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Over the last few decades, 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.
Through participant observation, extensive interviews with policymakers, senior managers, academics, and students, as well as in-depth archival inquiry, Mariya Ivancheva historicizes 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.
This book offers a serious contribution to debates on the future of the university and the role of the state in the era of neoliberal globalization, and outlines lessons for policymakers and educators who aspire to develop higher education alternatives.
"The Alternative University underscores the way that the neoliberalization and marketisation of higher education is a truly global process. This extremely powerful and ethnographically documented account of the inner workings of an alternative university poses some searching questions about university autonomy, the historical role of student movements, and the subsequent role of leaders of those movements in both the academy and politics." —John Gledhill, University of Manchester
"[The Alternative University] moves beyond a purely normative discussion (how should we envision the alternative university?) to provide insights from a vivid account of a real transformation process of the Venezuelan university within the context of the Bolivarian political upheaval." —Evandro Coggo Cristofoletti, Higher Education
"The Alternative University offers enticing glimpses into what higher education policy can be in a society whose political rules have been altered by mass action." —Aaron Kappeler, Focaal
"Ivancheva weaves a beautiful story told from below, among ordinary Venezuelans from a variety of social and educational backgrounds, all attempting to steer higher education into the service of the people, or the 'logic of social relevance', as she puts it." —Rowan Lubbock, Alternautas
"This fascinating volume is definitely worth a careful study by scholars and political activists interested in learning about one of the major reform efforts undertaken in Venezuela following the Bolivarian revolution led by Hugo Chávez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)." —Mark Ginsburg, Education Review
"It is impossible to do justice here to the depth of this ethnography but suffice to say it expertly draws out the dilemmas faced by everyday social actors within an ambitious but flawed experiment in alternative education. The broader political and policy inferences, which emerge in this compellingly written book, are informed by Ivancheva's positionality as an interdisciplinary Marxist scholar-activist who has researched and campaigned against neoliberal reform of higher education and the precaritization of the anthropological profession, while spending many years herself in a now all-to-normalized period of exploitative temporary employment." —Matthew Doyle, Social Anthropology
2. The Rise and Fall of Academic Autonomy: The University as a Historic Battlefield
3. Evaluation Matters: Teachers' Training at an Alternative University
4. The Children of the Revolution and the Matrisociality of the Benevolent State
5. Generation(s) of Protests at a Revolutionary University
Conclusion
Epilogue: De(colonial) Silences in the Hierarchy of Global Knowledge Production