By Kathleen Bohné
Below you will find an excerpt from the July 3 edition of “La Semana” newsletter. To read more and subscribe, please visit www.themexpatriate.com.
“We state our deep concern for the state of higher education and scientific research in Mexico. We observe that in addition to structural problems suffered for many years, there is now the open persecution of faculty freedom, the proprietary use of university assets and research centers, the budgetary suffocation for political objectives, and in general, the prevalence of biased interests above educational ones.”
This is from a statement issued by students and faculty at the CIDE (Center for Research and Teaching in Economics) last month as part of their protests demanding the resignation of the head of the CONACYT (National Council for Science and Technology), as well as the CIDE’s current director, José Antonio Romero Telleache, whom they fear will dismantle their institution from the inside out. The protestors marched from Bellas Artes to the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City on June 4 and tried to deliver their statement directly to the president (unsuccessfully). In November last year, students staged a takeover of the campus to protest the appointment of Romero as director without adherence to the university’s bylaws. In September 2021, the FGR (Attorney General’s Office) tried to obtain warrants for the arrest of 31 scientific and academic researchers on charges including organized crime and embezzlement, which if carried out, would mean automatic pre-trial detention at a high security prison.
Suddenly all the outraged spats echoing through “ivory towers” and in Twitter threads in the U.S. seem somewhat staid in comparison. In an inversion of the “culture wars” waged up north, the epithet of “elitist” is directed here towards those perceived to be “empreacadémicos”—business-academics—hailing from the right side of the political spectrum, not the left. President López Obrador has repeatedly characterized the CIDE, which was founded as a public university in 1974, as hijacked by “neoliberals” with “retrograde” and “conservative” regulations that protect private interests at the expense of the public good.
“Without its own funding, the CIDE is doubly impacted by ‘national austerity’…17 million pesos are owed to around 100 people (academics and administrators) for work performed from 2019-2021,” laments a member of the faculty of the history department, Jean Meyer, in an article published by Letras Libres. “We couldn’t offer continuing education diplomas in the 2020-22 school year. Since December 2021, fifteen research professors have left to work at other institutions or abroad. Others will follow.”
Funding—the allotment, administration, or abuse of it—is the central conflict in this drama. According to the FGR, there has been systematic, nefarious misuse of public monies through a civil association (AC) created in 2002, the Foro Consultivo Científico y Tecnológico (FORO) which received funding on behalf of the CONACYT. While the attorney general’s office has failed to convince a judge to issue warrants for the arrest of the 31 accused academics, the ethical use of public funds has been called into question by others too. In an investigative report published by Poder LATAM called “The Science Mafia” in 2020, the journalist Ricardo Balderas exposed inappropriate personal expenses and high salaries earned by “prestigious academics [who] have benefited personally from public funding for the development of science and technology in Mexico.”
On June 28, María Elena Álvarez-Buylla, director of the CONACYT, announced that grants would be restricted to subject areas deemed useful for the public sector, at the discretion of her agency and the Public Education Department (SEP). In this sexenio, funding for research in the sciences and humanities has dropped by 56%. The biologist, who was appointed by AMLO in 2018, has told students at the CIDE that they are “opposing the transformation of Mexico”. AMLO’s suspicious view of universities is nothing new: “A close reading of his speeches since 2018 shows he considers them to be the principal architects and beneficiaries of the neoliberal economic reforms enacted by governments since 1982,” explains Catherine Andrews, a faculty member of CIDE who was laid off in the recent “purges” of the faculty. “For López Obrador, academic life is one of undeserved privileges, huge financial rewards (gained from working on projects for private companies), and little relevant service to the public good.”
The jumble of biased interests in this feud is hard to untangle—the accusers have also been accused of taking advantage of their positions for personal gain. The attorney general, Alejandro Gertz Manero, had previously been rejected five times in his attempts to obtain the status of “Level III” in the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (National System of Researchers) of CONACYT, but after eleven years of attempts, in June 2021, his application was approved.
“Everyone has taken a position, few have a thorough understanding of the problem and each side wants their position to win since it’s become an issue of prestige,” notes José Ramón Cosío, academic and associate justice of the Supreme Court of Mexico. The bid of the cuarta transformación against higher education institutions has cost AMLO popularity amongst a particular demographic: according to one poll, 65% of people with a college degree surveyed in February 2019 approved of the president, and by November 2021, that percentage had dropped to only 8%.
As described in an essay written by professor Ernesto Mendoza: “What the promoters of the ‘4T’ seek is the over-simplification that makes it legitimate to attack anyone who is critical or opposes their program; without accounting for the vast differences amongst them or the diversity of their causes (feminists, human rights defenders, journalists, critics of militarization, indigenous rights defenders, communities opposed to mega-projects, and defenders of critical thinking), all of them are ‘neoliberals.’”
It is hard to ignore the glint of irony: a government that purports to represent the will of the people against corruption is intent on prosecuting academics while violent crimes go unpunished in 94% of cases, and appears to abdicate responsibility to pursue justice.
