This presentation gives a snapshot of my new book, The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela, Stanford University Press 2023.

The decline of the public university has dramatically increased under intensified commercialization and privatization, with market-driven restructurings leading to the deterioration of working and learning conditions. A growing reserve army of scholars and students, who enter precarious learning, teaching, and research arrangements, have joined recent waves of public unrest in both developed and developing countries to advocate for reforms to higher education. Yet even the most visible campaigns have rarely put forward any proposals for an alternative institutional organization. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, The Alternative University outlines the origins and day-to-day functioning of the colossal effort of late President Hugo Chávez's government to create a university that challenged national and global higher education norms. 

The book addresses the questions: What are the opportunities for and limitations to an alternative higher education project within the contradictions and confines of advanced capitalism? How are these reflected within a socialist state project in a semi-peripheral petrol state in the Global South and in which the government holds control neither of the balance of power in the bourgeois state subservient to market logic nor of the broader transnational processes of commercialization and stratification they reinforce? How do hierarchies typical of the higher education field and accelerated by processes of globalization manifest within an uneven national university field confronted with its internal gendered and racialized class dynamic? What are the ways in which such a process is experienced, negotiated, or challenged from within by academics and experts seen as proponents and class enemy of alternative education; and then by the poor, who are subject of its empowerment project?

To answer these questions, I examine the tension between enlightened and egalitarian tendencies in higher education, detailing processes that challenge or reinforce old and produce new inequalities. Instead of focusing on just one group, to depict the process in its full complex texture, I map the trajectories over time of the whole field with its various actors: experts, academics, staff, students, and community activists. I explore how existent and novel structural and symbolic hierarchies condition the relation of these different groups to each other and to the nation-state through its higher education policy. I show how the structural and agentive opportunities the new regime offers are limited by asymmetries of economic and symbolic power: ultimately, beyond certain redistributive initiatives, the class power of old educated elites stays strong while the success of the socialist project rests on its ability to produce affective reality and mobilize the social reproduction labor of women in poor communities. The global field of higher education (Marginson 2008) and the labor market of a semi-peripheral petrol state, with their own logic, hierarchies, and norms, also limit Bolivarian higher education policies. The resistance of traditional academics to both the massification of elite public universities and the accreditation of the new programs of UBV also sabotages the alternative university project. However, in the book I also show some aspects that are less dependent on global and systemic constraints and more on path dependencies of the political culture of petrol states and past socialist experiments. Political opportunities are missed, and responsibility is diffused by tendencies to start from scratch and build new parallel institutions every time resistance appears, to treat expertise as contingent and replaceable, and to circumvent critical feedback from sympathizers. Together with the objective structural constraints, these tendencies have reinforced the precariousness of Bolivarian institutions and frustrated higher education’s opportunity to serve as a key tool for national and global social change.

In the book I historicize the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), the vanguard institution of the higher education reform, and examines the complex and often contradictory and quixotic visions, policies, and practices that turn the alternative university model into a lived reality. I do this through participant observation, extensive interviews with policymakers, senior managers, academics, and students, as well as in-depth archival work. Anthropology provides unique tools to explore the everyday reality of the institutionalization of an egalitarian policy that faces external challenge and internal critique. Using ethnographic writing, I work through the ways in which UBV’s senior managers, faculty, and students were negotiating the contradictions of the transition to a democratic socialism in their own work and life. Discussing some of these key contradictions, this book also offers possible clues to, if not fully fledged explanations of, some central internal advancements and limitations of Chavismo, which led to its current decline even before the early death of its leader and pushed many of my research participants to migrate in the 2010s. The book also engages with different debates and interdisciplinary fields regarding higher education from different perspectives. Chapter 1 is concerned with the built environment and the political and social texture of the state behind the higher education policy and can be of interest to scholars of the state and urban/political intersection. Chapter 2 sets the historical background and trajectory of the policy and the former student militants–turned–Bolivarian experts behind it; thus, it might appeal to historically oriented readers. Chapter 3 focuses on the tension of this latter group with the new Bolivarian educators: the old guard’s hidden privileges vis-à-vis newcomers to both the academic and radical community might be of interest to scholars of class and to higher education faculty under growing workloads and productivity pressures. Chapter 4 explores the way in which a weak revolutionary state inserts itself into poor communities through female brokers and thus can be of interest to feminist scholars and community organizers. Chapter 5 questions the opportunity openings and closures to internal critique to socialist regimes and thus speaks to scholars of social movement and radical politics.

The book develops three main lines of inquiry that are intricately connected but can also be read independently. I address the theory of the state behind the higher education policy and show a new version of the state operating behind the Bolivarian process. This benevolent state is not present through all-encompassing infrastructural intervention or surveillance and governance technologies (Scott 1998; Das and Poole 2004). Instead, it is omnipresent in the lives of poor communities through affective power of small objects and symbols; through the familiar bodies of local female organizers; and through the politics of fear that even this minimal presence can be easily reversed. The use of surficial rather than structural reforms, however, affects the very sources of political surplus: the Bolivarian process feeds on the unpaid or underpaid reproductive labor of women in poor communities and thus on a matrisocial kinship structure typical of poor communities prior to the Bolivarian government (Hurtado 1998). This structure is also reproduced in Bolivarian higher education: while (especially male) faculty members with traditional academic and radical credentials are championed by their students and colleagues and accreditation and promotion systems, the core legitimacy of UBV’s alternative status depends on work with poor communities brokered by (mostly female) organizers and students. In this, a radical “nobility” (Bourdieu 1998) of former student militants is seen as a key source of academic and political legitimacy for UBV. Yet neither students nor new faculty have had access to traditional higher education and student militancy. And while such contradictions reproduce the asymmetries within the Bolivarian higher education field, the politics of fear, deeply rooted in the historical suppression of the Left in Latin America, is also used to diffuse responsibility for deeper irreversible reforms and defy internal critique against the Bolivarian government or UBV’s senior management.

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