The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela

By Mariya P. Ivancheva

Over the last few decades, the decline of the public university has dramatically increased under intensified commercialization and privatization, with market-driven restructurings leading to the deterioration of working and learning conditions. A growing reserve army of scholars and students, who enter precarious learning, teaching, and research arrangements, have joined recent waves of public unrest in both developed and developing countries to advocate for reforms to higher education. Yet even the most visible campaigns have rarely put forward any proposals for an alternative institutional organization. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, The Alternative University outlines the origins and day-to-day functioning of the colossal effort of late President Hugo Chávez's government to create a university that challenged national and global higher education norms.

Through participant observation, extensive interviews with policymakers, senior managers, academics, and students, as well as in-depth archival inquiry, Mariya Ivancheva historicizes the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), the vanguard institution of the higher education reform, and examines the complex and often contradictory and quixotic visions, policies, and practices that turn the alternative university model into a lived reality.

This book offers a serious contribution to debates on the future of the university and the role of the state in the era of neoliberal globalization, and outlines lessons for policymakers and educators who aspire to develop higher education alternatives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503636026

Book preview

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

Anthropology of Policy

Cris Shore and Susan Wright, editors

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy

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

3. Evaluation Matters: Teachers’ Training at an Alternative University

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

5. Generation(s) of Protests at a Revolutionary University

Conclusion

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

References

Index

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 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, unconditionally 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.

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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