La Educación superior pública y los derechos de libertad ideológica

Abstract

The importance of this research on public higher education and the rights of ideological freedom lies in questioning the state and political involvement in public universities in Ecuador, as well as the transformations and control that the governments in power acquire over them once they take office. This gives rise to the inquiry into to what extent the political doctrines represented by each government have influenced the formation of the values and procedures of the third level educational apparatus and whether the actions derived from such inclinations have violated the freedom of ideology and, beyond that, whether higher education can truly be considered free of political and ideological doctrines. The research was carried out with a descriptive methodological approach, for which interviews were conducted with leaders of student associations in three public higher education institutions in Ecuador and also through surveys of students from the institutions, UTA, UNACH, UCE. Furthermore, this research aims to determine the impact of the political power of the government on the academic and ideological training of future Ecuadorian professionals through public higher education institutions. The research has shown that, despite the fact that there is no indoctrination as such in higher education institutions, there are isolated acts and procedures that denote micropoliticization and the institutions are vulnerable to intrusions of politics from political spaces outside the universities, and especially from the agenda of the current government with a political inclination towards left-wing ideologies. Influencing in this way the values with which they will end up achieving the exercise of their profession. Finally concluding that despite the above, there are no clear and explicit politicizations in the institutions studied, although there are behaviors that correspond to the ideology of government models with left-wing ideologies and the hierarchically superior figure of an authority can result in a potential threat to the ideological freedom of its administrators by exercising their ideology in a deliberate and imposing way.