This blog has chronicled the reduction of higher education to indoctrination in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. The latest development: State seizure of private universities.
Chavez sent a message via his Twitter account to students of privately funded Santa Ines University, letting them know their school was being taken over by the government and tuition will be free.
“Students of Santa Ines University, I just approved a nationalization plan for the good of everyone. Now: FREE!” beamed Chavez last week on the microblogging website, which he uses frequently after having set up an account last month.
University officials weren’t available to comment on the charges, but students said the government’s reasons for taking it over were just an excuse to tighten its grip on the country’s education system.
“This is the worst of many bad moves by Chavez,” Carlos Chavez, a leader of the university’s 3,000-strong student body and who is not related to his president, told Dow Jones Newswires. “He’s going to impose his revolutionary, Marxist, socialist agenda on us students, and he’ll kick out good professors who allow us to study capitalism.”
The nationalization of the school was made official Monday, when the government’s newspaper of record, the Official Gazette, announced the “forced acquisition” of Santa Ines, and said it has been renamed Jose Felix Ribas University, in honor of a Venezuelan independence hero.
May 19th, 2010 at 7:11AM
I suggest that we arrange a trade for Carlos Chavez. We get him, and Hugo Chavez gets Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner and six Deputy Assistant Secretaries of State to be named at a later date.
January 6th, 2011 at 8:11PM
[…] on Venezuela’s universities. His various attempts to take them over have generated immense student protest; and now, with opposition to his government growing, […]