The standoff between students and administrators is less a fight over money than a battle over the university’s–and the nation’s–ideological soul. UNAM, which has long embodied the egalitarian principles of the Mexican revolution, is the latest battleground in the government’s attempt to dismantle the welfare state. Charging tuition, government officials say, will help UNAM move into the modern world–and compete with private institutions that have undermined its dominance. To most students, however, social justice must come first. “Our taxes are going to save the rich,” says 28-year-old chemistry student Sergio Muniz, referring to the nation’s $65 billion bailout of the banking sector. “Why not raise taxes on the rich for the university?”
The campus, in fact, is deeply divided over the tuition increase. Many professors side with the administration, accepting its promise to let the poorest students attend for free. Many students, too, recognize the difficulty of sustaining UNAM’s $1 billion annual budget. “The university needs resources, so we should help pay,” says Cesar Flores, a 23-year-old law student who worries that the strike will delay his plans to attend graduate school this fall.
Behind the strike looms the question of whether Mexico’s most important university is producing the graduates the country needs. UNAM, which still has world-class researchers and the best medical school in the country, sits at the center of Mexico’s cultural and intellectual life. But students from private schools, which typically cost several thousand dollars a year, often have first dibs on the best jobs. Alfredo Sanchez, a ponytailed 23-year-old economics student who supports the strike, says he appreciates being able to study what he calls the “human side of economics,” but he laments that Marx won’t help him find work. “The private-school students have an advantage: training for jobs in big business,” he says. “We don’t fit that model.” Perhaps there’s an opening in Ho Chi Minh City.
