Summit meeting between university presidents and students: CRUCH and CONFECH reaffirm common themes for 2012

17/04/2012
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The CRUCH executive committee and the CONFECH executive board, in their first official working meeting, established an agenda for 2012 where they continue to agree on the issues of admission, financing, quality and democratization.

At the meeting, both parties committed to maintaining a permanent dialogue in order to achieve the objectives that will lead to concrete changes in Higher Education.

In what would be the first meeting of the year to establish a work agenda, the executive committee of the Council of Rectors (CRUCH) and the executive board of the Confederation of Chilean Students (CONFECH) reviewed the past year, reaffirming their shared priorities for 2012 on key issues such as admissions, funding, quality assurance and control, and the democratization of universities. They also agreed to maintain joint efforts through monthly meetings.

Noam Titelman, president of the Catholic University Student Federation (FEUC), addressed the successes and failures of the relationship between CONFECH and CRUCH during 2011, emphasizing the importance of learning from the experience. “One of the mistakes was the distancing between CONFECH and CRUCH, which should not happen again, because beyond the turbulence, the objectives must always remain the same,” he stated.

Without repeating last year's scenario, the goal is to maintain a collaborative framework on the aforementioned issues while keeping communication channels open between CONFECH and CRUCH. Echoing the sentiment of learning from last year's experience, Gabriel Boric, president of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile (FECH), assessed 2011 as a year without concrete results in this area. "It only deepened the existing model where universities were weakened by both public policy and student mobilizations," he added.

Both organizations were available at all times to hold working groups where the demands for a transformation in Higher Education could be specified.

Along these lines, the rector of the University of Valparaíso, Aldo Valle, emphasized the need to create common spaces. “We need to generate strategic convergence spaces with teams that function permanently and can channel the points of agreement between students and rectors into practice,” he pointed out.

In this regard, the executive vice president of CRUCH, Juan Manuel Zolezzi, indicated that the first step in fulfilling the demands of 2011 will be the issue of admission to Higher Education, where they will focus on reformulating the system in order to make it fairer and more equitable, inserting new selection mechanisms such as the ranking.

Furthermore, the leaders of the various student federations recalled other important points that need to be addressed, such as advancing interculturalism in the education system and deepening technical and professional training in universities.