was ambitious, and we were all excited. However, when we made it back to María Lionza that Saturday, armed with snacks, refreshments, interview schedules and recorders, and my carrot cake, things did not work out as planned. No one was waiting for us. Yunier was there and waved at us while using a large machete knife to cut the grass around la cancha. A few women from the community were cooking soup on bricks laid next to the edge of the playground, but this activity was not related to our appearance or invitation for a sharing party. We walked a few times with our provisions between la cancha and Yulkensy’s and Yunier’s mother’s house on both sides of the sector. Rogelio arrived later and joined us on one of these walks, also waiting for some sign of willingness of the community to engage in his planned mesa de energía meeting. People who passed by said hello and nodded amicably, but no one was joining our party. The weather turned foggy, and drizzling rain began. Yunier brought a plastic table with an umbrella so we could put our provisions

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down. By the time the rain was over, students were disheartened and not willing to interview community members. Yunier brought two participation sheets to sign, one for the community council, one for UBV, and Rogelio added one from the Ministry of Energy. We all signed the three participant sheets with full name, ID number, address, email, and phone number. Yunier signed and, his mother signed. His sister and her husband signed and left on a motorbike. The women cooking the soup signed. We then left to go to the bus stop. The snacks and fizzy drinks we left. The carrot cake we ate while going downhill. This story is not the only possible development of UBV proyectos. I also heard of some that offered inspiring and humbling moments and experiences, manifesting the enormous effort that grassroots democracy takes to build: Dario Azzellini’s documentary The Commune under Construction (2010) is perhaps the one document where the intersections of different community and state efforts can be seen in their temporal and spatial fascinations and challenges by those who did not witness them firsthand. However, the trips with several other groups I joined, and many I heard of from research participants, had a similar dynamic to the one described. While such field trips perhaps contributed very little to the production of knowledge about communities or solutions to the hardships in the barrios, they offered some crucial insights about the functioning of the alternative university. Observing the work of UBV students and faculty with barrio communities only through the lens of scientific or organizing achievement would miss the point. It is important to see it through multiple lenses to grasp its multifaceted meaning. To elaborate on these meanings, after evoking some themes from feminist theory of social reproduction that help flesh out some ideas, the chapter develops in four sections. I first discuss the contrast between UBV classrooms, dominated by the desire for a male Left charisma, and the aldea and barrio experiences often presided over by female community members as brokers between UBV and barrio communities. I elaborate on the relationship between UBV education, the mostly unreformed job market in the Bolivarian republic, and the funding of projects through communal banks as an alternative route to employment for UBV students. I discuss the hidden curriculum in higher education (Margolis 2001) for the Bolivarian University, in which students are expected to defy the traditional job market and opt for work as community organizers. I also elaborate further on the emergent central figure of the Bolivarian process: that of the female community. I show the difficult balance between

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moments of agency and empowerment that this process has brought to women from poor communities and the price they pay while juggling productive and reproductive labor as un(der)paid shift workers, (often single) parents, and political activists.

Social Reproduction, Empowerment, and Extraction Until the last decade, women from poor communities had remained on the margins of scholarly analysis, which was dominated by the traditional Left’s preoccupation with production and liberal feminist discourses focusing on emancipation and sidelining issues of labor and social class (Motta 2013, 36). This is very much the case with scholarship on women’s movements in Eastern European and older Latin American socialist and (post-)socialist countries, where the work of scholars often focuses on femocrats in the party apparatuses (Ghodsee 2012; Waylen 2016). Questions of powerful female figures or groups entering politics or framing policy reform from positions close to state power, in struggles already developing before the Bolivarian process, have also been present in the scholarship on Venezuela (Ciccariello-Maher 2013; Llavaneras Blanco 2017). While this focus is key to outline the importance of female participation in politics and governance structures, more recently, scholars working on Latin America (Gato 2015; Balen 2018; Cavallero and Gago 2019) and on Venezuela (Fernandes 2007; Motta 2013; Wilde 2016; Cooper 2019) have focused their attention on the underappreciated role of women in community council organizing. While men are still more often official community leaders in Venezuela, female activists are the backbone of community council organizing (Wilde 2016). Sujatha Fernandes, Sara Motta, Matt Wilde, and Amy Cooper have all shown different aspects of how President Chávez was a source of inspiration and empowerment for them even though the Bolivarian process was not the beginning of these women’s involvement in political organizing. Yet, while Fernandes and Motta focus on the agency and spaces women carve for themselves, and Cooper shows the level of change in their lives as beneficiaries and active agents of social programs such as health-care access policy Misión Barrio Adentro, Wilde sheds light on the neglected “dark side” of their participation. Discussing the Bolivarian process in Valencia, he shows the heavy unpaid and unrecognized bureaucratic and organizing workloads that women take on in communal council building and barrio organizing.

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To better understand this process as viewed through the lens of higher education and the alternative model embodied by UBV and Misión Sucre, feminist theory, especially autonomist Marxist feminism, helps foster a better understanding of Latin America’s “progressive cycle” (or Pink Tide). Together with a focus on gendered livelihoods, these works bring important insight and lived experience of how capitalism enters and colonizes spheres of life beyond waged labor, capturing and transforming relations previously outside its domain (Federici 2018). In this vein, focusing on Argentina, Verónica Gago has warned about reading the redistributive programs of the progressive government as benevolent redistribution without looking into the accompanying processes of extractivism and indebtedness as part of their neo-developmentalist state projects inscribed into the capitalist world system. Gago and her coauthors have shown different facets of this process (Gago and Sztulwark 2016; Mezzadra and Gago 2017). Despite their anticapitalist rhetoric and insistence on preserving rural and indigenous livelihoods, progressive governments have used extractivist programs as a basis of their redistribution to urban poor communities, preempting critique of the overexploitation of natural resources as the only possible tool for helping the poor (Mezzadra and Gago 2017). The complex dependency on capital accumulation based on extractive industries has gone hand in hand with an inclusion through consumption based on new layers of un(der)employment and debt. In most countries in Latin America indebtedness has been produced through bank cards, loans for purchasing domestic appliances and commodities, and leases of means of production, as well as through conditional cash transfers (CCTs) (Balen and Fotta 2018). These project debt into the future, as futurity is embedded in social relationships: quota payments and reliance on state subsidy to gain credit ultimately costs more for the poor than the wealthy (Murray and Cabaña 2018; Cavallero and Gago 2019). While the wealthy can pay off their debt ad hoc and guarantee debt repayment with other forms of collateral, the poor—especially women in poor communities in precarious labor relations—work in labor scenarios that would subject their future to the repayment of debt (Cavallero and Gago 2019). This process has been amplified through the CCTs in Latin America, which have replaced microcredits to poor communities, integrating them instead into the market, increasing individual responsibility and risk management. While redistributing the extractive rent that governments harvest through the long-term destruction of natural re-

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sources, CCTs have also designated recipients and their neighborhoods as poor and needy and prescribed family relations, political behaviors, and labor commitments (Balen and Fotta 2018). The often voluntary organizational work of women in poor communities has been pivotal for communities and families to meet credit conditions (Balen 2018). While domestic debt is lower in Venezuela than in other parts of Latin America (CEIC Express 2021), not least—more recently—because hyperinflation has canceled all real estate mortgage debts (Sutherland 2020), the extraction of rent and symbolic debt from precarious labor and housing relations has remained present there (Ivancheva and Krastev 2019). So has a form of conditional aid through microcredit, which was one of the only possible ways to seek employment through the government’s social programs. As elsewhere, programs for poverty alleviation have helped people out of extreme poverty and have integrated those with precarious livelihoods not able to participate in welfare-through-contribution schemes into the newly designed welfare and democratic institutions (see, e.g., Fernandes 2010; Schiller 2018; Cooper 2019). Yet institutions of social welfare remain precarious, and social integration, similar to the situation in other countries in the region, is not happening through changed labor relations and restructured material conditions of existence. As Stefan Krastev and I have argued in our work on informal housing (Ivancheva and Krastev 2019), under the justification of solidarity, Bolivarian Venezuela— not unlike other socialist countries in the past—neither legalized nor stabilized extralegal housing solutions. It left people in precarious housing arrangements vulnerable to the restructuring of the capitalist system, in which it played, if reluctantly, a part. This was also the case with a large sector of the population working in the informal economy: the urban self-employed and other workers who perform unregistered, off-the-books services, often in a position of semiformal legality, and outside the traditional workers’ unions and related protections (Leary 2007). This discussion furthers that of political surplus extraction made by the key theorist of twenty-first-century socialism, István Mészáros (1978). Discussing Soviet-style socialist societies, Mészáros said that even if capitalism might not be functioning in such societies while capital is, it would be a mistake to extract surplus based on a political rather than economic logic, disregarding economic processes that underpin production (17). Focused on production and not on social reproduction, he warns that capital’s rule will prevail through the

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system of division of labor, which cannot be changed by political means alone, but politically justified extraction makes dissent ever more difficult regardless of structural issues at stake (19). To this, it is imperative to add a focus on social reproduction. Extending welfare to the poor without transforming labor and property relations, socialist states relied not just on the politically justified productive surplus extraction but also on accumulation of reproductive surplus from marginalized groups such as women (Gal and Kligman 2000), peasants (Kligman and Verdery 2011), and communities catering to their own housing needs (Ivancheva and Krastev 2019). By doing so, they preserved a division of labor prevalent in capitalist societies and ultimately serving capital accumulation. Against this backdrop, it is important to understand if and how the Bolivarian project for social transformation and its alternative university—both its classroom instruction and the applied fieldwork with communities—tried to offer an alternative to such a system. How does a project trying to establish welfare institutions and political legitimacy in communities where both were formerly absent negotiate such contradictions? The contradictions and challenges evident in UBV classrooms and outreach education show a dissonance between the promise of formal education and gainful employment and the hidden curriculum of rejecting conventional divisions of labor and job-market pressures by promoting precarious employment as social organizer in the barrios as their alternative. In this setting, a central point of discussion is how the responsibility of performing revolutionary labor was delegated primarily to female community organizers. It functioned as a form of agency and empowerment but also as a system of political brokerage (Auyero and Benzecry 2017) that helped the state create its affective reality. While earlier I showed how this happened through material objects and the politics of fear, here I extend this notion to show how the state avails itself of an already established (matri)sociality (Hurtado 1998) among marginalized communities to extract politically justified reproductive surplus while not challenging economic rules. “Matrisociality” is a term used by anthropologist Samuel Hurtado (2018) to describe a household structure he observed among Venezuela’s urban poor. Unlike marianismo/machismo debates in other Latin American countries (Murray 2015), Hurtado connects patriarchy and capitalism in a more concrete way by focusing on mechanisms of reproduction of the prevalent kinship structure. In the absence of property, which patriarchal households are built around, the

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income and care of a single mother are the center of filial and familiar relations. Men are often absent, especially in economic terms, and when present, they have reproductive and erotic roles with no responsibility of provision and child care. In such communities where feminized care is the only guarantee of social reproduction, social empowerment and dignity in the Bolivarian process were produced not despite but through the state’s overreliance on the labor of un(der)paid female community organizers. Through them it was less what it wanted to be in its own rhetoric—a Teacher State—and more an embodied omnipresent pedagogy of benevolent statehood in the lives of their communities incorporated by female organizers. And while classroom-based higher education and the job market still mostly relied on the acquisition of traditional credentials, outreach was vital for the Bolivarian state, although its agents rarely got economic return for such labor.

Classroom versus Barrio Pedagogies Beyond the composition of students, which contributed to a real sense of diversity and inclusion, to my surprise, classes at UBV were in no sense structured differently from what I had witnessed during my studying and teaching experiences at Eastern and Western European universities. The one significant difference perhaps was the high degree of informality between students and faculty members, which meant that classes often spilled into informal discussions and jokes on various topics such as the global capitalist system, the teachings of Simón Bolívar, or the last game of the Caracas baseball team, Los Leones. However, despite the informality and the claim of horizontal relations between faculty members and students, at no other university did I witness so much respect and admiration for the faculty. UBV was designed according to the principles of Freirean popular pedagogy (Freire 1996) that aimed to raise awareness of power hierarchies at play and subvert the master-disciple asymmetry in the classroom. Yet I was finding that authoritative and “expert” faculty members endowed with male Left charisma were usually held in the highest regard by their students and colleagues. This could partly be explained by the very nature of Freirean pedagogy. A theoretical system that aims to build profound reflection and foster non-oppressive relations in the classroom in order to redress inequalities, it remains somewhat esoteric and—in a world of excessive manuals—iconoclastic about

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how to apply its principles. Developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, his pedagogy of the oppressed was built on the bases of liberation theology and progressive education practices among the poor. It laid the principles of noninstrumental treatment of education, and horizontal treatment of students as equals, through non-oppressive, nonhierarchical relations of mutual understanding, support, and solidarity. It was an attempt to reverse inequalities and search for subaltern voices: those who were not just oppressed but also deprived of their voice and agency within a dominated discursive and institutional power structure (Freire 1996, 2004). By denouncing Western pedagogies, practitioners preserve a level of authenticity that defied textbook- or manual-style systematization. Or, as Sebastien, an educator from barrio Petare working for a UBV aldea, told me: “No one tells me what to do. I just know it, because I am a kid of the barrio and I work with barrio kids. I know the cultural codes, and they know what to expect from me.” Asked if this implied that a person not coming from a barrio would never be able to practice critical pedagogy, he smiled mysteriously: “I didn’t say this, but I am not saying it’s not the case either.” While at the teachers’ training program there was little space for a genuine discussion of the everyday experiences and challenges of this approach, many faculty members told me during our interviews and informal conversations that it was not clear what it meant to put popular pedagogy into practice. Samanta Vásquez, a faculty member herself from a barrio community, told me, “We read all the theoretical texts on critical pedagogy, but no one tells you how to do it. So, there are no rules I could apply. . . . So, I basically do what the academics who taught me at UCV did, but I try to do it better and treat students respectfully, not as inferior to me.” In her classes, which I audited, she performed this by spending most of the class chatting with her mature students: all single mothers, attending afternoon shifts at UBV. They shared stories about their children and families and internet and real-life relationships. She shared with them stories about her daughters who studied at a private school, so they could compare their education to that at public schools where the students’ children did their studies. Yet over the semester when I audited her classes and went with her and her class to the barrio sector they studied, it was clear she faced a challenge to insert any structure in class, and the students often became too chatty, lost interest, or kept quiet when their participation was expected. She struggled with this prescribed role of “facilitator” and observed about her students: “They are so silent, the ladies

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[las muchachas]; they look up to me and expect to be instructed.” Her class’s visits to a barrio where one of them was from also ended up in multiple participant sheet signing, usually in the living room of her host where the father was a spokesperson (vocero). Their proyecto was frustrated because of frequent community member and student absences; eventually they gave up on developing a project of their own with this community, but—thanks to Samanta’s colleague in a ministry—as a class assignment they administered the official government census questionnaire in the barrio sector. My own experience from having audited dozens of different classes and given a small number of invited sessions at Miguel and Esperanza’s and a few of their colleagues’ classes left me with the strong impression that most UBV students expected structured information and authoritative instruction. As many came through the adult literacy programs and Bolivarian misiones and had their first encounter with formal education late in life, internalizing the rules of formal classroom learning was initially a struggle for them. The scarce resources of the tiny library, the lack of access to online databases, and the rather basic digital literacy of mature students also turned lecturers into ultimate information sources. Not surprisingly then, the classes that left a strong impression on students used traditional approaches and clear, structured, authoritative instruction. Asking both students and faculty members to recommend classes to audit if I wished to observe good pedagogic practice, I was never referred to classes given by female faculty members but was always directed to classes led by charismatic male faculty with credentials from UCV or other traditional universities, and often those also had a past in the student Left. Their classes were discussed as state of the art in their respective fields. Two such faculty members, very highly acclaimed and recommended to me by both students and faculty, who insisted I should attend their classes, were Ignacio Burgos in environmental studies and Rodrigo Suárez in architecture. Speaking of Burgos, sophomore Anjel told me while I kept him company queueing to change his shift so that he could attend Burgos’s course: “He is el Maestro; we all want to study with him.” A man in his sixties, Burgos had left Venezuela as a persecuted radical student in the late 1960s. He finished his PhD at an acclaimed European university and returned after the Communist Party was made legal in the 1970s but stayed outside party politics. Burgos’s classes resembled seminars at a liberal arts college: he would sit among the students, reading to them, sometimes translating from a German or English text. He

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would then pose a question and wait silently for their replies. He expected students to carefully listen to him and corrected them amicably but strictly if they voiced opinions that he found unreasonable. Rather than rely on students’ previous knowledge as a source on which to build, he systematically tried to detect gaps in grammar or basic knowledge, reeducating them as, as he often solemnly stated: “Some colleagues are shameless letting them pass courses without basic natural science knowledge.” His students adopted his concerns, such as the intolerance to environmental or sound pollution—or even classroom noise typical for UBV’s lively sessions. Their respect for him was ostensible, and their collaborative work was receiving acclaim even across the street at UCV. Rodrigo Suárez was a graduate of UCV, a civil engineer, and a former participant in the student movement in the late 1990s. Before joining UBV Suárez had worked as a consultant for large infrastructural projects with national and international companies. He often shared with his students the story of his political transition as a Chávez supporter. The attempted coup against Chávez was eye-opening as it showed him how the opposition still controlled most of the economy by keeping their highly educated cadres in key positions in the PDVSA and knowledge-intensive industries. To help rectify this injustice, after the 2003 petrol strike, he left his private-sector job and initially joined Misión Sucre and, later, UBV. With a witty sense of humor and passionate commitment to both serious debates and chit-chat, Suárez was a favorite of his students. For classes he always prepared a polemic essay. He would read it aloud, inserting improvised comments, serious remarks, and witty jokes between the lines and then would discuss it with students. His essays went far beyond issues of the built environment and touched on media, politics, ethics, ecology, and the economy. To facilitate the discussion, Suárez used self-deprecatory humor, outlining some contradiction or vain expression he wrote into the text: “I am a contradiction; read my life and your own lives to see the contradictions of the capitalist system,” he would say. His openness and enthusiasm were contagious, but the teaching style still put his expertise, experience, and authority as a key source of knowledge. Thus, at UBV the master-disciple relation was modified into an amicable communication and the education process was pleasurable, not unlike the Barrio Adentro access to health care through personable Cuban doctors as described by Amy Cooper (2019). Similar to the case of health care, where the source of expertise and authority was clear and power relations rather asymmetric, UBV

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education experiences were appreciated most by students and faculty when the role of authority was embodied by male faculty with traditional and Left credentials. They inspired students through the ways in which they presented disciplined knowledge, not when they defied the position of authority to facilitate student discussion or used students’ knowledge to build on it. Power relations in their classrooms were not profoundly transformed, but students appreciated the possibility of being taught by trusted and benevolent authoritative figures. When I discussed these observations with students and faculty, they usually shrugged and smiled and then told me: “You should attend our proyecto in barrio communities.” Even acclaimed UBV faculty members such as Burgos and Suárez expressed a growing dissatisfaction with proyecto realities. “We receive no resources to run projects in the communities.” Burgos nodded his head disapprovingly in class: “UBV’s own buses are used for canvassing, not to bring students to barrios.” I was invited to his class’s project in a sector of barrio Petare in east Caracas, but the outings were canceled for most of the semester because of the escalation of street violence in that sector. Suárez, who was praised as having had a very successful track record with proyecto fieldwork, shared his frustration with me at a small gathering celebrating the microcredit given to fund the proyecto idea of one group of his students. While students were celebrating, he took me to the side and candidly explained: “Look, the reason why we were successful is because I was there to turn the excellent idea of my students and the community into a heavily bureaucratic project application.” He claimed that getting a project funded by a government-sponsored bank—the Communal Bank branches (Banco Comunal), the Sovereign People’s Bank (Banco del Pueblo Soberano), or the Women’s Development Bank (Banco de Desarollo de la Mujer, Banco de la Mujer)—was possible for him because of his experience with commercial bids: “The government expects you to speak this technocratic language and to fill in forms that our students are not trained in. They are made to compete with communal councils run by middle-class members of the opposition. They will always beat us to this.” This statement, corroborated by Gabriel Hetland’s (2014) work on community councils, in effect meant that opposition supporters often formed community councils within opposition-dominated areas and were entitled to benefit from the redistributive programs, but because of their skills were getting an advantage over most Chavistas. Of all classrooms I attended at UBV, and except for Suárez’s group, only one other class could get a grant for a project during

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the first year of my fieldwork: applications had little or no success. Suárez also shared a concern that even successful projects meant a bleak job prospect of fixed-term employment for not more than one student as a project leader.

The Children of the Revolution: New Socialists in the Old Job Market When UBV opened its doors, it had some 570,000 enrolled students at the sedes and aldeas across the country. The Bolivarian University and the aldeas of Misión Sucre initially supported registered students with full scholarship. Those going to UBV’s central sedes also had free access to a canteen and further services, to which their colleagues studying at one of the thousands of aldeas in Caracas and the rest of the country did not always have. In 2009, however, the scholarship was only 200 BsF a month, the equivalent of US$40. With a minimum salary of 900 BsF, the sum of 200 BsF was not enough to allow students to pay for their individual daily expenses, let alone to support a family. Students mostly lived with the support of their spouses, partners, and children or worked while studying. Part-time students often failed to turn in the assignments required to renew their scholarship. While the number of “triumphant” graduates (triunfadores) was quickly growing, many UBV programs were not accredited and thus not fully recognized by postgraduate programs at traditional universities. By 2010 most programs offered by Misión Sucre were not accredited by OPSU. This meant that the education most aldeas offered was not considered up to the national standards. According to both faculty and students I spoke to, many graduates from UBV were denied access to postgraduate studies at traditional universities. “It is terribly exclusive: our students go to the big public universities, and they are simply smiled at and asked to start a BA,” Susana González, a UBV faculty member in environmental studies told me. Even though the program she led was set up by UBV, public companies such as PDVSA instead sent their employees to state-subsidized master’s programs abroad. Paradoxically, UBV itself mirrored this trend: its graduates were also not hired to teach at their alma mater. New faculty members were recruited mostly from UCV and other public universities. And even if UBV and the aldeas were producing ever more graduates, most of them did not acquire high-ranking positions in the government. For such positions, ironically, the government also used cadres trained at the traditional universities in the country and at universities abroad.

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Henri, a fifty-year-old UBV student, had previously studied public health at UCV but dropped out after a traumatic divorce. He went to the United States, where he worked precarious jobs in the construction sector. Back in Venezuela, he taught beginners’ English as a foreign language to kids in his neighborhood. Entering UBV, he received a stipend and put a lot of effort in completing all requirements so he would not lose it. Yet it did not allow him to get his own place, so he continued to live with his parents, who supported him through his studies. In his third year in the politics and government program when I met him, Henri was lagging behind with his studies despite his efforts. Due to slow advancement in his computer literacy course, to prepare for class he relied on outdated newspaper articles he dexterously sourced from a big pile of newspapers at the library reception and scarce photocopies that some faculty members provided at their own expense. Still, Henri was cheerfully positive that after graduation he would find a job: “I want to be a diplomat abroad,” he said, but was not getting guidance on how to achieve this goal. A student who had a better sense of what it took to get into such a career trajectory was Henri’s colleague Vincent. Coming from a working-class family, he entered UBV in his early twenties and was twenty-five when I met him. He was living with his parents and siblings in a distant barrio from where he had to travel for two hours to get to his full-time job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in downtown Caracas and then rush to UBV for night classes. At the ministry, Vincent was employed as a low-level office coordinator and was very excited about this rare opportunity. However, for the three years that his employment at the ministry lasted, he did not change status or position: he carried on working as a low-ranking administrator, making copies and completing small administrative tasks for people higher in the office hierarchy. He was not losing hope, was reading Venezuelan and foreign history of diplomacy and geopolitics books, ardently studying French, and dreaming about a mission abroad—“ideally in Europe,” he would stress when we spoke about it, but such opportunity never materialized. The person whom I met outside UBV and who got such an opportunity as an attaché at an embassy in a European country was Andres. The same age as Vincent, he also worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but did not know of Vincent. A child of diplomats and a graduate from an American liberal arts college with a major in politics, Andres had never worked to make a living. He returned to Caracas after graduation and immediately got hired as an adviser to a vice-min-

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ister and was soon sent abroad. In addition to his connections in the diplomatic milieu, he was fluent in English and French. When I met him at a reception of the British Council, he was undergoing state-subsidized distant learning master’s training at a prestigious European university. Andres had an advantage in any competition at the ministry against Vincent, let alone Henri, as he had the traditional distinctions and habitus of his upper-middle-class upbringing. He was socializing with diplomats and foreign journalists and rich Venezuelans from both opposition and Chavista circles. His large flat in an affluent area was just a short drive to the ministry in his air-conditioned car: physically and symbolically miles away from the tiny rooms in Vincent or Henri’s houses in the barrios. The comparison between the trajectories of Henri, Vincent, and Andres exemplifies how the reproduction of educational credentials functioned in Venezuelan society during the Chávez era. The paradox was not that Andres’s social and cultural capital far exceeded that of Henri or Vincent but that its importance had not diminished and was not relativized under the socialist government. Despite the new supply of graduates, traditional universities at home and abroad were still considered to be the legitimate supplier of credentials for the employment of students by both the public and the private sectors. Both Andres’s success and the enrollment of government cadres at Western universities gave a clear sign that the Bolivarian institutions remained lower in esteem even of the socialist state: a signal of the reproduction of the hierarchies of the global field of higher education (Marginson 2008) within the new Bolivarian system. Despite the introduction of an alternative higher education system, the institutions in the Bolivarian state had functioned within the doxa (Bourdieu 1998) of the hierarchical power relations from before Chavismo. Privileged access was granted to those in higher positions. Against this backdrop, UBV students’ expectations to find a job spoke of a cognitive dissonance between UBV’s promise and the low convertibility of their degree.

The Hidden Curriculum of Alternative Higher Education “Commercial and state employers alike don’t value Bolivarian diplomas,” said Julio, an alumnus from the first cohort of UBV graduates. Two years after graduating from the politics and government program at the age of thirty-five, he had still not found a stable job. He was doing some freelance wedding photography, which he did before he joined UBV to support his family.

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“At UBV, we were told that the moment we graduated we would be able to find a job in public administration. But from three hundred people who were accepted for a big competition for jobs at PDVSA this fall, only three were from UBV or its aldeas. All the others were from the traditional and private universities.” These were the words of Geraldin, a graduate in environmental science and a student spokesperson from the same cohort. Due to her position, she had kept in touch with many alumni from UBV-Caracas and recounted this situation when I asked her about their recruitment, especially to public-sector jobs. Geraldin told me of her colleagues’ bitter disappointment when they made it to a public office: as in the case of Vincent, those who got a job in the ministries and national and local government offices were mostly given routine tasks such as making coffee and photocopies. If academics maintained that the chances were higher for UBV graduates in state institutions, Geraldin’s words were confirmed by my interviewees in the Ministry of Higher Education. “The Human Resource chief of PDVSA is my close friend, but we have frictions on that point: he refuses to accept my arguments [about] why we should employ students from UBV and always prefers [students] from established public and private schools,” Carlos Alzualde from the Ministry of Higher Education told me with a bitter smile. “If you are asking if the public sector can offer jobs for the majority of the students that we educate, the answer is no—one of the weaknesses of the system is that we first created UBV and then started to think about student employment,” said Bernardo Ancidey from the Strategic Planning Sector of the ministry and ex-chair of OPSU. They both suggested contacts at PDVSA who could help me inquire further into this subject, but the respective officials never responded to my requests for an interview. Even if the students who could find a job were not more than the lucky few, getting a commercial job was looked down on by UBV faculty and senior management members. It was not considered a possible and dignified outcome of the university training. In their discourses most faculty worked toward a particular “hidden transcript”: the implied rather than explicit requirement of the system of schooling (Margolis 2001). The faculty members had strong expectations that the first cohort of students would realize through their education the meaninglessness of the conventional capitalist occupation system. “We are trying to show all the dysfunctions of the commercial job market and to make students recognize the importance of applying their knowledge in community

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work,” Ariel Vega shared with me. “But students want jobs, and they are disappointed when they don’t have money to support a better lifestyle,” she continued in an understanding but also disappointed tone. Geraldin herself had followed this political imperative and said that after studying at UBV, she has definitely decided not to take a commercial job: “After training at UBV you are most fit to become a community organizer [promotor social]. You work in your community to help them mobilize and solve their own problems.” To this end she stayed mostly outside the job competitions in the public and private sectors, in which her colleagues were not successful. She was living with her parents in 23 de enero, a high-rise barrio known for its revolutionary history during the 1958 uprising, the Caracazo, and the contestation of the 2002 coup (Velasco 2015). Seeing herself as a part of that neighborhood, she had been continuously active in the community council even before joining UBV and was trying to develop projects for urban gardening that would benefit her community. Since she graduated from UBV, she had submitted several applications for microcredit to fund her community projects to the communal branches Banco Comunal and Banco de Desarollo de la Mujer (BanMujer), but all her applications had failed. Getting a microcredit on its own, however, was not a solution that guaranteed economic independence. Coromoto, a mature student in education from a Misión Sucre aldea, was one of the lucky few who had managed to win a microcredit with BanMujer after graduation. It helped her establish a cooperative with her neighbors. I met her through a visit to successful cooperatives organized by the Ministry of Women. In Coromoto’s garden, organic broccoli, potatoes, and onions were planted and grew, nurtured by her constant loving care. Her house, a self-built tin shack, had a bedroom and a living room with two beds for two of her children, as the oldest one had left. In the living room, she hosted her neighbors with their kids. They were all women, most were single mothers living within a radius of five kilometers, and even before the Bolivarian process they used to converge at one another’s houses, cooking together, bringing up their children, and repairing their cars that often got stuck on the muddy roads. They were also all active in their local branches of PSUV and formed a community council. Yet the economic hardships of Coromoto and women in her situation were hardly solved by a microcredit. The income from the heavy agricultural work hardly allowed the women to make ends meet. The microcredit from the Ban-

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Mujer initially covered some production costs. It also obliged them to sell their produce at subsidized markets in Caracas (mercal) at a really low price. Coromoto shared that a group of local entrepreneurs started buying their produce there and then selling it at a higher price at the neighborhood market, where they themselves had to buy it. At my astounded gaze, she bent down and took a handful of the soil under her naked feet—she loved to do gardening barefoot and feel the ground, she told me—and gazing at the stunning view to the hills, she said while sifting the earth through her fingers: “That’s what we are in [Estamos en esto]! You know, it gave me so much power, the election of el Comandante. The education allowed me so much clarity to see I wanted to work in my garden, to plant, to be with the ground where my ancestors have been working for centuries.” Influenced by these experiences of UBV and Misión Sucre alumni, I asked Rubén Reinoso, then a ministry officer and later vice-minister of higher education, what the government was doing to ensure improved access to employment opportunities for UBV and aldeas graduates. Reinoso did not take the question well: “Your instrumental, Western way of thinking reflects the neoliberal education you get over in Europe. It does not allow you to see beyond the application of the knowledge of students on the job market. We are not trying to have this instrumental attitude here, in which work is the only way to progress in society. We’re trying not only to train professionals but also to apply knowledge in direct action in community councils. It is a process of permanent learning. But tell me, do you know if there is one single country [that] has a fully fitting education supply and job market?” While neoliberal governments in the Europe Union (EU) were seeing their highest rates of youth unemployment since 2008, I could hardly give a positive answer to Reinoso. In places like the United Kingdom, the discourse of “employability” has been weaponized by the government to demand that universities curtail “unprofitable” courses in the humanities and social sciences, expand training in the natural sciences, and support commercial companies by training and indebting students who are then readily absorbed as a cheap and compliant workforce (Boden and Nedeva 2010). Also in the EU, agency and empowerment—key in the Bolivarian government’s higher education policy—have been pushed out at the expense of value-for-money (Tomlinson 2018) оr what I have called the “logic of capital” in higher education (Ivancheva et al. 2020). Unlike the logic of social relevance this principle of organizing universities privileges

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students from wealthy families and a marketized system relying on ranking rather than locally embedded, egalitarian, and pedagogically innovative higher education (Ivancheva et al. 2020). An education based on the latter has been empowering for many students in Bolivarian Venezuela. As Pablo, another mature student in political science and a member of the motorized barrio forces who defended Chávez during the attempted coup in 2002 told me, for him UBV was eye-opening: “I was working as a butcher until I was forty, but I didn’t know I was working class. Thanks to UBV I realized what class was and that it has always been there in my life. Now I know it and act on it.” To support his large household and an extended family as a main breadwinner, Pablo worked full-time at the UBV-Caracas canteen and attended late-night shifts, where he was quite tired but always grateful for the chance he was given by his comandante and the revolution whom he often said, even at his most tired moments, he would support with his body. It remains an open question, however, how to translate dignity and empowerment into an improvement of the economic prosperity of those who have been exposed to UBV and aldea training. Bolivarian Venezuela advanced the former model, yet the theoretical normativity of this ideal hit rock bottom when it came to real-life structural constraints of students’ economic integration. This brings a new nuance to the argument of István Mészáros (1978) of how socialist regimes extract political surplus from workers without corresponding economic planning: in the Bolivarian case this happened not only through production but also social reproduction that is invested in the process. Expected to be tirelessly mobilized in community organizing, for which little or no funding was available, students had to internalize the values of the education programs and perform the role of the new Bolivarian citizen: one working endlessly with communities as a freelancing social entrepreneur dependent on fugitive communal bank funding. The “hidden curriculum” (Margolis 2001) expectation that students went against the narrative of employability and defied commercial-sector jobs came without the attendant reform of public-sector jobs and microcredit criteria. It exposed UBV and aldea graduates to a high risk of protracted unemployment or to low-ranking administrative work as a sole alternative. However, as the next section shows, there was one extra layer to the way in which higher education and political surplus extraction effected state-led, outreach-mediated, community-brokered social change.

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The Bolivarian (Matri)sociality The choice of a community and location for proyecto outreach work was slightly different for each student group, but most often it was a barrio sector where one or more of the students in a classroom came from and where they were ideally involved with the local community council. That student, then, secured access for UBV by being or knowing brokers in the respective community. Unlike spokespersons (voceras/voceros), who were usually men at the communities I visited, the brokers for UBV groups and other state-led initiatives were mostly women. Men were in these positions often due to their own or their father’s past involvement with the PCV or with other parties of the former establishment (such as AD, less often COPEI). As Matt Wilde (2016) has also described in his ethnography, in my experience women were also more often rank-and-file members, even when they were highly represented at the grassroots level and took a lot of responsibility in the community council organizing. Often single mothers, they combined child and family care, a full- or part-time job, and activism in community councils and PSUV. Part of their community work was to welcome UBV groups and other state representatives such as Rogelio from the Ministry of Energy. Milagros, Yunier’s mother in María Lionza, for instance, was a schoolteacher. She had three daughters and a son. Yunier’s father had died young, so his wife had to provide for four children. She managed to do that with the help of her father, who was, before his passing, the community council spokesperson, but also with the ongoing help of her older daughters and the extended family in the neighborhood. Her oldest daughter, Yulkensy, continued to live in the sector with her partner and three young children. After his grandfather’s passing, Yunier had become the vocero of the council, and Yulkensy had taken their mother’s role as its central activist. Women from the community gathered at her house with their kids to cook and chat. She was also the go-to person for state representatives coming to the sector. Yulkensy relied on a large network of female friends to take care of her children, her house was always open to the community, and she was responsive to its problems. “It is so much easier to do community work at a homeless shelter [refugio] than in my barrio. In the barrio you knock on every door. In the shelter people can’t hide.” These were the words of Jisela, whom I met during an outing to María Lionza in 2011 with Miguel, Esperanza, and Yunier—his classmates did not appear during this visit to the community, all busy with their own commu-

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nities facing landslides and a soaring housing crisis. Jisela was a PSUV activist, organizing a number of sectors in the larger neighborhood of Catia into a commune: the new unit of the Bolivarian process that would gather 120 community councils into what the government had called social production (CiccarielloMaher 2016; Wilde 2017). At that time, due to extended floods, many organizers such as Jisela were assigned by the Ministry of the Commune to work at homeless shelters set up by the government after the mudslides in 2010, which left a hundred thousand Caraqueños homeless. We had first met Jisela when Miguel and Esperanza took their proyecto class to a shelter to see how work there was organized, and it had turned out that Jisela knew of Yunier’s community. At the shelter, located in the recently nationalized unfinished shopping mall Sambil, Jisela was to provide community aid through community council organizing to the three thousand people who slept on bunkbeds on four floors of a public parking garage. In the meantime, she continued visiting community councils to aid them to form a commune. When I met her a second time at Yulkensy’s house, Jisela had climbed up the stairs and steep alleys of the hill to María Lionza on a hot afternoon to speak to council members, but too few had come. Coming from a poor barrio family in Catia, Jisela had completed Misión Ribas to gain a high school qualification. She then got a degree in social management in her forties with a Misión Sucre aldea hosted in a community center in her barrio. She found new hope and energy for struggle in the government programs. She was eternally grateful to Chávez, “my President” (mi Presidente), whom she dearly loved for having given her the power to change her life. A deputy spokesperson of the community council of her barrio sector and a secretary of the local PSUV unit (batallón), she was also a mother of three, a wife to her second husband, and an active member of a large extended family. Her relief about the concentration of people in the shelter was simple: instead of having to climb hundreds of stairs up to barrio sectors where people hardly ever showed up, even when she knocked on their doors, at the shelter they lived under the supervision of attendants and she did not need to run around and urge them endlessly to meet her. Women such as Yulkensy and Jisela, as well as Geraldin, Coromoto, and many others, were the backbone of community organizing in Bolivarian Venezuela, inciting those around them to participate in the broader political process that had empowered them and allowed them access to services and welfare never available before. Tired at the end of a long workday and still with familial care

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to perform, they enthusiastically did community work, walking up the steep hills of their barrios, welcoming UBV and other state-sent groups and officials. The work they did with communities was rarely “efficient” in the more traditional sense of this word—often exhausted, distracted by their own or by their family’s or community’s problems or urgent issues to solve, they did little more than be present, chat to those who turned up, and ask them to sign participation forms. They were also often asked to change the direction of what they and their communities were doing: forming community councils was replaced by the bigger effort to form communes before community councils were all even functioning well; cooperatives were subsequently given multiple tasks to organize community media, host energy discussions, and present urban gardening or sewing workshops for revolutionary garments. All these directives were given on short notice, and every time the direction and main activity the councils were supposed to be occupied with shifted, and old projects were rarely followed up. They never gave up because proving they were able to self-organize was always seen as the only way for communities to be eligible for state aid. In doing this, these women community organizers embodied the state for communities. The Bolivarian process relied on its own version of the model of matrisociality, which Samuel Hurtado (1998) described: the mother-centered socialities in poor families with no property, where women brought up their children together and were the sole breadwinners in families. Through the familiar, feminine, and maternal faces, presences, and bodies of these women and their daughters in communities, the state became “available,” approachable, legible, and easy to decipher. This expresses one further aspect of the state affect discussed in Chapter 1. Instead of the top-down static expert cartography of the Soviet state (Scott 1998) or the anonymous, controlling disciplinary state of neoliberal forms of governmentality (Foucault 1984), the state, represented by community organizers, was a benevolent state. As such, it was constantly but unobtrusively present in the barrios through the soft human power of predominantly female, caring community organizers. And while people rejected the memory of the liberal state present in their lives mostly through police violence and other forms of physical and symbolic coercion, many embraced the Bolivarian state. It came embodied in what was close and familiar: personified by the mothers, sisters, neighbors in their communities. This was a new way of creating trust in the state: democratic institutions merged with affective kindred structures. It allowed the socialization of people with new state institutions as

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an organic and consensual process, even when its efficiency was often compromised, less because of activists than because of the state’s constant policy shifts and precarious infrastructure. This process has broader implications for what UBV ultimately meant within the Bolivarian process as well. Article 88 of the Venezuelan 1999 Bolivarian Constitution granted the economically invisible housework and reproductive labor the status of work (Llavaneras Blanco 2017). The possibility to be called a laborer, a worker, and not just mother or housewife (ama de casa) has gone further by allowing a lot of women—including many adult learners—to exceed the otherwise typical labor designations. Having gone through the education programs of the government and engaged in voluntary activity, their housework was recognized but also instrumentalized by the Bolivarian government. Women in poor communities became the state’s main force to socialize its agents, programs, and institutions. In this bigger picture, UBV’s appearance in the barrios was not confined to formal education. The charismatic radical male faculty members teaching at the campus or leading their students into the barrios were dependent on powerful women community organizers. Those were two sides of the education process, which had to speak a common language. Formal education and the socialization of state institutions had to form mutually reinforcing parts of the same unidirectional process of creation of the new Bolivarian subjects and communities. A serious set of problems, however, was arising for such community organizers, especially for women among them, which was not solved within the Bolivarian process during the leadership of Hugo Chávez. The first problem was the incredible business of the women engaged in the process. Their often voluntary work happened as a third, fourth, fifth, or nth shift on a daily basis, and they had to be similarly dedicated to every sphere of their life with no rest. This work, however, as useful as it was to the state to socialize its institutions among communities, was one more layer of overengagement and, simply, overwork that was the very conditionality to receive visibility and aid, in a situation of extreme deprivation when still pitted against a market of financial and symbolic capital that both worked against their benefit. Moreover, as this work was not properly remunerated, it did not serve for a significant improvement of the precarious working and living conditions of many women in these circumstances. And even those workers in cooperatives who received remuneration, in the rare cases when they were considered eligible for microcredits, as

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Coromoto’s case showed, did much of their work at best at low rates and under free-market pressures. While trying to help the community in all kinds of positions—members or even spokespersons of community councils, PSUV batallónes, representatives of one or another mesa de trabajo—the women who form the mainstay of the Bolivarian process often were not sufficiently supported to make ends meet. They remained dependent on the unpaid caring labor of members within their extended family and community and on extra employment in the informal sector. Thus, while the Bolivarian government extracted a lot of political surplus from these women to build its own standing in the poor communities, it did so by exploiting and solidifying the institution of matrisociality (Hurtado 1998): the household structure based on the permanence of income and care of a network of interconnected households of single mothers with quick rotation and little responsibility of breadwinning and child care by men. Matrisociality had come to be the main battle unit of the revolution. It perpetuated a specific feminization of community labor, which happened at the expense of women’s full economic emancipation. Similarly, as Matt Wilde (2016) observed in community councils, in higher education the division between an erotic masculine charisma—such as the one epitomized by Left president Hugo Chávez but also perpetuated by male Left charisma within spaces of official regime participation such as UBV or community councils—happened at the expense of underpaid female political care labor. As much as Chávez’s government brought empowerment and political consciousness to women from poor communities not available to them in previous regimes, it was also perpetuating the low-paid female labor and still left poor women in unequal economic conditions.

Reflections Although UBV faculty and students rarely found a way to produce new applied knowledge or win microcredits out of the encounters with communities, their activity had its specific role within the Bolivarian process. More than the education in classrooms and the acquisition of traditional and radical credentials, it made Bolivarian higher education useful for the Bolivarian state as part of a larger legitimation effort. It was a vital part of the broader effort to socialize state agents and agencies, who now entered communities on a daily basis and

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made it possible for the state to be constantly present, tangible, and personified by and through women by their guests from different ministries, state agencies, independent state-funded media, or the educational missions. In this personification, state agents entered the houses of people as another community member and were willingly invited to sit down and have a chat. Even without bringing any material benefit, the agents of the benevolent state made it present, recognizable in the everyday life of the community with a human, nonuniformed, nonviolent, and non-bureaucratic face. Through its engaged presence, a new matrisociality—the communion of shared practices of household maintenance and formation of the new subjects, the Bolivarian citizens—was asserted. It was both socialization of subjects in the new state institutions and this new Bolivarian sociality that the figure of the state agent brought along as central to the participatory process: a process of socialization and sharing (compartir). Women such as Yulkensy, Jisela, Coromoto, Geraldin, and many more personified this process in a soft, universally caring female social body. Through them, the state became a significant other: a term attributed to George Herbert Mead (2000) but actually stemming from psychiatry to express the way each individual member experiences the generalized normative Other in the life of the community (Rosenberg 1973). Engaging in the production of a new (matri)sociality of the Bolivarian institutions, they were the lifeline between the state and communities, replacing its scarce or nonexistent infrastructure and services. Volunteering their free time as organizers, they maintained their role in the community and society: their underpaid precarious job as social producers extended the state’s bandwidth in communities, which brought them some symbolic but little economic empowerment. The insights from proyecto extension work with barrio communities alongside UBV faculty and students during their fieldwork speaks of how a similar dynamic is perpetuated for poor communities, not just despite but rather thanks to their newly gained access to higher education. While men retained political recognition, highly gendered, low-paid, and recognized forms of work are the backbone of the political work and source of its legitimacy in poor communities. UBV faculty and students and other state functionaries, then, come to the barrios on a weekly basis less to organize communities or produce knowledge from their fieldwork than to be part of a wider set of social relations producing the Bolivarian state affect among communities on the margins of state power (Das and Poole 2004).

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It remains an open question, however, if making social protection and infrastructure a matter of community-level informal solidarity—or for the lucky few, microcredits payable to the communal banks—Venezuela, as have other Latin American progressive regimes (Mezzadra and Gago 2017), has left mostly unchallenged the marginalization of vulnerable social groups. While the country remains immersed in a global capitalist system through an extractive economy, its poorest citizens remain exposed to the unreformed rules of a market economy. They serve the regime through political surplus from reproductive work, while also performing the self-exploitive practices of “surplus” populations in precarious working and living conditions (Ivancheva and Krastev 2019). The lack of structural advancement for students from UBV in the job market and of sustainable funding and support for their communitarian projects perpetuates the asymmetry in this quixotic effort. And while classroom experiences remain dependent on traditional instruction, el proyecto reinvigorates the state credibility dismantled by state-led neoliberalism (Jessop 2003; D. Harvey 2005) by perpetuating a neoliberalism from below (Gago 2015): extracting unpaid labor and symbolic credit from women who remain exposed to structural inequality. The question remains if and how students from future cohorts of UBV will deal with the ever-growing discrepancies between the initially promised job and the eventual joblessness that their UBV studies meant for them. While faculty members—themselves disenfranchised as underpaid public servants— were disappointed with the students’ desire to get commercial jobs, the new university system reproduced the stratification it aimed to solve: working-class kids continued getting working-class jobs (Willis [1977] 2017). Yet those who created both the initial promise and the hidden curriculum of rejection of “normal jobs” had very little power to produce the structural reform that would reform a labor market to match the alternative higher education model. It will still require a political economic analysis into the economic reforms of the Bolivarian government to understand at which juncture the link between these two levels was broken and how this disjuncture produced the effects that led to the rather underwhelming outcomes of the promising imaginative and transformative higher education model that UBV and Misión Sucre represented.

 

Chapter 5

Generation(s) of Protests at a Revolutionary University

“Five years after its establishment, the revolutionary university is, sadly, not able to generate a solid student movement. The students are passive and fail to organize among themselves: they mobilize and then demobilize again.” This concern, shared by Cecilia Gómez, a former JPCV student activist at UCV and at the time of our interview a faculty member in UBV’s Communications Department, was repeated with surprising frequency by UBV faculty. At traditional universities both in the Western liberal democracies and under repressive regimes around the world, the presence of student movements usually indicates serious crises of institutional legitimacy (Searle 1971; Altbach 1989; Ordorika 2003): “activist movements are not perceived as a normal part of student life” (Altbach 1989, 101). At UBV, on the contrary, the absence of student mobilization was interpreted as a failure of revolutionary consciousness. This had much to do with the history of UBV as the vanguard institution of the Bolivarian higher education reform, designed by former student militants from traditional universities. At the same time, while UBV was rapidly created to make up for the systematic exclusion of poor Venezuelans in the past, in the first years of its existence UBV advanced much, but still there were even more apparent reasons why student discontent could be expected to emerge. True, the majority of services at UBV were free for students. They received a scholarship from the state, paid no fees, had three meals a day at the canteen, free internet access, computer literacy, sports and language training, qualification courses, and extracurricular activities such as cinema, theater, and poetry. Buses were available to transport people living in remote areas and on demand to students to visit pro-government mass rallies. Yet five years after the establishment of UBV, problems had started to materialize. Most of the facilities and events were available to students only on the 135

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five campuses of the university, not to those at Misión Sucre’s aldeas, an asymmetry that reproduced the typical centralizing rather than decentralized higher education model. As discussed previously, the monthly scholarship of 200 BsF (US$40 in 2009) could not pay the daily expenses of an individual, let alone a family, so students relied on the support of their families or often worked at a low-skilled job. Academic facilities were also not always adequate to meet the demands. The canteen at UBV-Caracas was often closed for weeks, serving a full meal just once a day and providing only snacks and a glass of powdered milk for the evening meal. Buses were not available beyond those to the rallies in support of the government. While the bookshop was supplied with new books, the free library’s collection, located in a tiny cellar, was far inferior to that of local community libraries. There were just a dozen stacks of books available, not more than twenty study places in the reading room, and no electronic catalogue of the books. A pile of uncatalogued and unordered newspapers was placed in front of the reception desk. Classrooms were narrow, but space for extracurricular activities was almost nonexistent. Most public lectures and debates took place in the wider open parts of each floor where new cubicles were constantly being added for the faculty. A huge parking lot took more than half the courtyard, and the rest was taken by a baseball pitch, leaving no space for socializing outside except for a small cafeteria and an aisle with a few benches. The university had stipulated co-governance, but the University Council had a space for only one student representative each year. The job market and traditional universities were not welcoming to the new “socialist cadres,” as most degrees remained unaccredited. Given these rising problems, the emergence of a student movement could be anticipated not just because of the faculty members’ urgency for one. During the academic year I spent on the main campus of UBV-Caracas, to my knowledge there were six attempts to form a student movement. Four of these were small-scale initiatives to demonstrate that the students were capable of organizing. Just two came out of specific political and financial demands and grew into a sustained campaign. None of these were recognized by the majority of faculty and staff. When I asked the faculty why they saw their students’ mobilization as weak and dysfunctional, they mostly stated the same reasons. First, quite a few academics criticized the emergence of leaders or organizational nuclei: while they took part in or willingly accepted the vanguard distinction of radical nobility

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within the Bolivarian higher education field, they refused the very possibility that the student movement formed a vanguard. This idea was considered undemocratic and threatening to the democratic structure of the university. Second, the student movement had to mobilize for a cause of social solidarity, beyond immediate material concerns. Finally, even when formed, the student movement was not supposed to stand up against UBV’s faculty members, senior management, or the revolutionary government or President Chávez himself. This struggle was to be directed against the old elites and the remnants of its bourgeois state at the traditional universities that had become bastions of the opposition. A few pointed out that the real student movement was already formed: the pro-government student movement at UCV that many saw as the true heir of the student struggles from the era before Chávez. These three requirements went against the basic historical characteristics of student mobilizations around the world and in Venezuela. As Philip Altbach argued in one of the only attempts at a cross-national overview of student movements: “Student political activism is largely a minority phenomenon . . . sporadic in nature. . . . Student leaders do not reflect the rank-and-file of the student population” (1989,105). According to Altbach, these campaigns have a certain urgency and rapid decomposition as they span only the time of one cohort in the university and express “a generational revolt” and “anti-regime attitudes” directed against parents, faculty, and university and national leadership (99, 104). This common belonging—by birth and social mobility—according to Karl Mannheim, limits student movements to generational experiences: “a specific range of potential experience, predisposing them to a certain characteristic mode of thought . . . and a characteristic type of historically relevant action” (1952, 291). This was the case in most Venezuelan left-wing student movements in the period of the Venezuelan Fourth Republic, from which UBV senior managers and some faculty and ministry staff stemmed: the Academic Renovation, the protests in the 1980s brutally suppressed by the state, the late 1990s campaign against the privatization of public universities, and the pro-Chávez Movement of University Transformation in 2001. The small organizational vanguard was led by young people from middle-class origins with left-wing party membership (Beltran Acosta 1994). These had organized in several waves of contention, usually triggered by claims for wider access and material benefits for the Venezuelan poor (López 2005; Stephany 2006). The movements were always framed in

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strong opposition against the complacent older generation, including the fragmenting leadership of the left-wing parties, the university senior management, and the local or national governments (Calderón and Niño 2006). Paradoxically, at UBV, the university of the revolution, these same characteristics and strategies were named by faculty and senior managers to explain and lament the alleged lack of student movement on campus. In this chapter, I show how rather than provoking debate or opposition among UBV students, certain explanations were adopted and adapted by them so that no real conflict emerged. This process diminished students’ organizational potential and made them silence their claims, subvert their mobilization strategies, and resort to the usual repertoires of contention (Tilly 2006) used by government supporters. All this made their protests look like a reaffirmation of the hegemony created by the state and its radical nobility of former student militants. It allowed mass media, government, and the UBV community to ignore the student discontent and even to repurpose it as a celebration of the government’s achievements. After developing the paradoxes of the student movement in three sections, I show how the tactic of minimizing or disregarding constructive internal critique applied to both students and members of the radical nobility vis-à-vis the core source of democratic legitimacy of Chavismo: the late president himself. I show how requirements of unconditional support hinder transformation routes in regimes that hail critical thinking but fail to tolerate criticism.

Protagonist versus Participatory Democracy The first initiative to form a student movement at UBV that I encountered when I started my fieldwork on the campus in Caracas later merged into the only sustained campaign. It came from a group of freshmen and sophomores from the Department of Politics and Government. They mobilized against the reappearance of a few long-established student representatives at UBV-Caracas who had become small-scale media celebrities. All three—two men and a woman—came from a middle-class background and figured prominently in the PSUV’s youth faction (Juventud del PSUV, JPSUV) as candidates for the coming elections. Fellow students referred to them as the “student bureaucrats” (estudiantes burócratas) or “the posh ones” (sifrinos)—a term used for the upper-class opposition to Chávez, which was also transferred to the new “Bolivarian bourgeoisie” (Boliburguesía; see Ellner 2016). Soon after the beginning of the aca-

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demic year, the overall frustration with student bureaucrats utilizing all student initiatives for their political credit triggered a tiny student mobilization. One of them, Jaime, started a campaign to represent students before the University Council. Charmingly elbowing his way up, he could be seen in his official suit, entering classrooms, inviting his colleagues to events organized by JPSUV and various ministries. Jaime’s ambitious maneuvering irritated his fellow students. At an assembly that he organized in the Department of Politics and Government he was challenged by a group of freshmen. “The very idea of a single student representative for the whole of UBV is wrong, as is that of student representation in a participatory democracy,” said Héctor, a Colombian freshman who confronted Jaime first. “We need to form an alternative student organization in which all students can participate.” Other similar opinions heightened the energy in the noisy narrow classroom. Jaime grinned, tapping Héctor’s shoulder. “I agree, comrade. However, for the time being, one of us being elected is the only way to keep the one position of a student representative in the University Council at all.” Heated discussions followed. Many students backed Héctor. They criticized the dominant decision-making role of the University Council for its top-down governance that went against UBV’s initially designed horizontal structure and the participatory nature of the Bolivarian process. “Our organization should not copy the pyramidal structure of the traditional student unions!” Raúl, a sophomore, exclaimed in the middle of the student arguments. “We should propose an alternative grassroots model [de los bases].” By the end of the debate Héctor, Raúl, and a few of their colleagues volunteered to go to every classroom and mobilize students to join an all-inclusive movement. Thus, students at UBV already showed a critical attitude against traditional student representation at the university in the first month of their study, also reflecting some antiauthoritarian discourses that I had already heard at open events around the university. A leading voice articulating this line was the vice-rector of UBV, Luis Damiani:

It turns out that we, the University of the Revolution, reproduce the old representative democracy. If we want to create new participatory democracy, we must abolish the old structures of the bourgeois state, to do away with its legal framework and its vertical leadership. It is not a representation or a vanguard we aim to form at all levels of our organization but a collective including workers and the broader community in the struggle. . . . We don’t want mobilization and activity to only take place in Caracas: it needs to be

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decentralized as the university and include all students and communities. Let us decentralize the university to the last bit! These words of Damiani stated at a public event in Simón Bolívar Hall had a significant repercussion among the UBV students in their first year. A warmly admired white-bearded sociologist, Damiani was not just a senior manager of the university but also a public intellectual well-known for his militancy on the Left and radical positions. Damiani’s anti-positivist academic articles on radical epistemology and his passionate speeches provided a main source of reflection and inspiration for UBV faculty and students. This message, of which I had heard different iterations at several public gatherings at UBV throughout the academic year, at his presentation during the teachers’ training program was the same. Thus, besides the general rhetoric of the participatory protagonist democracy (Lugo 2017), of the revolution, replayed by the national media, the faculty members’ vision was also adopted by students on their arrival at the university. Following Damiani’s discourse one could clearly distinguish some unwritten rules or organizational imperatives that the student movement had to follow to be recognized by the government and UBV’s faculty. First, a recognizable and recognized student leadership was not desired. While the presence of the student-bureaucrats was endemic and difficult to avoid, it was not just critique of the ambitions of student-bureaucrats that academics required from their students. The very concept of student representation was to be dismantled as an evil remnant of the old system of parliamentary democracy, which the revolution had replaced with the new protagonist, participatory popular power and grassroots horizontal governance. The enthusiasts who organized the student movement had to prevent formation of a leadership or even a radical vanguard. Their organization was not to copy the usual framework of university politics that reproduced the pyramidal structures of the traditional representative student unions. Instead, the sine qua non of the UBV student movement was to be a monad of revolutionary experience: the whole student body, and even further, the whole population of Venezuela were to be equally represented in it, or it would be a failure. As a response to the demand for all-inclusive horizontal organization, for the rest of the first term the students from politics and government led a campaign to get all students to participate in a general meeting. There, a structure of a leaderless student movement with equal rights for all to participate would be

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discussed and approved by consensus. Not more than two dozen students took part in the first assembly. Héctor and Raúl proposed a UBV student movement structure: each UBV-Caracas classroom from the morning, afternoon, and evening shifts was to choose three spokespersons. They were to consult their classmates at a classroom assembly and then voice the opinions expressed there at a coordination meeting of all classroom speakers. The latter meeting was an organ with no decision-making power except to hold a general assembly, where all students could vote on the issues of importance. “Voceros, they explained emphatically, were ‘those who give voice’ to the concerns shared by all rather than ‘those who have voice’ and express only their own opinions: they were the sum of consensus of all people in the group.” Armed with Héctor’s laptop, Raúl explained painstakingly the structure they proposed at the general meeting. This structure and the central place of the vocero were reminiscent of the overall organization of the Bolivarian process. As explained earlier, voceros were the main figures in each communal council (consejo comunal)—the administrative unit of the Bolivarian reform, and of each batallón of PSUV. Carrying out a few small-scale meetings in classrooms, the active students campaigned exhaustively for weeks to get a larger number of students to participate at a general assembly for all UBV-Caracas classrooms. This first campaign ended in the naming or renaming (often already existent) voceros in different classrooms. After holding a few general assemblies with little participation, the group energy dissipated. They temporarily disappeared from the open spaces, and other groups took over.

A Post-materialist Student Movement at a Materialist University The ongoing student discussion over the general structure of the movement in the Department of Politics and Government was paralleled by increase in more immediate concerns among the students. The structural disparities of higher education at UBV were debated and critiqued. At the first gathering of the politics and government students with student-bureaucrat Jaime, further issues beyond student organizing were raised. Second-year Argentinian student Ricarda criticized the low budget for facilities and services at UBV. A tempered militant with a past in the student Left in her country, she was among the only ones who dared to point out the responsibility of “faculty members . . . overburdened with work, double-employed, and often badly prepared. They funnel theory down

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our heads but give us little practically applicable knowledge. Even our proyecto doesn’t go as deep as traditional social work.” Cornelia, a Peruvian colleague of Héctor from the freshman cohort, emphasized the need of better services at the university: “I went to the library for the first time to look for materials for a class presentation and wanted to cry: there is nothing there; it was really frustrating.” Sophomore Miguel said it was important to bring these issues beyond the borders of the UBV central facilities into the decentralized aldeas universitarias: “Only 10,000 out of all 250,000 students at UBV and all 570,000 of Misión Sucre are on the central campuses. The government gives the people in the aldeas, mostly adult students, a red T-shirt, and they think that’s how you get education. Many don’t know their programs are not accredited by OPSU.” The concern with these and similar practical issues, however, mostly remained a matter of private conversations and was not articulated until austerity cuts occurred in 2009. As noted earlier, pressed by the reduction of prices of crude oil due to the world financial crisis, at the beginning of 2009 the government cut the budget of higher education as a whole. All budgets of public institutions were reduced by 6 percent, including those of the ministries, government, and the presidential institution. The Bolivarian universities suffered the same effects as traditional ones. However, after the budget reduction, the OPSU revealed a statistic showing that despite its large number of students, UBV received a budget twenty times smaller per student than that of the UCV. The comparison with the state expenditure for students at USB, the first experimental university in the country and a US-modeled research-intensive university known for its excellence in the exact sciences and anti-Chavista attitudes, showed more drastic disparities. The funding the state allotted to organizing the studies of students from Misión Sucre equaled one-fortieth of that of USB (Colomine 2009). UBV faculty and staff were aware that these financial constraints were severe for UBV and the aldeas because of the rapid massification of higher education the government had carried out in these new institutions. Some were openly criticizing the bad economic conditions on campus and in the aldeas in Caracas and beyond. However, when a group of students publicly articulated their claim for better student services and demanded rethinking of the redistribution of public funds, there was a surprisingly negative reaction among faculty members. At the student gathering where these claims were presented to her, Rector Yadira Córdoba expressed her bitter disappointment. Reminding the audience of her

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past as a student militant against the privatization of public universities and a lifelong fighter for better access to medical services in the poor barrios, she spoke to the students in a grim, tired voice: “I was curious to see what the student movement comes up with. I see you mobilized and even found a chair to moderate and time the discussion, which is great. But how is it that you only call me to speak about the canteen and the library? This makes you sound like clients, and not like revolutionary students.” Some of her colleagues expressed their irritation with the student material concerns on a daily basis in much harsher words. Ariel Vega, for instance, seated in the back of this gathering, next to where I sat, recalled meeting me there during our interview a week later and expressed her concern: “We create consumerists and clients. Our students have such incredibly low consciousness when it comes to anything but cars, phones, and shopping malls. Look at my phone. This rugged Nokia is what I have [had] for some ten years now. My barrio students all have a Blackberry!” Both the rector and her colleague speak out from two rather complementary positions that framed UBV senior managers and former militants such as Ariel as a political generation with a different ethos than that of the new students making claims against them. Speaking of all former student militants of the Left in Venezuela’s recent history—some of whom later formed the radical nobility—one single political generation, can of course be problematic. They spanned at least two generations born between the late 1940s and the early 1980s. UBV faculty also had different experiences during their adolescence, which could be formative of their generation (Mannheim 1952; Kohli 1999). A number of older faculty members had formative experiences during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948–58). They were student militants in the 1960s during the Renovación Academica while the Communist Party was still illegal. Renovación Academica achieved relative autonomy for universities, including the banning of police intervention on campus. In later decades student movements against the narrowing access to higher education, its planned privatization, and the neoliberal austerity cuts lived under fewer restrictions but under similar levels of repression from the state (Calderón and Niño 2006). Their “revolutionary ethos”—a term used by Vice-Rector Damiani during the teachers’ training program—was a frame formulated in antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, and anti-utilitarian discourses and around the requirement of a universal right to higher education for all. The past campaigns were thus trig-

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gered by concrete material conditions on campus: the privatization of lands belonging to the universities (1980s), the attempted introduction of student fees under the deteriorating student services (1990s), and the dysfunctional canteen (2000s). Student movements in Venezuela’s recent past saw material conditions as a legitimate reason to protest, reflecting deep disparities in Venezuela’s society that students addressed and fought against. In this sense, the faculty and senior managers at UBV required from their students that they discard material concerns, contradicted partly by their own frame in a previous stage of the student struggle. In that stage they themselves framed their protests as an educated stratum who carried out the struggle on behalf of people from different structural positions who did not receive a chance for social mobility through higher education. Through the invention of UBV and Misión Sucre the Bolivarian government had made a gesture of social redistribution toward the Venezuelan poor. Yet the argument that there was much more to be done to bridge the gap seemed to be valid only on the level of official discourse. UBV students, it seemed, were left with the choice only to be grateful and to adopt anticapitalist and anti-utilitarian discourse without being allowed to express themselves in relation to the material conditions of the university and structures put in place by their faculty. A peculiar paradox disclosed a degree of contradiction in the accusations of UBV faculty and staff against their students being reactionary clients. While the student was slowly gaining pace at UBV, faculty and senior managers had started to recognize another student movement as a front-runner of the revolution. That student movement was named after the occupation of UCV Movimiento por la Transformación Universitaria on 28 March 2001 (M-28; YKVE Mundial 2009b). It had emerged at the oldest university in Venezuela, UCV, where many UBV-Caracas faculty had been educated and many higher education experts at UBV’s senior manager and the ministry had been student militants. UCV’s main campus was just across the street from UBV. Even though it had been an oasis for the persecuted student Left in Venezuela’s liberal democracy (1958– 98), after the ascent of President Chávez, UCV’s senior management, faculty, and student body had mostly sided with the opposition against Chavismo. And while the Ministry of Higher Education was trying to suggest countrywide reforms and transparency, the resistance at traditional autonomous universities such as UCV often played on the old rhetoric of autonomy that the student Left had struggled to achieve.

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This conflict became prominent after the budget cuts caused by the global financial crisis. A protest wave rose at the traditional universities, led by a mobilization at UCV. The rector of the Central University—a former dean of the Department of Dentistry who acted against the MTU in 2001—summoned the community and went to protest at the Ministry of Higher Education. Just she and two students supporting the protest were accepted at the ministry. At the debate with the minister, a former UCV lecturer himself, a student from proChávez student group M-28 was allowed to be present. He stood up and opposed the rector in front of the TV cameras. Outraged, she left the ministry. The state-sponsored media celebrated the heroic deed of the student from M-28 (YKVE Mundial 2009b, 2009c). In the subsequent months, three students from M-28, which had only a handful of active members at UCV, became well-known media faces. They were often invited to government media and public events to speak on behalf of and represent the student movement as a whole. A couple of them ran for office in subsequent election campaigns. And while the student movement at UBV was slowly developing under the condescending eyes of faculty and senior managers, the former radicals often gazed with envy across the street at the UCV campus. Rodrigo Suárez, a UBV faculty member in architecture and a former student militant at UCV who also took part in the MTU mobilization in 2001, told his night-shift students at UBV, mostly full-time workers, who were curious but did not partake in student discussions: “Student movements at UBV? Nah, that’s small and insignificant. See M-28 over at UCV. Now that is a real student movement! They struggle where we once did—a small vanguard in the heart of the enemy, the old corrupt capitalist system. We fought for a canteen, a better library, a scholarship. Our students don’t have that much to fight for.” Suárez was not the only one to voice this position. UBV faculty members often viewed with nostalgia the students at the other, traditional university who fought the same old struggle. The vanguard structure of M-28, their alleged representation of hidden Chavista voices at UCV, and their subsequent institutionalization were not seen as problematic. And while at the revolutionary university UBV students were not expected to form such a vanguard-led student movement, the same characteristics made M-28 at UCV the legitimate heir of the radical nobility, continuing the battle of David versus Goliath. The romanticization of M-28 among UBV faculty and in the press became so overbearing that M-28 student activists even felt the need to make a disclaimer.

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Soon after their first public appearance during the opposition march, they issued a declaration stating that M-28 was not claiming to be that radical but was just struggling for the bare basics, such as a better canteen, library resources, and the transparent distribution of the university budget and against the privatization of UCV and its facilities (Aporrea 2009a). Yet across the street at UBV the struggle for such goods and services was silenced as clientelist and reactionary. The attempt of UBV students to diagnose the problems at their own university and to address them with concrete solutions was possible only on two conditions: full gratitude to the revolutionary government and the transcendence of the material conditions of university life.

A Pro-government Protest Despite the difficulties of organizing a university-wide student movement, the nucleus of the same group of students at the Department of Politics and Government whom I had encountered during their confrontation with the student bureaucrat Jaime had stayed firm. Becoming ever-closer friends and comrades, they carried out Marxist readings, listened to revolutionary music, and adopted an urban militant fashion. This made it easy for the group to reassemble and act like a vanguard in a next mobilization: the debate over the new Regulations (el Reglamento) of UBV. Published in the official newspaper, el Reglamento (Gazeta Oficial 2009) was the first attempt of the senior management since the establishment of UBV to structure the rights and responsibilities of students, faculty, and working staff. Debated in numerous voluntary workshops around the country over two years, el Reglamento was never announced as a significant document challenging the structure and functioning of UBV. Once it was published as a decree of the president himself, it was presented to the UBV community as a consensual and exemplary piece of legislation. Surprising to the majority of the UBV faculty and senior managers, some students and a few young faculty members saw the Regulations as a challenge to the horizontal structure and to the democratic principles of UBV. Student activists organized a front called Foro Proponente (FP). It came out of the joint initiative of two groups that merged: the students from politics and government who had temporarily stopped the organizational debates and started debating the appearance of el Reglamento and its content, and a group of students from the legal studies department who debated the university budget.

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The most active members of the two groups came together to contest the new administrative divisions and sanctions introduced by el Reglamento and received the support of two young faculty members—Diego Vásquez and Eduardo Palacios, former student militants from UCV. FP activists could use the offices where these two faculty members worked to gather and debate. FP’s first and crucial initiative was to convoke a meeting with Rector Yadira Córdoba to debate the Regulations and the budget. The meeting had more than 120 participants among students, faculty, and staff. The moderator, Cornelia, explained FP’s position: “The state-administered budget of the university does not suffice [for] the enormous complex structure of UBV and Misión Sucre. El Reglamento has no provision of more transparent budget governance. It speaks of students and university workers in a tiny paragraph. The rest is dedicated to the academic staff. It came as a top-down bureaucratic imposition. The document does not change the pyramidal decision-making structure of the university. It reintroduces the University Council, where there is a limit to student representatives from UBV. It does not mention students from the aldeas.” From its first presentation as a group in the public space of the university, FP took a stance of opposition to the university senior management. Cornelia’s words, which expressed the official position of FP members, indicated clearly the issues that students saw as threatening to the democratic functioning of the university: the bureaucratization and verticality of UBV’s governance expressed not just in the text of the document but also in its presentation as an accomplished fact; the lack of transparency of the use of the university budget; and the persistent inequality between the central facilities and the aldeas. The reaction of senior managers and most of the faculty was that of mere indignation. At the meeting with students, Yadira Córdoba told them: “I want us to talk as socialists. Socialists are honest. And to be honest with you, I have tried so hard to help [in] organizing a student movement, but the support and reaction have been really meager.” She thus claimed all the initiative for the formation of a student movement for herself. A former member of the student Left, former minister of science, and after 2011 a minister of higher education, Córdoba was part of what I have called the radical nobility of the Bolivarian process. Claiming the organization of a student movement as her own priority while she was in the position of power showed that the legitimacy of a student movement was still in possession of those who held what I call revolutionary capital.

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Beyond the rector, FP was either ignored or its emergence was taken as an outrageous offense against the benevolence of the UBV senior management. After the insurgence of the FP, the opinions of UBV faculty and staff members varied between disappointment with the students’ allegedly precipitate conclusions and the suspicion or accusation of students being reactionary, counterrevolutionary, or infiltrated. “I really don’t understand how come they don’t like el Reglamento— it’s a beautiful document, reflecting our struggle and a great step ahead in the Revolution,” Thais from my nucleo at the teachers’ training lamented during our interview. Yadira Córdoba said the FP was a small group (grupito) and not being present during the discussion of el Reglamento was their own fault: the invitation was extended, she insisted, and many students did attend the public discussions of the document. The head of the Social Management program, Francisco Figueroa, went even further. He lowered his voice when speaking to me of FP: “I can show you pages and pages of transcripts of meetings with students from all around the country that show that we consulted the document. It seems, however, that the students that hold these meeting are simply blind to these facts. But there is a reason: they must be infiltrated. . . . Their leaders are mostly foreigners. A clique of counterrevolutionary spies sent to sabotage the Bolivarian process.” Many UBV faculty members expressed to me a similar suspicion against FP. This vision of the intentional sabotage of the university process by the group, mirroring the suspicion against the infiltrated elevator wreckers discussed in Chapter 1, was shared by some students as well. Simona, a mature female student and poet with a guitar told me outside the meeting with the rector: “These youngsters show such a low respect to our faculty members who built this university with their own two hands. We can’t have a student movement that does not respect our revolutionary academics! This makes me so sad.” Pablo, a mature student in politics and government who also worked at the UBV canteen, expressed a concern used to silence any critique to the revolution: “Articulating such positions, we end up putting arms in the hands of our enemies, the opposition. . . . FP acts as a vanguard, always plotting something in secret.” This view was contested only among a handful of younger faculty such as Diego Vásquez from politics and government. He shared with me that he was saddened that some of his students, such as Colombian Héctor, Peruvian Cornelia, and Argentinean Ricarda, were called “counterrevolutionaries” and “infiltrated.” He laughed bitterly: “Our colleagues prefer to remain blind that we have the privilege to teach foreign students with a high political consciousness

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through international political conventions of academic exchange and these students can incite the rest.” Despite the critiques of most faculty members, senior managers, and other students, the fame of FP was growing. Speaking to Héctor, Raúl, and their colleagues, I understood that they had not entirely internalized the requirement not to act as a vanguard. In a meeting of the group who gathered at the legal studies office, Raúl told me: “We are in a difficult position. We want to challenge the unjust budgets. When I called my classmates to act out, they said, ‘We can’t go out to protest because it is like putting arms in the hands of the opposition.’ This is so wrong. People think we are challenging the government. But all we do is challenge the remnants of the old bourgeois state. We need a legislative change, and to achieve it, we need to act as a vanguard.” Publicly, FP members knew what was required from the student movement to be seen as legitimate, and so once again they had to do everything to show they were not a vanguard but had a broad base. To do that, they organized several assemblies beyond the central facility of the campus in Caracas. They spent a vast amount of their personal resources, time, and energy to travel around the country, creating connections with students at sedes and aldeas, whom they hosted at two big meetings at UBV-Caracas. At the second of two meetings where I was present as well, the leadership of the movement was expressed in a clear if unobtrusive fashion. A long discussion was carried out in four mesas de trabajo on the topics that had been listed as most urgent for the students: the budget, el Reglamento, student services, and student movement organizing. All four discussion tables were headed and voiced by voceros who were members of FP. Perhaps not surprisingly, all small groups came to the same conclusion. A letter critical of the UBV authorities was to be drafted on behalf of all the student community with the student claims. This letter would then be taken to the National Assembly as a symbolic act of student solidarity during a march in Caracas that was to be attended by students from all around the country. The march was to walk from UBV Los Chaguaramos to the National Assembly in downtown Caracas, where it was to deposit the letter drafted by students from FP in Caracas. Students from regional centers just had to arrange their travel to the city. A week before the march, posters and flyers were posted all around the university. The march was called Mobilization for the Necessary University (Movilización por la Universidad Necesaria; FP 2009b). Graphics on the post-

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ers reaffirmed the statement of mobilization of popular power—a clenched fist and a schematic sketch of the silhouettes of a crowd raising flags into the sky. The slogans of the march were stated below the graphics, saying firmly: “Fight, fight, and fight! Don’t stop fighting for the socialist and popular university! A just budget, this is our fight! No more free gifts to the bourgeois! March for the necessary university!” The day of the march brought two surprising developments. First, to gain legitimacy, the demonstration framed itself completely in line with all other marches within the Bolivarian process. Not just students but also faculty and administrative staff came along, arriving with their students from Caracas and other cities. Dressed in red T-shirts, carrying pro-government posters and a huge flag of Venezuela, actors who were previously opposed to FP suddenly joined their march. Not only did bureaucrats such as Jaime and students like Simona and Pablo, who did not sympathize with FP, come to the march. Rector Yadira Córdoba, dressed in a red shirt and black trousers and wearing platform sandals, headed the march and walked the long road to the National Assembly. Faculty members such as Diego Vásquez and Eduardo Palacios, sympathetic to FP, walked along with the rector, and their colleagues such as Francisco Figueroa, Ariel Vega, and Cecilia Gómez, who had called FP “infiltrated,” “counterrevolutionaries,” or “clients,” also marched with them. Second, the letter (FP 2009a) that was handed in had little to do with the initially discussed issues at the gatherings of FP. The critical document they previously produced was never made official, following a similar imperative of some documents seen as “arms in the hands of the enemy.” Instead, the document that the National Assembly received started with a celebration of the government’s achievements and then raised a few critical points. The main critique addressed the laws concerning the functioning of higher education in Venezuela. The document mentioned both the Law of Organic Education (1980) and the University Law (1970). They were called “bourgeois,” “leading to the reproduction of the capitalist system,” and “creating conditions for a new coup d’état.” Yet there was no critique of the fact that by 2010 the laws had never been changed with new pieces of legislation except a handful of decrees, despite the 98 percent dominance of PSUV in the National Assembly at the time. Budget-related concerns were mentioned in the proposal just in passing: transparency figured as a highly desired asset, but the lack of it was attributed to the opposition and the remnants of the bourgeois state. The two-tier system of higher education

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in Venezuela and among the Bolivarian sedes and aldeas, debated at FP gatherings, was not addressed, and neither was el Reglamento, which occasioned the emergence of FP. Instead of pointing out possible reasons for failure within the governance of UBV and Misión Sucre, the document was filled with the traditional enemies of the revolution: the usual antagonists of President Chávez and his government. Seen as culpable for the ancient laws in operation were “the CIA,” the opposition students who painted their hands white (las manos blancas), “the bourgeoisie,” “the petty bourgeoisie,” “the capitalist system,” the presidents of Colombia and Peru, the autonomous universities, “the economic elite,” “a bunch of illuminated thinkers,” and “the university academics” (FP 2009a). No one within a political position in the government, the state agencies responsible for accreditation, the Ministry of Higher Education, or UBV was attributed any responsibility. There were no suggestions for changes in the government’s policies or UBV’s internal governance or financial management. The way ahead in higher education reform that students proposed was to get funding and technical support from the National Assembly so they could travel around the country and mobilize communities to debate the new legal framework of higher education. Headed by the rector, senior managers, and high-ranking faculty, mostly representing the radical nobility of UBV, the protest displayed the UBV community marching in seemingly perfect harmony: all dressed in red with progovernment posters and flags, they walked through the main arteries of the city. Under the kind smiles and gazes of the faculty, the students were painting anti-opposition graffiti on the walls of the city. The UBV community gradually reached the final aim, the National Assembly, where a representative group handed in a statement and a proposal. The document was received in a cooperative manner by Head of the Assembly Cilia Flores and MPs from the Education Committee. Flores tapped Héctor on the shoulder in a friendly manner. Further consideration was promised. Over the next months, Diego Vásquez and Eduardo Palacios lost their positions as national coordinators of their respective departments. FP soon dissolved. A few of its members became part of a rector’s committee to incite a new student movement.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Criticized The regime’s not being open to internal critique and self-rectification, as could be seen in the student protests, did not end with this episode. After the Enmienda campaign, critiques against the government’s overreliance on oil, the failure to diversify its Dutch disease economy, the centrality of Chávez, and its poor financial decisions started to mount among rank-and-file Chavistas as well as among circles closer to the Bolivarian government. Paradoxically, while members of the radical nobility of the former student Left had contributed to the marginalization of the UBV student movement concerns, similar mechanisms came to play in an episode in which the critique coming from this rather prominent group was silenced (Ivancheva 2016). In June 2009 the International Center Francisco de Miranda (Centro Internacional Miranda, CIM), a think tank sponsored by the Ministry of Higher Education, hosted the forum “Intellectuals, Socialism and Democracy: One-Way Streets and the Ways Ahead.” Held in the main hall of CIM at the nationalized hotel Anauco Suites in downtown Caracas, where CIM-affiliated left-wing intellectuals resided to produce research and provide training to government officials, the forum offered a peculiar moment in the Bolivarian process. It aimed to offer constructive intellectual critique and discussion of alternative solutions to the emerging contradictions of the Bolivarian process and to galvanize reform from within. Yet, similar to the student movement, rather than open opportunity, it produced closure after which less and less critique was possible even from those with more symbolic legitimacy within the regime. Instead of serving to offer a critical corrective, the forum resulting in well-established left-wing intellectuals having to conform to the radical hierarchy of the Bolivarian process with President Chávez at the top. The forum happened several months after the successful Enmienda referendum that removed presidential term limits in February 2009. It was a break in a tendency of consensual silence among Chavistas about the controversies and failures within the Bolivarian process. Before that forum, the discussions that took place in spaces of intellectual and popular debate in Caracas were marked by a peculiar self-censure. As with student discussions, the electoral losses were attributed not to the government, PSUV, or the president but exclusively to the persisting structures of the old bourgeois state and its representative democracy. Yet intellectual debates gained new momentum in the aftermath of the referendum and through the ripple effects of the world financial crisis, such as

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the steep decline of oil prices that affected Venezuela. They caused budget cuts, and the suspension of Chavista contract workers in the public sector while permanent employees loyal to previous regimes kept their jobs ignited discontent (Wilpert 2009). Still, the electoral victory with 54 percent signaled a democratic legitimacy and stability and were initially seen as a good time to bring in some internal critique. Against this background the chair of CIM, Spanish academic Luis BonillaMolina, organized the abovementioned public forum on the role of intellectuals supporting the regime. The forum was opened by his compatriot scholar JuanCarlos Monedero—later an adviser of the Spanish left-wing party Podemos. Monedero declared that the revolution was suffocating under the hyper-leadership (hiperliderazgo) of President Chávez. The second speaker, UCV sociologist, national TV program host, and former member of JPCV Vladimir Acosta, followed with a no less critical statement: “I celebrate, of course, our extraordinary achievements over the last ten years. However, important unnoticed or underestimated problems have accumulated and have become a menace to the advancement and deepening of this process, which, I believe, we all wish to be successful.” Amid increasing silence, Acosta enumerated thirteen crucial problems that he saw as threatening the Bolivarian revolution. He critiqued the lack of a clear political program in the face of the vague generic idea of socialism of the twenty-first century. He outlined the contradiction between the revolution as a collective effort and the centrality of Chávez’s leadership. For Acosta the Socialist Party PSUV was not a revolutionary party but rather an electoral instrument of the Bolivarian government. He criticized the persistent capitalist relations of production, the failure of the government to challenge consumerism among the population, the lack of transparency in public expenditure, and the timid nationalization that did not affect wealthy Venezuelans. He emphasized that the commercial media were the number-one power holder in Venezuela and that moderate currents dominated PSUV. Calling Chávez “the soul, heart, nerve, and force of this process,” he still pleaded with government supporters not to suppress their critique. Acosta’s speech was followed by an avalanche of critical interventions, some prepared, others improvised (Aporrea 2009b). UCV’s feminist anthropologist Iraida Vargas asked provocatively if the revolution needed a state. Canadian political economist and founding member of CIM Michael Lebowitz insisted

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that revolutionary intellectuals should subject themselves to discipline by the revolutionary party as a critical corrective but reminded the group that PSUV was still far from such a party. Historian Roberto Lopéz from Maracaibo—a former Maoist rural guerrilla member in the 1980s—spoke of the division of center and periphery in which the countryside was neglected by the revolution. Economist Victor Álvarez, former minister of basic industry, presented National Statistics Office data on the actual increase of the share of private companies during Chávez’s presidency. Miguel Ángel Pérez Pirela from the governmentfunded research institute IDEA demonstrated that science in Venezuela still worked as an individual effort rather than a radically reorganized collective endeavor. Gonzalo Gómez—former student organizer and editor in chief of the government-supported online comment and analysis website Aporrea—spoke of the failure of the state media to create revolutionary content and format. Many other critical comments followed. The men and women presenting at the forum had a record of work as popular educators, community and trade union organizers, and former members of the student Left that had gained legitimacy under Chávez. Speakers stated, “This is not an attack. We are here to show support [for] the revolution.” Many said they were previously reticent to voice critique as it could be used by the opposition to destabilize Chávez’s rule. They had living memory of the coups against democratically elected governments in 1973 in Chile and 2002 in Venezuela. Ironically, the more pessimistic scenario reflected in the forum’s subtitle became the unintended outcome of the intellectual encounter. The new avenue for critical reflection turned into a one-way street. The first attack came from Chavista newspaper El Diario VEA’s regular column “Un grano de maiz” (A grain of corn). As I was told later by a forum participant, it was authored by an activist close to Rafael Ramírez, head of PDVSA and a strong opponent of workers’ control. An “Un grano de maiz” blogger called the forum participants “infiltrated bourgeois” attempting to destabilize the revolution (Un grano de maiz 2009). In Aporrea, critics called intellectuals destructive and criticized the Bolivarian division of labor that championed “quasi-intellectuals” over common people (Linares 2009). Chávez’s awaited response came through national TV. Seated in an open-air studio, he scorned the “armchair theorists,” sarcastically stating, “Who called these intellectuals Chavista? I didn’t!” If they thought they could solve Venezuela’s problems, the president pleaded, “Let them come on Sunday. I will hap-

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pily spend time with my family” (YVKE Mundial 2009a). His next Sunday show, Aló Presidente, launched its “theoretical” version, Aló Presidente Teórico (TodoChávez 2009a, 2009b; Vaz 2021). Chávez entered Venezuelans’ homes discussing Marxist theory. In one of the shows, he discussed exploitation with a teenager who wished for a phone company job. The show has been celebrated as “one of the Bolivarian Revolution’s most important theoretical references” (Vaz 2021), yet its launch soon after the forum could be read as rendering intellectuals replaceable. CIM intellectuals published their comments in a new journal, La Comuna. Their collective response on Aporrea stated that deep inside, Chávez’s arguments “coincided with the main points in the forum.” Later some of them told me that Chávez threatened to expel them from PSUV. Minister of Higher Education Luis Acuña wanted to close CIM or hand it over to another ministry. It was only when late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and the president’s late adviser General Alberto Müller Rojas intervened that he reconsidered. Later Chávez conceded to some of the critique by calling a TV station where JuanCarlos Monedero was interviewed and saying that the Spanish intellectual was right about his “hyper-leadership.” Yet his initial dismissal and attacks shook CIM’s legitimacy as a basis for critical reflection. Cilia Flores, then vice president of PSUV and chair of the National Assembly, and her husband, Nicolás Maduro—later nominated by Chávez and elected as Venezuelan president— also opposed the forum. I was told by forum participants that immediately after the forum, Flores confiscated all issues of La Comuna that Bonilla-Molina had distributed at a PSUV meeting, and Maduro said publicly on national TV that intellectuals talked “straw” (Ivancheva 2016). After the forum, CIM was not given further funding and its programs slowly dissolved. As the student movement and protest called by FP, this forum presented a turning point in which the possibility for critique of the Bolivarian government was opened and then closed. Ironically, this process mirrored the way in which some UBV-related academics with credentials from student movements in the past had not given credit to FP and its claims for university transformation. Unlike authoritarian left-wing governments in the twentieth century, the Bolivarian government did not apply any violence. Yet the reactions of Chávez, the Chavista media, and PSUV showed mechanisms of shunning constructive critique and disregarding legitimate discontent. In an increasingly top-down process, neither new student activists nor left-wing militants with a significant

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past in the struggle against exploitation and injustice were recognized as a corrective to revolutionary power. No further attempt was made to reestablish an intellectual tribune that would become a critical corrective to the government. Since Chávez suffered an untimely death, the internal critique of the revolution shifted from “no weapons to the enemy” to de mortuis aut nihil aut bene.

Reflections As much as it was disregarded by UBV faculty members as a dysfunctional mobilization initiative, FP was in fact a classical student movement. Following Philip Altbach (1989), one could see numerous characteristics that it shared with other student movements around the world. FP was composed of a tiny minority from the campus population of UBV that comprised radicalized youngsters with a degree of political consciousness more elevated than most rank-and-file students. Half of FP came from a minority group within the student community: Héctor, Ricarda, Cornelia, and some of the core sympathizers of the movement were in fact foreign students who received scholarships from the conventions of the Venezuelan government with other countries in Pink Tide Latin America. Venezuelans such as Raúl and Miguel were from lowermiddle-class families. They were all young people in their early twenties with no familial obligations. Some worked part-time, and all had clearly more time to dedicate to their studies and activism. This was in contrast to the majority of UBV or the aldeas students attending UBV’s night shift. Despite its being a classical student movement, FP was hardly a success. Determining its success or failure in social movements in general, and in student movements in particular, is difficult. The mobilization potential in terms of “unity, numbers, worthiness and commitment” was seen by Charles Tilly as a significant attestation of social movement success (1999, 261). Student movements have not achieved significant political changes, but their effect has been observed in mobilizing a wide number of sympathizers and attracting the attention of a broader constituency to a special issue (Altbach 1989). Yet, while FP succeeded in bringing more people to a march than many other movements in Western countries, it was not successful in a crucial part of social movement organizing. In the aftermath of the march, Héctor told me: UBV is not an island: it develops hand in hand with the revolutionary process, and with all the sectors of the state that have a very strong discourse. We had to center ourselves

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in this discourse, and that did not allow us a clear line of confrontation. We were very much consumed by the whole revolutionary process—we could not move at our own pace, so once we appeared publicly, we could not delay the march. We were pressed to carry it out quickly, with a high degree of abstraction, and our claims remained a secondary matter. . . . We did not achieve anything, and after the march it was clear we had to take a step back.

Héctor’s words speak directly to a set of alternative theories of social movement outcomes. These go beyond the numbers of participants mobilized and the visibility, or the perceived worthiness and commitment to a cause, which were all present in FP’s self-perception before the march. Being able to articulate a number of central claims against what they saw as a root cause of a problem or a culpable figure (“diagnostic” frame) and to propose viable solutions to the diagnosed problems (“prognostic” frame) is a crucial aspect of social movement success (Snow and Benford 2000). The concessions or at least recognition that the authorities grant to social movements has also been discussed as a clear sign of social movement advancement (Gamson 1990). As Héctor’s analysis shows, both these aspects were lacking in the student mobilization achieved by FP. The very name of the forum as “proponent” rather than “opponent” could be seen as an attestation of its intentions to make a stand favoring the government and UBV faculty and senior management. “Centering within the discourse” of the Bolivarian government was a necessary condition for the recognition of the student movement: the opposite strategy would have meant betraying the people to the revolution’s enemies. Taking this stance has also required avoiding the strategic step of framing the movement against the authorities and the state. Since the issues were attributed to an abstract external enemy, it was impossible to propose solutions to the issues with the budget, the vertical organization of the university, and the structural disparities encountered by its students. Shying away from an honest debate of the shortcomings of the UBV management and the government stifled the student movement’s energy. Positioned in that conjuncture, the students could not extend their frame to further student struggles in the country, let alone those abroad. They still considered themselves antagonistic to the students in liberal democracies in the Global North. And while most student movements out of Venezuela have been fighting against commercialization, marketization, and privatization of higher education, material concerns have not been foreign to Venezuelan students, including those at UBV.

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The repertoire of contention chosen by FP also contributed to the self-fulfilling prophecy of their eventual decline. The rally (concentración, marcha) had become the symbol of participation and positive support of each and every supporter of the government of President Chávez: all workers at public institutions joined the marches. Its choice as an expression of FP’s contention made it possible for the senior managers of UBV to harness the contention and protest the claims of students. Joined by proponents and opponents of el Reglamento and directed toward the positive support of the government that performed the austerity cuts allowed the protest to be seen as just the next pro-government rally. A further difficulty was created by the self-framing of the faculty and senior managers. On the one hand, students were not allowed to act against the will of the majority of the students. This would have signified a reaction against the fierce people of Venezuela: el bravo pueblo, the urban and rural poor previously deprived of chances to get access to free public services. Yet UBV students not only represented but also embodied and simply were these people. Full of students from all age groups, the UBV student body hardly represented a generation or cohort. On the other hand, while UBV faculty and senior managers were a much more obvious antagonist in the struggle, they did not allow the students to consider them such. Despite the fact that for ten years the Bolivarian intellectuals, education experts, and bureaucracy were part of the established power apparatus of a nation-state, the students respected faculty members as paragons of radicalism and activism. The implied requirement that no critique was addressed to the president because it would “put weapons in the hands of the enemy” was transferred to the whole senior management of UBV and the government. Using their authority of revolutionaries doing all for their students, senior managers and most faculty members did not allow the articulation of claims against them. In this constellation of power of the revolutionary government (or its alleged powerlessness vis-à-vis its all-powerful enemies), the only possible reference of the student protests was the old enemy: the capitalist system and its remnants in the bourgeois state. A central difficulty of framing the student movement at UBV has been the usual referent of anti-systemic process, the nation-state, in a new role. Student movements in Latin America have traditionally led historical struggles against repressive right-wing regimes that monopolized state power (Ordorika 2003). The antagonism against the state has created a strong identification mechanism for generations of student and social movement participants. When speaking of

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the present state, however, headed by President Chávez and the Bolivarian government, the main referent remained “the remnants of the old bourgeois state.” The FP campaign made it evident that by adopting this narrative, students were left with no choice: the revolutionary state was to be seen only as a hero entering an uneven battle with the omnipresent remnants of the bourgeois state. The latter was held solely responsible for the former. Philip Altbach’s claim that “student movements are often barometers of society” (1989, 105) was ironically true of FP’s failed attempt at social change. It can also apply to the Bolivarian process, as seen in the intellectual forum, and—as an open question—perhaps to revolutionary governments in general. Due to the heroic halo of the benevolent state and its radical nobility, internal critics could not frame their campaign against those who crafted the reforms. The key strategy of most student movements to act out a conflict against the older generation or to express anti-regime attitudes was not an available option for FP. The need to use the language of the negotiating antagonist in order to form its own claims as universal for the whole “people of Venezuela” made it difficult to gain recognition except as a pro-government initiative. Despite UBV’s hidden curriculum of educating radicals, it proved difficult to critique a power structure that assumes there is no more radical praxis than its own.

 

Conclusion

The story of UBV exemplifies the accomplishments and contradictions that define the Bolivarian higher education reform and potentially any similar initiative to set up an alternative university amid the capitalist world system. This reform was carried out against the negative background of the increasing commercialization of public universities worldwide and the repression of student movements during the period of liberal democracy in Venezuela (1958–98). It was catalyzed by the reticence of the Bolivarian government to support socialist academics in their fight to implement reform at autonomous public universities in the period 1998–2003. The establishment of the new university together with a parallel system of aldeas universitarias has been a symbolic victory and a symbolic defeat. It has given poor people a chance to receive free access to higher education. Yet, as the new university and its aldeas still required accreditation and legitimacy within the larger education system, this legitimacy had to be granted by the agents of academic authority: academics from traditional universities mostly and extremely hostile to the government. As part of a two-tier system, UBV became a second-class university. It received a smaller budget per student, and its degrees were regarded as inadequate. The old hierarchy lived on and lived well. The day-to-day practices detailed in my ethnography also show that UBV remained reliant on traditional norms even for its administrative and academic functioning. While its faculty were often first generation in higher education, the left-wing academics who made the ranks of its senior management and of the Ministry of Higher Education mostly came from what I have called “the radical nobility”: they were members of the former student Left with both traditional academic and radical militant credentials. Employed by the government to legitimate its reform and carry it out as experts, these radical-yet-traditional academics dominated the Bolivarian higher education field. Combined with 161

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their radical past, their academic credentials formed a new source of distinction: that of a revolutionary capital. In the Bolivarian higher education field, this form of symbolic capital concealed a hierarchical power and class relation, around which hegemony was created. Presented as organically related to the popular struggles of the past, it was accepted and internalized by the new faculty and the students of UBV as absolute and allowed no appeal or contestation. This new source of “revolutionary” distinction worked to conceal the reproduction of inequalities that are ubiquitous throughout the Bolivarian higher education field. A strict symbolic but also economic hierarchy was apparent at UBV. When comparing education and social status, material acquisitions, life standards, and chances at the job market, the members of the radical nobility scored above the new Bolivarian educators. All of them, however, were better off than UBV graduates. The former student radicals and the new educators had received their degrees from traditional educational institutions and kept enrolling their own children in these schools and universities, where most UBV students and graduates had no chance to study or work. And while the opportunity to study at UBV has meant dignity and empowerment for its students, they hardly stood any chance to get a secure job. They were regarded as low-skilled workers even within the government-controlled public sector. Paradoxically, while class differences between the older and newer generation of intellectuals persisted, class conflict remained symbolically precluded and stigmatized as antagonistic to the Bolivarian process. The growing precarity to which UBV faculty and students were exposed made some of them, especially among the faculty, hostile to the regime. At the same time, going beyond the instrumental vision of higher education as dedicated primarily to the accumulation of knowledge and acquisition of jobs, my book puts forward the politically imaginative ways in which the Bolivarian government made use of the UBV community. Not necessarily able to significantly improve most poor people’s lives or to accumulate knowledge about life in poor communities, UBV faculty and students still played an important role in these settings. Through their presence they advanced the government’s state- and nation-building project and supported the promotion of new redistributive institutions and services. In this way, the Bolivarian government carried out reform against the grain of the global trend toward dismantling of institutions of the welfare state. Embodied by its agents—low-ranking state employees and students at the Bolivarian university and aldeas—the state created

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a positive, likable incorporation, image, and affect of itself among poor barrio and village residents. Getting used to this presence, brokered by women in poor communities, the members of these communities were socialized within the new state institutions and its discourse, placing them as fully fledged Bolivarian citizens. A side effect of this process, in which the political government of a state transformed by neoliberal reforms should be eventually recognized across its territory, was the centrality of women in the process. For women from barrio communities, the Bolivarian revolution had brought an inspiring and significant change. This was the first time they were treated not only as workers, housewives, childbearers, and caregivers but also as the agents of a political process and its civic community. Being recognized community organizers in poor neighborhoods, they had become the voice of their communities as well as power brokers with the state. This process was crucial for bringing new status and power to these women. However, they remained in an economically exploited position. They were willingly contributing to the socialization of state institutions among their communities and helping the government literally touch ground with communities. Creating the new sociality of the Bolivarian state, their voluntary efforts to legitimize the state’s presence in the barrios brought them mostly symbolic returns but no substantial economic emancipation. While the government made efforts to redistribute its oil revenues to poor communities, its reforms were far from consistent. Taking the higher education reform as an example, I have shown that time and resources were often spent on programs that were then readily discarded and quickly replaced. The enormous and spectacular redistributive effort was often reminiscent of the material grandeur of what Fernando Coronil (1997) called “the magical state.” While the words of the late president on TV were usually taken literally and put into policy documents in the form of decrees, the shift of direction they produced was readily absorbed by community organizers. The tendency to change the direction of development every time the government faced resistance from opponents seemed justified through the past of the Latin American and Venezuelan Left, where radical movements had been opposed by mighty enemies. The same motif was used as a primary excuse for the misfortunes of the benevolent Bolivarian state. While this might be the case in certain instances, the permanent cadre rotation and the change of policy within the government show that twists and turns often came from within with no substantive expla-

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nation. The combination of the induced powerlessness of the government and its alternating power field made liminality (Turner 1995) a permanent state of affairs. While this permanent liminality could serve as a useful tool during frequent election campaigns, it also made the actions of the government ever less accountable and transparent, exuberant in radical gestures but not in perpetuating lasting social change (Ivancheva 2017a). A reason for this might be found in the centralization of decision-making in the hands of the late president and a few members of the political power field, which stifled the process of feedback and made the government impermeable to critique from below. My work has shown that while intellectuals from the radical nobility and faculty of UBV were used to legitimate the reforms of the government, they were not encouraged to assume a critical stance toward it. Despite the permanence of the members of the Venezuelan radical nobility in the echelons of state power, the Bolivarian academic field had very little leverage to influence the government. While the radical intellectuals with a history of activism became hegemons among their own colleagues and disciples, their position vis-à-vis the leader of the revolution and its bureaucratic functionaries was at best precarious. They gained relatively privileged positions, but their attempts to provide critical feedback and influence the decision-making were easily overturned. Thus, despite the permanence of a radical nobility, the Bolivarian academic field faced a key dilemma typical of intellectuals in processes of revolutionary social change. My work shows that a trend remains present both in state socialist countries from the twentieth-century state socialism and the new democratic socialism of the twenty-first century. Academics in socialist contexts have indeed traditionally faced a Hobson’s choice: either becoming a functionary clique or being reduced to a marginal critical opposition that stands no chance of carrying out social change. This alternative and its recurrence surfaced in my research when, for example, students who challenged the faculty and academic administration received a response similar to the one given to radical experts challenging Chávez and his government. My research outlines the difficulties of framing radical critique against a power structure when its dominant groups assume that no discourse or practice can be more radical than their own. The question remains whether the lack of critical self-reflection is one of the main deficits of the Bolivarian process or one of its strongest resistance mechanisms within the context of total political adversity both home and abroad. It is certain that this

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mechanism contributed to the constant shift of direction and diffusion of responsibility in the Bolivarian reform, which can now be seen in its problematic sequence in Maduro’s centralized autocratic regime with ever fewer democratic feedback mechanisms. It has prevented Chávez’s and consequent Bolivarian governments from creating sustainable institutions and models of alternative development applicable outside Venezuela. Against this background, while the Bolivarian experiment in higher education is quite specific in its particular history and positionality, and it might not easily be saved by a different set of policies alone, there are a few lessons for any alternative project for higher education to take that need thinking through. These are offered here especially for a policy audience—not as an attempt at thorough policy evaluation but by means of lessons offered that one can learn from this exciting but challenging experiment.

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Every next revolutionary or welfarist project is set up against the monster of neoliberal capitalism and its multiscale impacts on the way we organize our social institutions. Eradicating these structures at all levels is vital for any alternative to exist. In fact, as Eastern European post-socialist countries have shown, neoliberal capitalist reforms have been very efficient in eradicating all welfare structures, so a reverse response should be at least as radical, not less. Structural and legislative reform needs serious institutionalization that cannot be easily abolished by the new establishment. To that end, holding a record of past activities, decisions, and responsibilities for legacy and learning is imperative. Rethinking the content of old concepts such as “academic autonomy” and rethinking their meaning over time and in the new context are important for the new regime to conceptualize its own priorities and lines of action in regard to its antagonists. A better grasp of the intricate link between individual and collective agency within reforms needs to be established: alternative experiments need to thread more carefully between the personality cult of leaders and the oblivion of personal and collective visions for change that need an internal feedback mechanism but also a sustained and sustainable effort over time. Alternative higher education projects, set against the grain of prestige-driven commercially tailored higher education, need acknowledgment, reflection, and conscious renegotiation of traditional and other forms of symbolic distinction they produce within institutional, national, and global hierarchies.

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Doing this work carefully and with a lot of introspection by the actors is the only way for the logic of social relevance to overpower the logic of capital in higher education in the new alternative higher education models. Alternative models of higher education and welfare institutions need to produce and sustain alternative modes of evaluation and assessment that subvert institutional, national, and global hierarchies but allow for some element of discrimination of better and worse practices. Such models of higher education need to work with a firm understanding of the processes of class formation globally and locally, finding strategies to nurture alternative identification, consumption, and security without alienation. An alternative university deserves an alternative, radically reformed job market that takes into consideration preexisting disparities and establishes new ways to acknowledge distinct contributions workers make. A radically different higher education (as part of an alternative state-building) process should not rely on extraction of solidarity, love, and care from its most vulnerable agents but should remunerate otherwise symbolically unrecognized reproductive labor of people, taking into account intersectional inequalities. A revolutionary government should allow and take advantage of internal critique to accelerate rather than block social transformation. To this end, a double standard should not be allowed between producers and beneficiaries of reforms. New revolutionary experiments in higher education and in any other domains should learn from achievements in the past and not try to invent the wheel in the rare cases where progressive forces are back in power. Their efforts should be well documented for posterity, not thrown on “the rubble heap of history.”

   

Epilogue

(De)colonial Silences in the Hierarchy of Global Knowledge Production

“This is an unedited, unique experiment! Of course, we knew of other curricular practices that existed, but what we came up with was unprecedented.” These words from Magaldy Téllez, one of the first academic directors of UBV, were often repeated by Venezuelan intellectuals engaged with the creation of UBV and Misión Sucre. This book has focused on UBV as the principal field site of my eighteen months of research in the period 2008–11. Established in 2003 by radical intellectuals and former student activists, UBV has become the vanguard institution of higher education reform in Bolivarian Venezuela. As a main degree-granting agent of the mass higher education program Misión Sucre, the university provided placements to hundreds of thousands of poor Venezuelans. It promoted alternative pedagogy and knowledge production, a decentralized model of the university, and “globalization-critical” academic alliances within the Global South. To do that, all UBV university programs included applied work with communities not as a perfunctory facet but as an integral part of the curriculum. This work, carried out by students under the supervision of faculty, aimed to raise awareness of the world outside the academic “golden cage.” It put academic knowledge at the disposal of communities who wished to develop their own autonomous media, urban agriculture, popular education, or services. Its ambitious goal was to foster new forms of science and technology and to aid the new cadres of the regime to perform socially responsible governance (Ivancheva 2013). The creation of UBV as an alternative model of higher education has been a hallmark for the Venezuelan socialism of the twenty-first century: a democratic socialism that stood for free access to all rather than reverse discrimination (Wilpert 2007). UBV also was a timely reminder for the general impasse of imagination for alternatives in an era of emergent student contention in liberal democracies against the marketization of education, increasing 167

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indebtedness, job insecurity, precarious labor, and growing inequalities of access to services and goods (Ivancheva 2020). Still, the claim of Magaldy Téllez and her colleagues—that UBV was a unique experiment—came as a surprise to me. Coming from Eastern Europe, where universities had gone through vast curricular reform and massification, I saw UBV as another battle in a much longer struggle. Massification policies and reforms were not attempted only in socialist countries: the movements for popular education in France and Germany, the adult education movement in the United Kingdom (Steele 2007), as well as the community colleges in the United States (Brint and Karabel 1989; Marginson 2016), among others, were all examples of attempted progressive forms and models of higher education. Yet my question about past examples that Venezuelan socialist education reformers followed usually were dismissed by my interlocutors at UBV and the Ministry of Higher Education. On several occasions I was referred to—and gifted a volume of—the writings of Samuel Robinson: the teacher of Simón Bolívar. A few intellectuals quoted the Córdoba Reform in 1918: the time in history when university students claimed autonomy, co-governance, free access (for white men only), and the famous university extension (applied work with communities) as principles of higher education (Torres and Schugurensky 2002, 576). The Cuban campaigns of adult literacy and university municipalization were mentioned only once, by Rubén Reinoso, later vice-minister of higher education, who told me, “Cuban consultants say the model was theirs. But Cuba lacked our velocity. They municipalized one university in fifty years: we municipalized five universities in five.” Besides the lack of discussion of previous higher education experiments, the history of “really existing socialism” or of Western welfare states was rarely mentioned at UBV or among Chavista academics and experts. My attempts to inquire about the lessons from the Eastern European, Asian, African, or any other socialist experience beyond Latin America usually came to no avail: “Your countries failed the socialist project,” I was often told by higher education experts and UBV faculty members. At UBV, the history of the USSR—and no other socialist referent—was discussed, to my knowledge, mostly in elective classes on political economy. These were taught by a lecturer whom students deemed a “hard-core Stalinist” and who negated openly “the bourgeois myth of forced collectivization and peasant starvation.” Consequently, some students hardly knew “our” countries were not a part of the Soviet Union any longer (let alone,

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that my native Bulgaria never was part of it) and spoke of Russian president Vladimir Putin as the next Soviet leader. The majority, who knew the difference between the USSR and contemporary Russia, were thinking of Eastern Europe as an integral part of Western Europe with a similarly imperialist past and present. One of them inquired, “How do you feel about belonging to an imperialist country?” A citizen of Bulgaria, a former colony of the Ottoman Empire, and neocolonized by further national- and transnational-level colonial assemblages in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, my white skin color clearly implicated me in the broader imaginary of the colonial space. Progressive policies and politics in Western or northern countries were not discussed either. European or American education and credentials were seen as simply and bluntly Eurocentric and neocolonial. All science produced in European and American universities was denounced for its “positivist epistemology.” Western universities were condemned as incorrigible enemies. My own alma mater, the Central European University, was known as George Soros’s university and mentioned in my presence as producing CIA agents. This left me in much distress, especially in the first months of my fieldwork, and made me very self-conscious of being perceived as a spy and treated with less trust, unlike many scholars from the Anglo-American and European academy and even though UBV and ministry senior managers had graduated from European institutions. Meanwhile, the links between some advancements in the progressive academy in the Global North and UBV were also silenced. In the 1980s the first rector of UBV, María Egilda Castellano, spent two years in the United Kingdom to research the Open University—a model of mass institution for distance learning, which UBV took after but which was never mentioned publicly as one of its sources of inspiration (Ivancheva 2017a). This absence of comparison beyond a few regional cases seemed both explicable and difficult to grasp. It should not come as a surprise that many Venezuelan and Latin American intellectuals were not well informed but not really interested in what was happening in (post-)socialist Eastern Europe and the (former) Soviet Union. The very same can be said about a significant proportion of their counterparts in Eastern Europe, where Pink Tide Latin America is still mostly invisible, except when mentioned to decry the rise of “new totalitarianism” or “illiberal populism.” This mutual silence is explicable in a global knowledge hierarchy. In this subtle division of labor, Claudio Lomnitz (2001) argues, peripheral academics

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are left to discuss the particular “great national problems,” whereas intellectuals in core hubs of knowledge production utter “universal truths.” Besides, the post-1989 global hegemony treated the socialist experiments in Eastern Europe as a past that is to be forgotten and condemned altogether after the “end of history” (Fukuyama [1991] 2006). This division poses the questions, What is the relevant horizon of historical experiences for new egalitarian social experiments, for new policies and reforms that try to undo historical injustice? Are they just to write their blueprints for social change from scratch, as if most of these ideas were never thought of, never applied, never succeeded or failed? To address these questions, I understood my engagement with Venezuela to be a first step in a bigger project. I wished to explore the links between progressive reforms in higher education in both socialist and liberal states. Such a project was to open a theoretical space suggested by Walter Benjamin’s restorative project of writing history by reviving the unfulfilled utopias in the past. This work, recalled in Fernando Coronil’s (2011) posthumously published essay “The Future in Question: History and Utopia in Latin America (1989–2010),” denounces historicist writing that empathizes with the victors to benefit the rulers, who “tread over those who are sprawled underfoot” (Benjamin 2005). My aim was to explore new horizons of practical innovation in higher education by reconstruction of the lost voices and experiments in higher education from the past that have gone extinct in the post-1989 writing of history. Without losing track of local history, I wished to position the Venezuelan and Latin American higher education reforms and utopias within a broader horizon of experiments or “actions directed toward universal equality and well-being and thus toward forms of political life without which these goals cannot be achieved, including democracy, diversity, justice, and freedom” (Coronil 2011, 233). I planned to explore what sources are left and to what extent such an exploration could find the relevant seeds of change in a complex comparative global history. The work of revisionist historians of socialism such as Sheila Fitzpatrick, Michael David Fox, Vera Tolz, John Connolly, and Gyorgy Peteri; numerous anthropologists and sociologists in our region during the Cold War; as well of the first few anthropologists who made it behind the Iron Curtain—Katherine Verdery, Chris Hann, Gerald Creed, and Francis Pine, among others—and the theory developed out of their work could also be valuable material for such comparison. Their work has allowed us to think of life stories and experiences of people under socialism beyond the simple negation or endorsement of state

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socialism by excavating forms of living erased from the dominant historical narrative, according to which the West won the Cold War. Following the work of these scholars and doing independent historical anthropology, I reasoned, could allow a new generation of scholars, which included myself, to outline similar contradictions in Eastern European state socialism and Latin American democratic socialism. For instance, despite certain moments of contention, the Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union remained an institution of almost aristocratic privilege and distinction (Tolz 1997). This happened despite mass entry into higher education and workers’ education experiments, rabfak (workers’ faculty) after the Revolution of 1917. The Bolshevik leadership insisted that the working class and peasants had to reach the level of theoretical and scientific preparedness of the technical specialists (Fitzpatrick [1979] 2002). Under Stalin, despite the purges of the intelligentsia and new waves of massification of university education, industrialization and modernization remained a top priority of the Soviet Union in its Cold War battle for technological domination. These institutions had to achieve both social integration and scientific expert knowledge, resulting in the return of old bourgeois cadres in prestigious positions in the academy and the elimination of the workers’ education forms (Tolz 1997; Fitzpatrick 2002). In similar moves throughout the region a more populist socialist tradition such as the interwar people’s college (népi kollégium) was overpowered by an urbanite academically sophisticated tendency of the socialist movement during the state socialist period in Hungary. Through an underground cultural revival movement in that period, epitomized by the dancehall movement (táncház), this popular tendency had gradually gained political power in the post-socialist era but, sadly, with increasingly ethno-nationalist and irredentist motives as expressed in Viktor Orbán’s right-wing populist party Fidesz (Taylor 2021). Thus, while socialist regimes suspended critique from within and from the Left and invited in the Trojan Horse of Western liberal values masked as “progress,” they underwrote a lot of their own earlier efforts to produce knowledge that defies Western modernity through alternative and decolonial institutional design. The Cold War was fought on the grounds of industrialization and military warfare, which allowed old academic institutions like the Soviet-style Academies of Sciences to be revamped. Besides knowledge production, they allowed spaces of elitist, antipopular, and ultimately self-interested concern to survive

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(Fitzpatrick 2002). At the vanguard institutions of culture and knowledge production, old-guard intellectuals could also preserve their self-colonizing sentiments (Kiossev 1999), looking up to core “civilized” countries as a source of salvation for their own downtrodden “barbaric” compatriots (Gagyi and Ivancheva 2019). Meanwhile, downwardly mobile heirs of the former bourgeoisie and upwardly mobile new technocratic experts first lost their socialist ideals, working toward expertise and efficiency, which they imagined as prevalent on the other side of the Iron Curtain (Konrád and Szelényi 1979), and contributed to the development of new doctrines such as neoliberalism (Bockmann 2011). They embraced Western modernity, packaged with loans from capitalist institutions and incentives for a liberalized market economy, allowing individual development and pursuit of happiness without the constraints of socialist redistribution and security. One can draw significant parallels between Venezuela at the dawn of President Chávez and the end of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Bloc. True, the democratic socialism in Venezuela had little to do with the rather repressive “really existing socialism.” But as I have demonstrated in this book, the Bolivarian government’s efforts to reform the existing higher education system encountered resistance in the key knowledge-intensive industry, PDVSA, dependent on expert knowledge coupled with elite distinctions (Lopéz, Canino, and Vessuri 2007; Ellner 2008). To achieve better control over knowledge production, the government had to hire faculty to train hundreds of thousands of students from poor communities but also steer them into competition over credentials, research funding, and publications against scholars from traditional universities. Dependent on expert cadres, the government continued hiring expert cadres from traditional universities, diminishing the chances of UBV faculty and graduates for better working, learning, and living conditions. At the same time, scholars of the new socialism have often neglected to consider how socialist regimes’ concern with capitalism, oligarchies, and imperial interests tends to justify ignoring critique, including from the Left. The latter was often suppressed as counterrevolutionary. Balancing power mechanisms, claims for further democratization, and challenges to centralized bureaucracies were gradually weakened, and those committed to advancing state socialism were often marginalized. The Bolivarian higher education field clearly shows these tendencies. It gradually became impossible to critique the late president, as this was immediately read as coup mongering (golpismo). It also proved dif-

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ficult to critique the old guard of the radical nobility: their past in the struggles, coupled with their academic excellence, serves as a two-tier mechanism to quell anger and contention, while their own critique has gradually been disregarded or silenced. This mechanism was strengthened by the presence of the usual “fellow-travellers” (Caute 1988) invested in Western networks of radical distinction. Their commitment to work in Venezuela or any developing revolutionary regime, against the distortion of reality that the media in their countries present, is in many ways remarkable. Yet rosy accounts of the reality reinforce the self-confidence of socialist regimes and delegitimize critique.

Lost Chances and New Predicaments For the time being, this comparative project I wished to initiate has come to naught. During my PhD studies, comparative research design was encouraged only by faculty in my program, sociology and social anthropology, at the Central European University. Somewhat unique in its marriage of the two disciplines, it also stood in the tradition of comparative historical sociology that engages comparison earnestly and within the work of one scholar or collective. Yet outside the program, the anthropology field was riven with hostility to comparative studies. The only time I heard comparison discussed as a valid option was at a talk given by an anthropologist based in a core hub of the profession in Europe who lectured Eastern European academics, insisting that comparison was vital for the discipline, but it should happen in only one way: local scholars, engaged in the “ethnological” tradition in peripheral locations could continue collecting, describing, and cataloguing local rites, rituals, and social institutions in their contexts, which demand continuous access and language knowledge. Anthropologists based in core English-speaking departments outside the periphery could then engage this “local” tradition by collating these texts in edited volumes and writing the overarching theoretical insights that the ethnological works leave dormant in the diligently collected material. This proposition, profoundly (neo)colonial in its implications, had pushed me even further in the search of comparative frameworks within my case study. Both during and after my PhD I received some hard lessons that comparison—outside the neocolonial settlement just described—was not really encouraged within anthropology. While working on my PhD, I could receive funding only when applying to present my case study of Venezuela within Latin American or higher education study settings. An abstract of mine was once

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rejected for a conference on “Global Socialisms and Post-socialisms” held by anthropologists, with the condescending note that it was great I was exploring “new fields,” but places like Venezuela were not of interest to the organizers who privileged “real” socialisms, those of Eastern European and former Soviet countries. In the academy in my home country of Bulgaria, where I wished to return to work, my engagement with a “totalitarian regime” and a “Third World country” (as oil-rich Venezuela was termed by colleagues there) was seen as irrelevant—and possibly politically problematic. Even before I finished grad school, I realized that there was no way back for me as an academic: I had “betrayed” my local loyalty by getting a scholarship abroad instead of staying home and engaging with the “grand national problems” within the allowed theoretical frameworks. After graduation, as did many people in my discipline and in academia, I confronted a dire job market, and one also in which being an Eastern European applying for jobs working in Latin America—even within a frame of global history of higher education—seemed, to say the least, unusual. I soon realized that the Western labor market had precarious fellowships and jobs for “local scholars” who had to study their own societies ideally in their native languages and for “global scholars” who could study everyone else’s society, usually by using the local scholars as “fixers.” Like many other Eastern Europeans, despite scores of applications, I was offered only short stipends as a national who had to do research in his or her home country. At a Central European research institute where I first secured a short fellowship, I was told that my “work on . . . erm . . . Bolivia?” was interesting, but I was strongly encouraged to present on Bulgaria at its seminar series. Shortlisted in any competition for jobs related to Latin America, I faced scholars with Spanish or English surnames, the former more “native” and the latter more “global” than me. Having gone back to Bulgaria and witnessing and writing about protests and other topics in my native country, I was ever more pigeonholed within the group of local informants of global scholars who extracted surplus from my native knowledge. It was little consolation that the latter were sometimes those Eastern Europeans who “made it” in Western academia. While protests in Venezuela were raging at the same time as those in Bulgaria around 2013–14, I was never asked to comment on Venezuela but often approached to write on the Bulgarian protests—a field in which, having returned home while searching for a job, I was more of an observing participant than a participant-observer. My

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knowledge as a “peripheral” subject could only be valuable in its local peculiarity. I started receiving invitations to produce opinion pieces or to be present at plenaries of large academic and political conferences as an activist-scholar from the post-socialist world, sometimes only to realize that global academics from a core hub of anthropology were using my work on Bulgaria or that of other Eastern Europeans without a reference. Why would I care—one reasoned when I challenged them—Venezuela was my main field of contribution anyway. Thus, the anthropological discipline that I had considered my intellectual home was divided not just into Cold War “area studies” in which my native Bulgaria and the country I studied, Venezuela, belonged to different denominations. It was also divided into dominions of global scholars based in core hubs of the discipline in the Global North and those who remained outside. Many used the scarcity of the job market and the asymmetry of research funding to tap into what was framed as our local and lived knowledge of the ongoing recession and new waves of violent protest, which many of us did not only experience but also theorized, using comparative frameworks. The resurgence of the Cold War rhetoric in global politics, even more since the war in Ukraine, pushed us ever further back to our “ethnic selves.” To address the predicaments of the job market, I had to refashion myself as a scholar of higher education, and the positions I could get were as a postdoctoral research fellow, hired to collect data for bigger projects on the Irish, UK, and South African higher education systems. By the time this happened, my CV spoke of one fact alone—I was easily mobile, able to switch contexts of fieldwork, and could adapt to relatively new theoretical and methodological approaches. In the language of contemporary neoliberal academia with its short-term project culture and precarious labor market, this meant I fit into a specific labor category: the hypermobile researcher, highly invisible within departments, easily displaced geographically, on constant data-collecting trails, line-managed by senior academics who do not invest in them as a full-fledged colleague but treat them as a disposable work unit (Ivancheva and O’Flynn 2016; Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating 2019). With a labor time all fully “owned” by Principal Investigators and their projects, one’s own work was to be placed on the back burner: done on evenings, weekends, or once the job was done and we were to leave, losing institutional affiliation and—as one senior academic put it—becoming “intellectually homeless” once again. So, while I did not have to activate my ethnic self to appeal, it was my uprooted self that was now en-

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tering new and ever-more-uneven competitions in the precarious job market, or—when lucky—within a higher education field ever-further-subsuming my labor at ever-higher return but lower cost. Within the present job market ideas of historical comparative and interdisciplinary work were rather prohibitive unless done by a large team, which only a permanent faculty member could assemble and had to manage. Methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002) lived on and lived well, within proliferating “comparative” edited volumes and special issues of loosely collected case studies, performed by local scholars and theorized by global ones. Austere funding budgets, requirements of hypermobility, constant self-promotion, and 24/7 availability made anthropological fieldwork harder to sustain (Ivancheva 2018). That has been even more so for those who could not afford to fall into months or years of unemployment supported by their parents, spouse, or other sort of work while developing their portfolio (Fotta, Ivancheva, and Pernes 2020). Women have been at a greater disadvantage, as we are still subject to the imperative of care and subjected to assumptions about our career being a second priority to that of our partner (O’Brien 2007; Rivera 2017; Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating 2019). And while anthropology has required an extra amount of mobility and precarity because of the very nature of our (field) work, at present transgressing core-periphery dogmas and boundaries in the field has made such aspirations rather prohibitive.

Coda Quoting Samuel Beckett’s “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” Slavoj Žižek (2008, 361) calls for oblivion of failed socialist attempts because they never lived up to the ideal of a communist society. In order to build a new more equal society afresh, Žižek argues, we need to avoid thinking that the Soviet past had anything to do with real communism and just try to do it better next time. To argue against this simplistic vaulting over past real-life experiments, one needs to treat the past as an open chapter we should read anew. In this, I firmly stand with the legacy of Walter Benjamin and Fernando Coronil: the insistence of reconstructing utopian projects of the past as the way to draw the blueprint of a better future. Beyond offering the current book as a document that outlines the contradiction of one such blueprint, presenting a larger research program with the bitter taste of a lost chance, I am reminded of its structural limitations in the anthropological and academic profession of today (Fotta, Ivancheva, and

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Pernes 2020). Adam Kuper’s (2015) suggestion that anthropologists should engage in “interesting conversations” and resist pragmatic concerns could only be uttered by someone in a permanent position in a core hub of knowledge production within the discipline. A discussion of how this new model of knowledge production could transgress rather than reproduce patterns of uneven development and structural inequalities within the discipline and the academic profession is urgent. The story of UBV can teach some lessons in this regard, some dos and don’ts, where radical utopias and their real-life implementation can be read against the grain of the dominant narratives of history. It can teach us that while the production of local knowledge is crucial, without the abolition of global structural inequalities and area studies boundaries and an honest attempt at a global historical comparison, we shall continue reproducing colonial knowledge taxonomies and exploitative labor relations. Such taxonomies can be transgressed only by changing the very structures within the discipline and the academy that make comparative thinking and fieldwork prohibitive and allow the treatment of peripheral scholars as data collectors rather than colleagues of equal value. If it is serious about this political mission, the field of anthropology and academia should brace themselves for a fight: a struggle with funding bodies and institutional and disciplinary frameworks that reinforce inequalities and produce insurmountable divisions among us, and between us and the wretched of the earth we claim to defend.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to tables. academic autonomy: contradictions within, 13–14, 75–76; history and definitions of, 50–52; as ideological principle, 49, 55, 62, 71; and public accountability, 48, 63, 64, 71, 75–76; weaponization of against reform, 9, 47–49, 53, 61, 75 academic hierarchies, 92, 105–7, 152, 162, 169–70. See also “radical nobility” academic hypermobility, 175–76 academic jargon, 78–79, 81, 100 academic promotion. See promotion, academic Academic Renovation, 8, 55–57, 64, 87, 137 academic staff. See faculty Academy of Sciences, Soviet Union, 171 Acción Democrática (AD), 56, 60, 87, 128 accountability (universities), 51–52, 64, 71 Acosta, Vladimir, 153 Acuña, Luis, 47, 72, 155 AD (Acción Democrática), 56, 60, 87, 128 affective reality, state, 23, 44–46, 115, 130, 162–63 agency, 25, 74, 165 aldeas universitarias (decentralized classrooms), 7–12, 69, 121, 142, 147, 161–62 Altbach, Philip, 137, 156, 159 alternative university, 2–4, 10, 165–66; challenges and limitations, 13, 73–74, 123–27; contradictions within, 6, 115, 161; evaluation measures, 41, 100–101, 166; historical models, Global South and North, 168–71; UBV as, 10–11, 135, 161–62, 167–68 Alzualde, Carlos, 87, 124 Ancidey, Bernardo, 86–87, 124 Angelus Novus (Klee), 19, 96 anonymization, 17 anthropology, 6, 12, 24, 176–77; and comparison, 170–71, 173–76; of infrastructure, 24, 34; of policy, 12, 24, 32; of the state, 4, 23, 25–27, 44–45

Aporrea (website), 154, 155 archives and records: state, 25, 29–31, 32, 44, 165; UBV, 31, 41 area studies, 15, 175, 177 “arms in the hands of the enemy,” 32, 103, 148–49, 158. See also critique artifacts, 23, 24, 29–30, 32–33, 44. See also materiality; promotional materials austerity measures, 18, 58–59, 72, 142 autonomous universities, 8, 64, 67, 70, 144. See also two-tier higher education system autonomy, academic. See academic autonomy Bandera Roja (student movement), 63, 91 barrios, 34–35, 108–11, 117–18, 128–31, 163; 23 de enero, 125; “María Lionza,” 108–9, 128–29; Petare, 37, 120 benevolent state, 6, 116, 130, 133, 159, 163 Benjamin, Walter, 19–20, 96, 170, 176 Bigott, Luis, 93–95 Bolivarian educators. See faculty Bolivarian missions, 40, 43 Bolivarian process (proceso), 9, 26–28, 44–46; contradictions within, 50, 80–81; critique of, 16, 152–53, 164–65; epistemology, 94–96; “radical nobility,” 6, 81, 88–89, 106–7, 161–62, 164; and UBV, 9, 64–65, 131, 132; women and, 6, 112, 116, 125–27, 130–32, 163 Bolivarian state: affective reality, 23, 44–46, 115, 130, 162–63; legislation, 40, 56–57, 60, 146, 150; and marginalized groups, 11, 26, 45; material traces of, 23–25, 27, 33–34, 44, 96; media representation, 28, 43, 59, 154–55; structural power, 24–25, 27, 42–43, 45–46, 158, 165; women and, 115–16, 130, 133, 163. See also opposition Bolivarian University of Venezuela. See UBV Bonilla-Molina, Luis, 153, 155

197

198

Index

Bourdieu, Pierre, 26, 81, 83, 88 brokers (between state and people), 26, 115, 128, 163 budget cuts, 8, 47, 58, 142, 145, 153 built environment, 22, 33, 34–35, 105. See also barrios; Caracas Bulgaria, 19, 169, 174–75 cadres (government administration), 18, 64–65, 74, 121–23, 163, 172 Caldera, Rafael, 57–58, 75 campaigns, political, 21–23, 34, 36–40, 152. See also student movements capital, cultural, 17, 45, 82–83, 88, 92, 123 capital, economic, 83, 88, 91–92 capital, logic of, 84–85, 106, 126–27, 166 capital, revolutionary, 85, 88, 91–92, 96, 147, 162 capital, social, 92, 123 capital, symbolic, 81, 83, 92, 162 capitalism, 33–34, 45–46, 113–15, 165 Caponi, Orietta, 66–67 Caracas, 22, 34–35, 37, 102–3, 105, 149 Caracazo (popular rebellion), 8, 59, 125 caravanas de alegría (caravans of happiness), 21–22, 33 Castellano, María Egilda: career, 49–50, 55; higher education reform, 59–63, 65, 71–72, 74, 169; and Misión Alma Mater, 65, 69; and Misión Sucre, 65, 69; and UBV, 53–54, 66–67, 68, 74 Central European University, 169, 173 Central University of Venezuela. See UCV Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM), 152–53, 155 charisma, male revolutionary, 81, 116, 118, 131, 132 Chatterjee, Partha, 24, 26–27 Chávez government. See Bolivarian state Chávez, Hugo: and 2002 coup, 42, 64; antiintellectualism, 70, 102, 154–55; attempt to end presidential term limits, 21, 38; leadership and centrality, 152–53, 155, 164; media representation, 28, 59, 154–55; rejection of critique, 62–63, 154–55, 164; rise to power, 8, 59–60 Chavismo, 7, 36–37, 81, 144 CIM (Centro Internacional Miranda), 152–53, 155 civil society and political society, 26–27. See also Chatterjee, Partha class. See social class CNU (National University Council), 57, 65 Cold War, 70, 170–71, 175

Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI), 56–58, 60, 75, 128 communities, poor. See poor communities community councils, 109, 112, 120, 128–30 community organizers, female, 81, 112, 115–16, 125–26, 128–31, 133 comparative anthropology, 170–71, 173–76 Comuna, La (journal), 155 conditional cash transfers, 113–14 control, state, 23, 25, 27, 130 Cooper, Amy, 112, 119 COPEI (Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente), 56–58, 60, 75, 128 Córdoba Reform (1918), 51, 55, 56, 168 Córdoba, Yadira, 68, 69, 94, 142–43, 147–48 Coronil, Fernando, 24, 27, 163, 170, 176 coup, attempted (2002), 36, 40, 42–43, 64, 119 credentials, academic, 84–85, 91–92, 102, 106–7, 122–23. See also evaluation measures crime, 36, 103–4 crisis, financial, 1, 142, 145, 152–53 critical pedagogy, 10, 79, 92, 116–17 critique: of Bolivarian process (proceso), 16, 152–53, 164–65; of Hugo Chávez, 62–63, 154–55, 164; of radical movements, 38, 138, 152–58, 164, 166, 172–73 cultural capital, 17, 45, 82–83, 88, 92, 123 cuts, budgetary, 8, 47, 58, 142, 145, 153 Damiani, Luis, 37, 54, 92, 94–96, 139–40 debt, 58, 113–14 Diario VEA, El, 154 dictatorships, Latin American 20c, 42, 48 Documento Rector (Rector’s Paper, UBV), 10, 53–54, 66–67, 68, 69, 93, 97 documents, 25, 32–33, 41, 44, 150. See also archives and records Dutch disease economy, 8, 58, 152 economic capital, 83, 88, 91–92 educational exclusion, 11, 61, 84, 99 elevators, malfunctioning, 35–36 elitism: educational, 5, 43, 74, 83–84; political, 8, 9, 26–27, 42, 50. See also “radical nobility” Eloy Blanco, Andrés, 66, 67–68 employability. See labor market empowerment, 10, 94, 112, 115–16, 126–27 Enmienda campaign (abolition of presidential term limits), 21, 36, 37–38, 40, 152 epistemology, 79, 94–96, 169

Index ethnography, 12–15, 17–18, 24–25, 27, 128, 161 evaluation measures: alternative university, 41, 100–101, 166; neoliberal, 2, 58, 84, 100–101, 105–6; UBV faculty, 77, 89, 93, 97–99 exclusion, 11, 61, 84, 99 experimental universities, 57, 59, 63, 67, 69, 74. See also two-tier higher education system experts: intellectuals as, 82; as opposition, 5, 40, 50, 161; state socialism, new class, 82, 172; teaching and pedagogy, 119; UBV, 92, 106 extensión (applied fieldwork), 51, 60, 133, 168 extraction of surplus, 114–15, 127, 134, 166 extractive industries, 27, 113 faculty: evaluation measures, 77, 89, 93, 97–99; living conditions, 104–5, 106–7; “radical nobility,” 81, 88–89, 106–7, 161–62, 164; training, 68, 77–80, 89–90, 93–95, 98–99, 105–6 fear, politics of, 6, 27–28, 36–37, 39–40, 104, 158 fields of power, 4, 26, 83, 106 financial crisis, global, 1, 142, 145, 152–53 Flores, Cilia, 151, 155 Foro Proponente (student movement), 146–50, 156–59 Fourth Republic period, Venezuela, 48, 78, 87, 93–94, 137 Francisco de Miranda Front (Frente Francisco de Miranda, youth organization), 66 freedom, academic. See academic autonomy Freire, Paolo, 10, 116, 117 Frente Francisco de Miranda (Francisco de Miranda Front, youth organization), 66 Gaceta Oficial, 29, 44, 54 Gago, Verónica, 113, 134 Garcia Arocha, Cecilia, 47 Generación del 28 (student movement), 56, 70 Generation 2007 (student movement), 70 “global scholars,” 174, 175 Global South, 10, 18, 24, 43, 73, 167 Globovision (TV network), 47 Goicoechea, Yon, 47, 70–71 government administration (cadres), 18, 64–65, 74, 121–23, 163, 172 graduate employability. See labor market graffiti, 22, 33, 44, 151. See also campaigns, political habitus, 26, 123 hegemony, 84, 86, 138, 162

199

hidden curriculum, 115, 124, 127, 134, 159 hierarchies, academic, 92, 105–7, 152, 162, 169–70. See also “radical hierarchy”; “radical nobility” higher education: core-periphery dynamic, 2–27, 5, 45, 82, 85–86, 169, 170, 172–73, 175–77; elitism, 5, 43, 74, 83–84 (see also academic hierarchies; “radical hierarchy”; “radical nobility”); global ranking systems, 84, 99–100; hidden curriculum, 115, 124, 127, 134, 159; legislation, 40, 56–57, 60, 146, 150; and market forces, 2, 51, 53, 84; massification, 7–9, 11, 61, 65, 168, 171 (see also Misión Sucre); and neoliberalism, 2, 57–58, 126, 175; policy shifts, 49–50, 65, 68–69, 72; precarity, 2, 174–76, 177; public accountability, 51–52, 64, 71; two-tier system, 8–9, 41, 57, 68, 161, 173 (see also parallel structures). See also universities higher education, alternative. See alternative university higher education reform, 4–6, 54–57, 61–62, 73–74, 161, 168–71 housing, 34–35, 105, 108, 114–15, 129 Hungary, 171 Hurtado, Samuel, 115–16, 130 hyperleadership (hiperliderazgo), 153. See also Monedero, Juan-Carlos hypermobility, academic, 175–76 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 8, 58–59 infiltration, 36, 148 infrastructure, 24–25, 34–36, 108, 131 intellectuals, 70, 82–83, 102, 152–55, 164 International Center Francisco de Miranda (CIM), 152–53, 155 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 8, 58–59 jargon, academic, 78–79, 81, 100 job market, 68, 123–25, 126–27, 134, 174–76 kinship structures, 115–16, 130 Klee, Paul: Angelus Novus, 19, 96 knowledge production, 22, 82, 101, 169–71, 173–75, 177 labor, division of, 97, 107, 115, 154, 169–70 labor market, 68, 123–25, 126–27, 134, 174–76 Latin America, 1, 42, 73, 104, 113 Latin American 20c dictatorships, 42, 48 Latin American public universities, 51

200

Index

legislation: 1958, University Law, 56–57; 1970, University Law, 57, 150; 1980, Organic Bill of Education, 58, 150; 1998, Bill for Higher Education (Proyecto Ley Educación Superior, PLES), 59; 1999, Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 21, 60, 131; 2001, Enabling law decrees incl. Laws of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Law of Agrarian Land, Organic Law of Hydrocarbons, 60; 2001, Organic Bill of Higher Education, 62; 2003, Presidential Decree 2517 (18 July), UBV, 10; 2009, Presidential Decree 3.537 (09 February), Reglamento UBV, 146; 2009, Presidential Decree 6650 (24 March), Alma Mater, 54; 2010, Organic Law of Education 2009, 40 liberal democracy period, Venezuela, 48, 78, 87, 93–94, 137 Linárez, Pedro Pablo, 77–79, 80–81 literacy programs, 7, 40, 118, 168 living conditions, 18, 35, 58, 102–5, 106–7. See also poor communities local classrooms (aldeas universitarias), 7–12, 69, 121, 142, 147, 161–62 logic of capital vs. logic of social relevance, 84–85, 99, 106, 126–27, 166 M-28 (March 28th student movement), 47, 144–46 Maduro, Nicolás, 7, 23, 155, 165 marginalized groups, 7, 11, 26, 45, 81, 115. See also poor communities; subalternality Marginson, Simon, 83–84 market forces and higher education, 2, 51, 53, 84 Marxism, 71, 95, 102, 113 massification of higher education, 7–9, 11, 61, 65, 168, 171. See also Misión Sucre materiality, 23–25, 27, 33–34, 44, 96 matrisociality (matrisocialidad), 6, 115–16, 130, 132, 133 media and politics, 28, 43, 47, 60, 64, 154–55; Aporrea (website), 154, 155; Diario VEA, El, 154; Gaceta Oficial, 29, 44, 54; Globovision (TV network), 47; National TV (Canal 8), 28, 30, 154 Mészáros, István, 28, 46, 114–15, 127 microcredits, 113–14, 120, 125–26, 131–32, 134 middle classes, 35, 82, 90–92, 102–4 Ministry of Higher Education, 28–30, 40, 72, 86–88, 144–45

Misión Alma Mater, 54, 68–69, 74 Misión Barrio Adentro, 40, 119 Misión Barrio Nuevo, Barrio Tricolor, 34 Misión Ribas, 11, 40, 129 Misión Robinson I and II, 40 Misión Sucre, 7–10, 64–65, 67; accreditation, 41, 65, 121; aldeas universitarias (local classrooms), 7–12, 69, 121, 142, 147, 161–62; budget, 142; and the labor market, 68, 121, 125–26; promotional materials, 29–30 Monedero, Juan-Carlos, 153, 155 MTU (Movimiento por la Transformación Universitaria), 62–64, 71, 144–45 National Assembly, 38, 60, 149–51, 155 National Library, 30–31. See also archives and records National University Council (CNU), 57, 65 neoliberalism: and the Bolivarian state, 42, 44–45, 58–59, 134; in higher education, 57–58, 126, 175 no-platforming, 52 Office for Planning and Budgeting of the University Sector (OPSU), 41, 65, 88, 142 oil industry, 8, 40, 57–58, 64. See also PDVSA; petrol strike On the Concept of History (Benjamin), 19–20 Open University, 59, 169 opposition: electoral success, 22, 37; and government funding, 120; infiltration by, 36, 148; and OPSU, 65; resistance to reform, 40, 47–48, 60; student support for, 47–48, 70–71; and UCV, 144–45 OPSU (Office for Planning and Budgeting of the University Sector), 41, 65, 88, 142 parallel structures, 5, 43–45, 63, 72–75, 161. See also two-tier higher education system paro petrolero (petrol strike), 64–65 participatory (protagonist) democracy, 10, 37, 39, 111, 139–40. See also representative democracy PCV (Partido Comunista de Venezuela), 21, 56, 88 PDVSA (Venezuelan Petrol), 35, 64–65, 68, 121, 124, 172 pedagogy, critical, 10, 79, 92, 116–17 Pérez, Carlos Andrés, 59 Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 48, 56, 143 petrol strike, 64–65

Index Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. See PDVSA (Venezuelan Petrol) “pink tide” or progressive cycle (Latin American socialism), 1, 4, 18–19, 82, 104, 113, 134, 169 polarization, social, 62–63, 71–72, 75 policy, governmental, 31–32, 49–50, 163, 165 policy shifts, 49–50, 65, 68–69, 72, 163 political society and civil society, 26–27. See also Chatterjee, Partha politics and the media. See media and politics politics of fear, 6, 13, 27–28, 36, 40, 104 poor communities, 26–27, 112–15, 162–63; applied fieldwork (proyectos), 14, 109–11, 118, 120, 128, 134; state access to, 81, 116, 130–32, 132–33; women and, 81, 112, 115–16, 125–26, 128–31, 133 Popular Power for University Education. See Ministry of Higher Education populism, 23, 39, 171 positionality, 16–17, 27, 81, 83–84, 157 positivism, 95, 140, 169 post-socialism, 165, 169, 171, 175 poverty. See poor communities power, fields of, 4, 26, 83, 106 power structures: Bolivarian state and, 24–25, 42–43, 45, 158, 164; intellectuals and, 82–83; state, 22, 24–25; at UBV, 97, 116–20, 158–59 precarity: in higher education, 2, 174–76, 177; living conditions, 113–15; women and, 131, 133 privatization, 3, 42–43, 45, 58–59 proceso. See Bolivarian process promotion, academic: Program for the Promotion of Researchers (PPI), 100–101; Program for the Stimulation of Researchers (PEI), 101 propaganda, promotional materials: state, 22–23, 29–30, 33, 44; UBV, 31–32 protests: Academic Renovation, 8, 55–57, 64, 87, 137; Caracazo (popular rebellion), 8, 59, 125; Eastern Europe, 169, 174–75. See also student movements proyectos (applied fieldwork, UBV), 14, 109–11, 118, 120, 128, 134. See also extensión PSUV (political party), 37–38, 128–29, 138, 150–51, 154–55 public higher education. See higher education; Latin American public universities public sector cuts, 8, 47, 58, 142, 145, 153 public services, 7, 42–43 “radical hierarchy,” 15, 92, 105–6, 152, 162

201

“radical nobility,” 81, 88–89, 106–7, 161–62, 164 Ramírez, Edgardo, 72, 87–88 Rector’s Paper (Documento Rector, UBV), 10, 53–54, 66–67, 68, 69, 93, 97 redistribution, 7, 42–43, 113, 120, 162–63 referendum on presidential term limits (Enmienda campaign), 21, 36, 37–38, 40, 152 reforms, higher education, 4–6, 54–57, 61–62, 73–74, 161, 168–71 Regulations of UBV (Reglamento), 146–48, 151 Reinoso, Rubén, 126, 168 Renovación Academica, 8, 55–57, 64, 87, 137 representative democracy, 37, 62, 139–40, 152. See also participatory (protagonist) democracy reproductive labor, 6, 114–15, 116, 127, 131 research methodology, radical, 94–96 revolutionary capital, 85, 88, 91–92, 96, 147, 162 Schiller, Naomi, 26, 48 sensibilización (awareness raising program), 11, 77, 79, 89, 93 social capital, 92, 123 social class: conflict, 4, 5, 71, 106, 122–23, 162; and intellectuals, 82–83; middle classes, 35, 82, 90–92, 102–4; and UBV, 17, 90–92, 102–3, 138–39; working classes, 17, 90–91, 102–3, 127, 134, 171 social exclusion, 11, 61, 99 social polarization, 62–63, 71–72, 75 social relevance, logic of, 84–85, 99, 106, 126–27, 166 social reproductive labor, 6, 114–15, 116, 127, 131 social welfare, 26, 114–15, 162, 165–66 socialism: 21c socialism, 13, 28, 114, 127 (see also Mészáros, István); Eastern Europe, 168, 171–72; Latin America, 1, 4, 18–19, 82, 104, 113, 134, 169; and reproductive labor, 114–15, 127; Soviet Union, 168–69, 171; state socialism, 19, 73, 115, 164, 170–73, 176–77; Venezuela (see Bolivarian process) socialist higher education. See alternative university society, civil and political, 26–27. See also Chatterjee, Partha Soviet Union, 168–69, 171 spokespeople (voceros/voceras), 118, 128, 141 staff. See faculty state affect, 13, 27, 33, 130, 133 state, benevolent, 6, 116, 130, 133, 159, 163 state control, 23, 25, 27, 130

202

Index

state power, 22, 24–27. See also Bolivarian state: structural power state socialism, 73, 164, 171 stratification of higher education. See two-tier higher education system structures, creation of, 73 structures, parallel, 5, 43, 63, 72–75, 161 structures, persistence of, 75, 85–86, 152 student movements, 58–59, 87–88, 137, 140–41, 156–59; azules, los (the blue ones), 59; Bandera Roja, 63, 91; faculty views on, 135–37, 140, 142–45, 147–49; Federation of University Centers (FCU), 47; Foro Proponente, 146–50, 156–59; Generación del 28, 56, 70; Generation 2007, 70; M-28 (March 28th), 47, 144–46; manos blancas, las (the white hand), 47; Movimiento por la Transformación Universitaria (MTU), 62–64, 71, 144; Students for Freedom, 70–71; Utopia, 59, 62 Students for Freedom (protest movement), 70–71 subalternality, 11, 26–27, 42–43, 104, 117. See also marginalized groups surplus (capitalism), 114–15, 127, 134, 174 symbolic capital, 81, 83, 92, 162 symbolic objects. See artifacts teacher training. See training, faculty Téllez, Magaldy, 167, 168 term limits, presidential. See Enmienda campaign training, faculty, 68, 77–80, 89–90, 93–95, 98–99, 105–6 Turner, Victor, 23, 73, 86 two-tier higher education system, 8–9, 41, 45, 57, 68, 161, 173. See also parallel structures UBV (Bolivarian University of Venezuela), 9–12, 64–65, 167–68; accreditation, 9, 41, 65, 68, 121, 161; aldeas universitarias (local classrooms), 7–12, 69, 121, 142, 147, 161–62; as alternative university, 10–11, 135, 161–62, 167–68; archives and records, 31, 41; and Bolivarian process, 9, 64–65, 131, 132; budget, 142, 147, 150, 161; buildings and campuses, 7, 9, 64–65; elevators, malfunctioning, 35–36; facilities and services, 135–36, 146; governance and regulations, 139, 146–48, 151;

inclusive education, 11–12; involvement in Enmienda campaign, 21–22; and labor market, 68, 123–25, 126–27, 134; relationship with UCV, 64, 90–92, 96, 121, 142, 146; student stipends and (self-)funding, 12, 121, 136 UCV (Central University of Venezuela): relationship with UBV, 64, 90–92, 96, 121, 142, 146; student protests, 47, 56, 62, 144–46 Unión de Reforma Democrática (URD), 56 United States, 8, 18–19, 44, 51, 70–71 Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela. See UBV universities: autonomous, 8, 64, 67, 70, 144; Bolivarian University of Venezuela (see UBV); Central University of Venezuela (see UCV); experimental, 57, 59, 63, 67, 69, 74; Latin American public, 51; Open University, 59, 169; rankings, 2, 58, 84, 100–101, 105–6; student enrolment, 66, 67; Utopia, 59, 62. See also higher education university, alternative. See alternative university university autonomy. See academic autonomy university reform. See higher education reform UTAL (University of Workers of Latin America), 77, 98 utopia (social project), 19, 20, 170, 176 Utopia (student movement), 59, 62 Venezuela: economy, 8, 42, 58–59, 114, 134, 144; history, 41–42, 56, 57–59, 73, 75, 172; liberal democracy period (Fourth Republic), 48, 78, 87, 93–94, 137; oil industry, 8, 40, 57–58, 64–65; as subaltern state, 27, 43 Venezuelan Petrol. See PDVSA voceros/voceras (spokespeople), 118, 128, 141 welfare redistribution, 7, 42–43, 113, 120, 162–63 welfare, social, 26, 114–15, 162, 165–66 Wilde, Matt, 112, 128 women: community organizers, 81, 112, 115–16, 125–26, 128–31, 133; as embodiment of Bolivarian state, 130, 133, 163; social reproduction labor, 116, 131–32 working classes, 17, 90–91, 102–3, 127, 134, 171 Žižek, Slavoj, 176

Anthropology of Policy

Cris Shore and Susan Wright, editors

ADVISORY BOARD

Laura Bear, Donald Brenneis, Janine Wedel, Dvora Yanow Village Gone Viral: Hidden Dimensions of Traveling Policy Models Marit Tolo Østebø 2020 Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention Tess Lea 2020 The Gray Zone: Sovereignty, Human Smuggling, and Undercover Police Investigation in Europe Gregory Feldman 2018 Law Mart: Justice, Access, and For-Profit Law Schools Riaz Tejani 2017 One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health Susanna Trnka 2017 The Orderly Entrepreneur: Youth, Education, and Governance in Rwanda Catherine A. Honeyman 2016 Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth Reva Jaffe-Walter 2016 Fragile Elite: The Dilemmas of China’s Top University Students Susanne Bregnbaek 2016

Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt along a South Asian River Laura Bear 2015 Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymaking in Colombia Winifred Tate 2015