translated from Spanish: Democratization of public universities

The uncertain return to higher education classes by 2021, as well as the drastic budget reductions in STUDY houses related to CRUCH, update a sensitive and relevant debate around the structures of these institutions. When we are ad portas of statutory change in most state universities, where their communities will decide whether or not to give officials, students and teachers the right to vote per hour, beyond the percentages they have for each state, what remains pending is the commitment to deeper cultural change, which is to effectively incorporate them into decision-making processes leadership, management and monitoring.
It is not only a question of obtaining the right to vote, it is also about respecting their right to voice, sharing experiences born from different roles within the same organization, recognizing and integrating diversity; in other words, to participate from a dimension other than the strictly electoral. That is what has been expressed on the streets, and universities cannot be walls of containment of these legitimate and expected social changes.
This change has been mandated by Law 21.094 on State Universities, which obliges higher education institutions to amend their Statutes, with the exception of those that had done so after March 11, 1990. For more than 30 years dictatorial heritage has remained moderately unsompted in the organization and operation of our study houses. With all the limits contained in this law, it nevertheless offers a more advanced governance framework than the one that currently governs us, because it challenges that the creation of scientific, humanistic and artistic knowledge should aim to “contribute to the strengthening of democracy, the sustainable and integral development of the country and the progress of society in the various areas of knowledge and domains of culture” (art. 1).
Tremendous challenge, because enacted in 2018, this law could not foreshadow the social outburst of October 18 or anticipate demand for better forms of participation that are required in today’s Chile. It is important to remember that this law originated from numerous demands, mainly student, but also many of them multisectoral, which since before 2006 encouraged numerous mass marches, which populated the streets of Chile with slogans of democratization of all the strongly hierarchical and vertical structures corresponding, by the way, to the enclaves of our ignominious dictatorial and conservative past.
Law 21.094 became a kind of corollary that responded to these social demands and that opened up the challenge of transforming organic statutes to collect the guidelines that the law requires, in its form and content. University communities can tend to collaboration and not competition. It is about building a culture of participation, collaborative and permanent, that allows to generate integral well-being in all its members.
Times force dialogues that once seemed impossible, without seeing faces (in person), and with fewer resources than before, public universities are confronted with reacting to an imminent process of democratization. The first thing will be to make an effort to discard the anquiloid political practices, underpinned by fear, clientelism and lack of transparency. These challenges do not require only the fact of accepting the letter of a law: it requires first and foremost conviction, conviction, ethics, consequence, will and, of course, commitment.

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Original source in Spanish