The University

La Universidad Simon Bolivar (USB), founded in 1970, is a state school that is world renowned for its excellent science and engineering programs. I don’t think there are even any humanity programs at the undergraduate level. However, the graduate program in political science is well respected and supposedly quite good. Many Venezuelan politicians have passed through the program, including Hugo Chavez, who began a Masters in Political Science at USB in 1990 but never finished after being imprisoned for leading an abortive coup in 1992.

USB has a gorgeous green campus with plenty of open, inviting grassy spaces on which to sprawl out after a three hour discussion on participatory democracy or the particulars of the Bolivarian Revolution. Plenty of palm trees give the campus a tropical, relaxed feel, not exactly conducive to a rigorous study schedule. Out of the 12,424 students enrolled in the university, 9,524 are undergraduate students and 2,810 are graduate students. I’ve noticed that the government takes care of the students fairly well here. For one, food is subsidised. I pay a whooping 15 cents for a lunch consisting of soup, salad, a main dish, fruit, bread, and juice. Although extremely inefficient, transportation to and from the university is free. The down side is that I have to wait 30 minutes plus at the bus stop inhaling low emission standard exhaust from an endless line of bumper to bumper traffic. More often than not a sympathetic fellow student offers me a lift. Other times I walk and arrive before the bus does. Finally, the undergraduate students don’t pay tuition. Besides a $15 or so registration fee, university is free. What a bizarre but attractive concept.

I am enrolled in two graduate political science classes: Understanding the Bolivarian Revolution, a doctoral level class opened to masters students and Democracy, Society, and Citizen Participation in Venezuela: Student Movements, an undergraduate opened to masters students and supplemented with additional reading material and research projects. So far the classes aren’t as rigorous as I imagine graduate school in the US would be. The biggest challenge so far hasn’t been the quantity of reading but the fact that the reading is in Spanish, which will undoubtedly become easier as the year goes on.

Politically, USB identifies as an anti-government school. This is partly because the majority of students are middle to upper class and in Venezuela class and political affiliation are closely connected. However, it also probably has to do with the fact that Chavez has lost much of the initial support he enjoyed from the autonomous intellectual community. They say it's difficult to find an intellectual that supports Chavez, outside of the Bolivarian Universities. My professors seem to strive toward objectivity in the classroom, but everyone has their opinion and even they acknowledge that their biases will inevitably seep through any attempt at disinterested discourse.

But while the USB community is largely opposed to Chavez it should not automatically be associated with the “opposition,” that is, the opposition media and political parties. Although tempting at times, I am trying to avoid placing people into simplified political categories of either Chavista or Opposition. While it’s true that extreme political polarization exists here there’s also a political spectrum that tends to be overlooked. The student movement, for example, has proven to be less radical and more rational than the opposition media. The other day I met a student at USB who voted for one block of the constitutional reform and against the other (the reform was presented in two separate blocks). While perhaps rare, there are people here who recognize both the negative and the positive of the Chavez government.