On December 13 Ecuador’s National Assembly passed a law compromising the independence of its public universities. The mandate, in this small country, where everything is personal, is aimed specifically at the two institutions of higher learning that offer only post-graduate degrees: Andina University and the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, aka FLACSO.
The new law relieves those universities of critical financial decisions, ceding that power to the National Secretariat of Higher Education, Science and Technology. Instead of university faculty and administrators choosing how best to allocate funds for research and student aid, those decisions will be left to ministry bureaucrats.
This anti-democratic stealth edict, inserted as articles into an unrelated law and passed with no public discussion, is a recipe for misbegotten political correctness and intellectual mediocrity. Though the Correa government has made huge investments in higher education, this law is only its most recent regulation aimed at controlling those investments by disabling university autonomy. Above all, it is a move by Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa to consolidate his power.
FLACSO was founded in the mid-1950s by UNESCO as a consortium of post-graduate universities in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries. FLACSO’s Ecuador campus seeks to produce rigorous social science research to promote justice, equality and social inclusion. The university’s…