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In the social context of the country, the Council of Rectors announced today that open dialogues will be held for citizens in its 29 universities, with the purpose of raising proposals to address social demands.
The CRUCH will also carry out internal work to improve social equity within its institutions and will review its undergraduate study plans, to strengthen training in Humanities and civic skills.
During the extraordinary session of the Council of Rectors, held this Wednesday, November 6 in Santiago, the role of CRUCH universities and their contribution to public deliberation in the current social context of the country, among other issues, was analyzed.
At the end of the meeting, the executive vice president of CRUCH, Aldo Valle, announced four main lines of work agreed upon by the plenary.
The first of these lines of work is the issuance of a public statement urging the authorities "who have powers from a constitutional point of view, with the best political will, hopefully put aside their differences and move forward in a constitutional agreement to pave a way out of this crisis.".
The also rector of the University of Valparaíso said that "this crisis represents enormous challenges as a country, beyond dwelling on the causes", so it requires "institutional solutions that allow reestablishing trust, public order, and institutionalism."
Along these lines, Valle stated that “the political system has the greatest responsibility, not those who are marching, not those who are in the streets, but those who, precisely by virtue of the current institutional framework, have the powers to carry out a reform to the constitution that allows us to open paths that lead us to a democratic solution, which guarantees the freedoms and rights of the people ”.
Call for citizen dialogues
The second course of action agreed by the rectors is to hold citizen dialogues in each of the regions of Chile, which will be convened by the 29 CRUCH universities. Although a date has not yet been set for its completion, these instances will be carried out in the short term.
“Our goal is for these dialogues to all take place on the same day and in the same format, so that we can reconcile common visions. These are citizen and civic dialogues; we want communities, organizations, and citizen representatives to meet at universities, putting all our universities at the service of a peaceful, constructive, urgent, and essential meeting for the country,” Valle explained.
The third line of action involves systematizing the dialogues in a document that will express proposals for the institutional crisis, that will gather a common voice from all the institutions that make up the Council of Rectors and that will be shared with the authorities and the public.
“We will work with the contributions and critical analyses we want to provide to the authorities, aiming, on the one hand, for better institutional development, so that the country can move towards having a political and institutional system that overcomes its current shortcomings,” stated the CRUCH representative. He added that “we will also address proposals and analyses to correct, in the economic and social spheres, those serious asymmetries that perpetuate an inequality that no one wants and that we have not yet been able to correct.”.
The fourth line of work defined by CRUCH will focus on reviewing the internal work of its universities.
Rector Valle stated that one of the objectives is to develop “internal proposals so that in our own communities we assume the commitment to achieve higher standards in responsibility and social equity.”.
On the other hand, “a proposal will also be raised to review our undergraduate study plans, to strengthen training in Humanities and civic virtues and skills, because we believe that a more enlightened citizenry and with capacities to understand the challenges that Chilean society has in these times, it is the most appropriate contribution that universities can make ”.
Other topics of the session
On the other hand, Aldo Valle referred to the resources earmarked for universities in the 2020 Budget Law project, which is being processed in Parliament.
The executive vice president of CRUCH explained that one of the agreements of the session was that “a set of observations and proposals will be presented that seek to improve the condition of the students who lose their Gratuity. This problem is not answered in this project and the situation of those who - having adhered to this policy in 2016, 2017 and 2018 - want to retroactively apply the penalty of loss of Gratuity is much worse, so that we will insist on Congress, before the mixed commission, to find a solution in this area ”.
Regarding the dates of the University Selection Tests (PSU), the plenary of rectors ratified the modification of dates for the taking announced last week, that is, for Monday 2 and Tuesday 3 December 2019.
It is worth remembering that these dates were agreed upon jointly by the Executive Committee of CRUCH, the Undersecretariat of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education and the Department of Educational Evaluation, Measurement and Registration (DEMRE) of the University of Chile.
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