Students Movements in Chile: Alternative Possibilities for Higher Education?

• In Event: 63.033 - Reimagining the Modern/Colonial University: Toward Alternative Horizons of Higher Education Otherwise

Abstract

The 2011 student movements in Chile emerged in response to high levels of student debt and the overall privatization of higher education, and was led by students enrolled at traditional universities, organized in the Confederation of Chilean Universities (CONFECH) (Donoso, 2017). Among their many demands, this movement asked the Chilean State to treat education as a public good, demanding free tuition for all. They demanded that the mechanisms of access to universities, today ruled by standardized tests, also be diversified, with the final goal of diversifying the sociodemographic profile of students at these selective universities. In addition, the activists demanded that students and professional staff would be guaranteed the right to participate in the government body, and have a voice in the institutions that they worked and studied within (Fleet, 2011).

While these demands predominantly called into question the effects of the neoliberal/capitalist system within the higher educational sector, they did not touch upon the other violences underlying these patterns of colonial power (Quijano, 2000; Grosfoguel, 2016). For instance, the movement’s main lemma -free and quality education for all- had a beneficiary subject in mind, whose conditions of exclusion were predominantly by social class of origin (Fleet, 2011). Race, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, or migratory conditions were not part of this imaginary of “exclusion”. This oversight speaks to the marginalization of such groups within Chile’s higher education system, as they were invisibilized within this movement. Perhaps more relevant, this movement did not question the geopolitics of knowledge underlying this structure of higher education.

In March of 2018, a new movement exploded in Chile, as female students in public research-intensive universities denounced the prevalence of sexual violence on their campuses, particularly from their professors. University leaders neglected to respond to their denouncements, but the movement continues today. In contrast to the activism of 2011, this movement has generated alternative institutional platforms to the Confederation of Chilean Universities (CONFECH), which female student leaders have described as reflective of systemic patriarchy in Chile (COFEU, nd). Among its many demands, this new movement envisions the creation of non-sexist curriculum in high schools and universities that explicitly makes visible how gender violence has been internalized in Chilean society. Its final goal is to end “patriarchal violence”.

In this paper, I begin with the premise that the Chilean higher education system is rooted in colonial relationships of power that primarily have privileged western ways of knowledge, and have excluded both indigenous knowledges and bodies from higher education. I use de-colonial (Grosfoguel, 2016; Quijano, 2000) and communitarian feminist lenses (Paredes, 2014) to analyze the demands of the two largest Chilean student movements in the last decade, in terms of the opportunities they offer for thinking about transformation within higher education. I ask, to what extent do the various demands draw alternative possibilities to the relationships and conditions existing in the Chilean higher education system today?

Author

• Roxana Chiappa, University of Washington - Seattle