We are fighting for public, free and quality education
By Impulso Socialista in the International Socialist League
Victories have been achieved in some national universities in regards to access through the matriculation zero during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to the efforts of our comrades that by risking their integrity they pressured the local, departmental and national government. We support the efforts of the student’s movement and invite the social movement in general to further the struggle for free education. More than impossible, it is necessary to raise this slogan in times of crisis, as it will allow us to leave the narrow horizon we have been subjected to by the traditional leaders, who by not trusting the strength of the movement end up surrendering our flags to the governments in office.
The lack of funding of higher public education in Colombia is one of the issues that have been on the landscape of the struggle of the student and professor’s movement for more than 30 years. Those sectors have confronted the progressive privatization policies of higher public education. However, is in the year 2018 that the financial crisis worsened as a result of the budget deficit accumulation (15 trillion pesos), inheriting the limited financial structure of act 30 of 1992. This situation was unsustainable for the HEI, which on the one hand were forced to strengthen their self-financing policies (on average, 50% of the income of the HEI was generated through the sale of goods and services) and on the other hand, some of them were left on the verge of economic insolvency.
Under this scenario, the students together with the tier of professors of all the 63 Institutions of Higher Education raised one the most historically important situations crystalized in a National Strike that managed to maintain the boom of the mobilization for six consecutive months simultaneously with spaces of democratic decision and organization in different regions of the country. However, it is in the broad spaces of debate and deliberation where the student’s movement does not manage to transcend from the economic struggles and accepts the conditions of negotiation of the National Government, to which only the most institutional sector of the student’s movement can respond. That is how the massive student mobilization is fragmented and the flags that were initially built democratically and lifted for the student’s movement are reduced to a partial and gradual addition to the budgetary resources that in no way solve the budgetary crisis of the HEI.
One of the deepest mistakes of the student’s movement was to assume as a product of mobilization the “Table of Dialogue for the building of agreements for Higher Public Education”, as it ended up driving the students away in their political role creating delegations that, without the strength of the student’s struggle on the streets, lacked the offensive nature to demand a public, free and quality higher education.
Higher education during the pandemic
After the exponential spread of COVID-19 throughout Colombia, the Institutions of Higher Education have adopted online classes to carry out their academic activities and were forced to halt the missionary activities of extension and investigation, the financial muscle that contributes approximately 50% of the budgetary need, which are the main sources of self-financing, thus increasing the high financial deficit. On the other hand, the students of public HEI, who mostly belong to the socioeconomic tiers 0, 1, 2 and 3, will be the great sufferers as they lack the economic conditions and the technological tools to fully sustain and carry out their academic activities during the lockdown. It is worth highlighting that coverage and access to a broadband internet connection are still a privilege in Colombia, especially in rural areas, where coverage only reaches 10% and in some regions is non-existent. Now those who have guarantees will have to deal with the issues of speed and saturation of the net, since Colombia occupies the spot 114 globally in terms of broadband speed with 3.25 mbps, half the speed if we compare it to countries like Panama.
More ICETEX and more debt for the public HEI
The muscle of the policies implemented by Duque during the pandemic has been the financial sector. To expand their monopoly in the management of resources, the Solidary Fund for Education has been implemented through a decree and will be administered by the ICETEX, who is also in charge of executing the relief plan of ICETEX, an institution accused of capitalizing the interests of its “beneficiaries” that has been at the forefront of the privatization of Higher public education in Colombia. However, the package of neoliberal measures is completed with the addition of the special guarantee program “United for Colombia” which has 1.5 trillion pesos to pay the payroll with guarantee of the National Guarantee Fund, plus a Findeter credit line of up to 200 billion pesos to be used for incentives, scholarships and tuition discounts for students. However, according to the latest guidelines from the Ministry of Education, and in response to the demands of different sectors of the student’s movement, a contribution of 97.5 billion pesos was made through the Solidarity Fund for Education to be divided and administered by the Higher University System among the 34 public universities in the country.
This is nothing more than the now endless policy of financing on demand, where the national government provides solutions to problems through debt, when the task is to strengthen public institutions. Even worse, the HEI are forced to readjust their budget to avoid the dropout that will worsen their budget deficit by the end of 2020. It is crucial to know that a large part of the budget for University Welfare is collected through the enrollment of postgraduate programs, the demand of which has been significantly reduced, which again affects the budgetary adjustment of the HEI.
The ghost of the student’s movement faces the consequences of the pandemic
In the face of the worsening of the socioeconomic and academic conditions that are unsustainable for students, responses and proposals have emerged from different sectors of the student’s movement. Some traditional sectors of the student’s movement and the student’s representatives to the different collegiate bodies of the HEI have been coordinating with teachers’ and workers’ organizations to request, by means of requirements that are kind to the institution, the injection of additional resources during the health emergency that will allow, on the one hand, to correct the deficit of the HEI operation in 2020, and on the other hand, to guarantee matriculation zero for the 2020-2 academic semester, as well as reliefs for the beneficiaries of credits with ICETEX, including programs such as Ser Pilo Paga and Generación E.
This brings back and raises the debate that has divided the student’s struggle: the conception of the gradualness of the struggle to achieve the goals set by the movement. This vision, currently the prevailing one in the direction of the student’s movement, proposes that there is a temporality divided into short, medium and long term, where each temporary level is the level to access the next one. The problem with this method, as the period of struggle in 2018 showed, is that it postpones the struggle, fragments the movement and generates a space for the reproduction of bureaucracy, conforming to the interests that crystallize the country’s governments.
However, from the more alternative sectors of the student’s movement, spontaneous efforts have been made to fuel the force of mobilization with sit-ins, marches, hunger strikes and camps on university campuses, as the maximum expression of student indignation that not only addresses their particular situation, but also the universality of social problems that are becoming more acute thanks to the right-wing government of Duque. These last actions evoke the work and political role of the student who builds public higher education for society, who must not forget that the institutional and negotiation path only strengthens the neoliberal system that imposes progressive privatization policies on our alma mater.
For a public, free and quality Higher Education
We strongly reject the precarization of education as a right and of the state university system by the National Government, because it is clear that even when there are resources to increase the military forces, subsidize banks and large private companies (80 trillion allocated to the pandemic), ordinary Colombians are denied their most basic rights. That is why the struggle for student’s access to higher education during the health emergency is a minimum that we as a student movement must stand for, as well as demanding additions on a budgetary basis to all HEIs so that they can continue in their very important task of building society, a different and critical society. For this reason, we must strive for unity of action that will allow us to deliver a real blow to the government of Duque in the face of its advance against the public higher education system.
Likewise, in the face of the crisis of the capitalist system that has become deeper and will have overwhelming post-pandemic effects on the living conditions of the majority of the Colombian people, it is necessary to prepare to fight for a real solution to the problem of public higher education. Such preparation requires us to organize and articulate ourselves in the construction of a program of unity within the student movement that establishes the bases of the system of free, quality public higher education. In this way, the majority of the force must be directed through a call for free, quality public higher education, to bring the student’s movement back together, to take to the streets raising the historic flag of the student’s movement: a free, quality public higher education system, and thus finally tip the class struggle in our country in our favor.
‘Sometimes – history needs a push.’ Vladimir Lenin