Being from Chile myself, I was very interested in reading the article on the Chilean Winter published on Feb. 20. I must congratulate the authors for the thorough fieldwork that took place. It provides a fresh point of view in comparison to the traditional Chilean media, which covered most of the manifestations from the outside, treating them as you would expect any traditional media to treat them: focusing on violence and political background.
The Chilean Winter article states that the Chilean protests offer lessons to UC students. It is my opinion, that aside from the “big picture” goals of the protests – for example, education for all regardless of income – –the Chilean demonstrations should be seen as an example not to be followed, particularly for the U.S. education system. At the very least, some care should be taken regarding the way that demonstrations are organized.
There is no information provided in the Daily Bruin’s article to the reader regarding how these protests are managed within a campus. I did my undergraduate studies at the Universidad de Chile, and during my years there, the common practice for campus takeovers was a violent one.
Takeovers consisted of a dozen students entering university premises at night, chaining doors and displaying political messages from far-left movements.
During some years, particularly during the so-called Chilean Winter, the takeovers related to education policy demands instead of political messages. However, the modus operandi of the takeover remained the same.
There was no voting at all on most campuses before the initial takeover, and once the takeover was established, it was easy to bias future voting as most students were not present at the premises, which had been taken over by a small minority.
Other types of manifestations included stopping the campus from working at all, such as not allowing students to attend classes. In this case, a vote was generally announced a couple of weeks before, where the two choices were to either stop classes for all students indefinitely or to continue classes for all students.
The problem with this type of voting is that at some point the first choice would always win, due to external influences from other campuses or universities, unfair voting practices such as setting low quorums for the voting to be valid or assembly-based voting where dissident opinion was censored.
Moreover, once classes stopped, students were not allowed (by means of violence or threats to students or faculty) to attend regular campus activities, except for those committed to the manifestations. Every week after the original vote, another vote takes place to choose whether to continue with classes or not.
Once the campus is closed for traditional classes or activities, most of the students stay at home except for those that participate in manifestation-related activities. Due to the biased student mass present in campus the initial vote is normally upheld and the class hiatus continues. There is no provision for fair voting practices and no chance to vote remotely online. Sometimes you are only allowed to vote if you attend a three-hour assembly where the only means to be heard is through volume and exaltation.
There are some significant lessons that can be taken from the Chilean Winter, particularly that student organizations do have the possibility of changing unfair education policies. However, in Chile, one group of students can decide (either violently or disguised as a voting) whether another group has the right to attend class or not by taking over the campus or threatening students that want to attend the classes they signed up for. In the United States, where freedom of choice and respect for others are basic mottos, that kind of organization should be avoided.
Cortes is a doctoral student in civil engineering.
Do you seriously not understand what a strike is? Or a picket? Or an occupation? Or a takeover?
This is drivel. Universities aren’t privatized democratically, and what about the voices of those shut out of them too? Additionally, so many students in Chile are in their student unions (eg CONFECH) that support for these almost always union-organized or at least union-supported actions seems pretty implicit.
Not everyone may be down to risk their safety and freedom for a good public educational system, but that doesn’t mean that any of them should be trying to prevent those that do from doing it. Do you really think dealing with Pinochet would’ve been handled well if students had backed off a ton? I’m sure your milquetoast permitted rallies, which you could get everyone safely behind, would scare off a military dictator and the private interests the holdover of his regime has left in place to profit from destroying public higher ed. Oh no, pacifists chanting! So scary! Aaaahh! Let’s give away our power before they chant slightly louder, then get bored and go home!
Hi Baloney, regarding the student unions you would be surprised how low the voting turnout is during student union elections. In particular, for the University of Chile representatives, the voter turnout is always less than 40% of the global student population, with the winning candidates adding up to maybe 10-20% of the total voting. Are student unions representative of the global student composition ? No. Do student union leaders take this into consideration when taking action? No.
It isn’t a matter of preventing others to fight for what they think is right. Among the Chilean winter “student backed” petitions things like “free education” or “end of for-profit schools” where listed, and such petitions are pretty discussable in terms of what is right or wrong in terms of education policy. The democratically elected government didn’t agree with most of the petitions, why should it promote policies that aren’t backed up by any form of democratic or institutional background? There are political conglomerates in Chile that probably share most of the student demands…why haven’t those conglomerates been elected ?
Should I, as a student, give freedom to protest to anyone who thinks that HIS beliefs are the correct ones? Yes, of course, but it is totally out of place for that protester to dispose of my freedom and liberties because he thinks he is protesting for the right reasons.
So: we are born into a system that normalizes us to itself (with force, if necessary). It sets up how we live our lives, what our “productive” routine is, etc. And, within that, we have to get people thus fashioned to agree to go against what has become a part of themselves, without any form of disruption?
We are subjected to the anti-democratic whims of people that run universities like corporations, who often do so terribly. And we’re supposed to fight them, without any of their institutional power, in a way more hindered than their attacks are? Look, this might seem like a contradiction–that pro-democracy movements don’t have to be “democratic” in process–but the vast majority of people under Hitler/Mussolini/etc did not support movements against that state of which they were a part. And yet if anyone seriously argued that disrupting the flow of those states was anti-democratic in any way, I’d just start laughing.
They (technocratic regimes like our Regents) shape people before those people give consent to be shaped in that way, so that by the time subjects choose whether or not to give consent it has been essentially pre-determined that they will give it. How is economic incentive (“I have to finish school so I’ll just grit my teeth and get on with it, otherwise I could lose even more money in the short term”), the threat of political persecution (“If I get involved in a strike I could get my head bashed in by their cops or receive fines of jail time”), or the inertia of non-normalcy (“It takes a lot more work to set up a just system then to just continue under an exploitative one that’s temporary for us”) the grounds for any sort of a “fair” election when it comes to strike-votes/etc?
If people are being pressured/designed to vote in certain ways en masse in every aspect of their lives, that’s a lot more anti-democratic than spectacular disruption/intervention. And anyway, voting is majoritarian authoritarianism when it’s reduced to a purely binary counting game in which people who don’t really care are weighed equally against those who really do (e.g. if someone who can afford the extra fees easily is given the same vote as someone who’d have to drop out if they were imposed). And again, what about all those who wish they were students but can’t be because of these fees, and so they can’t vote in something that has affected them hugely?
Remember, Pinochet–the military dictator–was deposed by what was, for a long time, a minority opinion movement in Chile. His famous vote (detailed wonderfully in the new Bernal movie “No”) was an attempt to show that he was democratic, by offering people the chance to vote “Yes” or “No” to keep him in power. Though that vote would clearly be tampered with to make it an apparent landslide, before the opposition really revved up Pinochet was still–according to many independent polls–likely to win the “election.” And yet, clearly, Pinochet was no democratic figure.
Think twice before you disparage the sacrifices of those who, a generation ago, fought to free you from fascism.
As a broader example, consider this: the American Revolution, considered by many Americans to be a fundamentally good, pro-democracy thing (I have some reservations with its bourgeois/colonial aims/results even given the era it came from), had less than 5% of the “American” population participate in it to any degree whatsoever. In fact, while it was starting, there was very strong opposition to it, a strong majority in several states. So, would you disagree with deposing a king and setting up the semblance of a (flawed, but at least not monarchical) republic, just because about as many supported the king as didn’t, the majority were opposed to revolution (as a disruption not worthy of any political merits it might have), and the vast majority did not participate?
And make no mistake–this university governance system is intensely similar to a pre-Magna Carta monarchy, in that there is no semblance of a democratic process, it is incredibly caste-based (students below grad students below the professoriat below the managers), and taxes (fees) can be raised at whim by the elites without any form of consent involved.