Chapter 4

Neoliberal discourses and the

emergence of an agentic field
The Chilean student movement
Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela

Introduction
The year 2011 was a milestone in the story of the higher education system in
Chile. In that year, dozens of university student protests took place, and students
were joined by several other sectors of wider society, around an agenda of free
access to the university and an education of quality for everyone (Espinoza and
González, 2012). These protests involved a variety of creative demonstrations in
public spaces – with thousands in the street including flash-mobs, races, and dancing
(Bellei et al., 2014), as well as the occupation of university premises for long periods
of time. The larger protests were violently repressed by the police, resulting in a
decline in the popularity of the incumbent government at the time as well as the
removal of several ministers of education. These protests received considerable
attention from both national and international mass media (Scorpio, 2013) and
the period became known as the ‘Chilean winter’ (Sehnbruch and Donoso, 2011)
since the protests mainly took place during wintertime.
In order to understand why these protests flourished at that particular moment,
this chapter firstly describes the historical context of the country and the policies that led
to a particularly agitated moment. Broadly, the key elements were the policies that
allowed the empowerment and growth of the private sector, and a reduced role for the
state, two main features of neoliberal economic policies (Peters, 2011) that had been
imposed by Pinochet’s military dictatorship (from 1973 to 1990). These policies
became a kind of legacy for subsequent democratic governments in Chile which, even
once the dictatorship had ended, were reproduced and reinforced for more than two
decades. Consequently, the implementation of neoliberal policies transformed the
landscape of the country and was progressively accepted without almost any kind of
resistance from citizens. A neoliberal ideology was naturalized to the extent that it per-
meated not only the higher education system but the ethos of the country as a whole.
This chapter also analyses spaces of interaction between agents (university students)
and neoliberal structures (Archer, 1995) that have been present in Chile for the
last 30 years. These structures have underpinned public policies and conditioned
the social project of the country. Specifically, this chapter draws attention to the
role of resistance to these ideologies by university students, who have also drawn
48 Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela

support from wider society. This resistance process led by students resulted, for
the first time, in a public problematization of current policies and, subsequently,
led to the proposal of new policies intended to change the state of society. Finally,
this chapter suggests that the Chilean student movement should be analyzed as an
agentic field that is helping to transform society.

Coup d’état in Chile: principles that ruled the country from

1973 onwards
After a coup d’état by the Chilean army in 1973 and the installation of a
dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet, Chilean history inevitably changed. The
democratic system – whose roots went back to the 19th century – was ended and
a new government was imposed, with the support of some sectors of society,
alongside a new political and economic agenda. This new agenda, implemented
between 1973 and 1990, and reinforced through the adoption of the Chilean formal
Constitution in 1980 (which is still in force), helped to create the current political
and economic system.
In the middle of an economic crisis, and in an attempt to extinguish the Marxist
principles that had been promoted by the former president, Salvador Allende, in
the 1970s, Pinochet’s government introduced wide-ranging social reforms. Its
policies were inspired by neoliberal principles originating in the Chicago School of
Economics1 (Taylor, 2006). Briefly, these principles consisted of both the
strengthening of the private sector and the cutting of government spending in
order to reduce the fiscal deficit and control inflation. The implementation of
these two principles changed the entire country, impacting particularly on welfare
provision including health, education, and pensions. Subsequently, the private sector
created numerous companies and enterprises that took control of these services. As
a consequence, welfare provision weakened, becoming a system focused primarily
on the lower social classes, who were not able to afford private fees.

The dismantling of the public university and the privatization

of the higher education system
During the dictatorship, the regime was sensitive to the development of critical
ideas that might destabilize the government by social institutions and civic associa-
tions, among them universities (Garretón, 2005).2 In order to weaken academic
organizations and students’ unions, the Pinochet regime acted, firstly by using
force and repression against universities – for example, closing some state universities,
dismantling the University of Chile by dividing it into several branches, allocating
members of the military government to serve on university boards or in key roles
of senior university management (Garretón, 2005), and suppressing students’
union activities (Bellei et al., 2014). In a second stage, the military government
enacted several official decrees (Bernasconi, 2003) that promoted the creation of
new private universities without the establishment of any kind of regulation or
 Neoliberal discourses and Chilean students 49

quality assurance system (Brunner, 1997).3 The only regulation that governed
their activities was a prohibition on these new universities becoming for-profit
institutions (this element is important in order to understand the student protest
movement in 2011 and I will return to it later).
After the creation of some private universities in the 1980s and others in the
1990s, the total number of universities (private and state) grew to around 60 by
2015. The number of private universities became far larger than the number of
state universities, with less than 20 per cent of students studying in state institutions
(CNED, 2013). Most of these new private universities are non-selective (either
because they do not take into account students’ performance in the national
entrance examination or because they accept students with low scores obtained in
that test). A few of these new private universities are very expensive and elitist in
the sense of being oriented towards the richest families of the country, while the
rest are conceived as mass-oriented institutions. Students who enroll in these latter
universities typically fail to obtain high scores in the entrance examination test and
usually belong to low-income families (who cannot afford to pay for a better
private secondary education for their children). The explosion of private universities
has led to a massified university system and enhanced, to some extent, widening
participation – by allowing first-generation students to attend universities,4
although at a high cost for their families.
An element to be considered here is the legal definition of universities as non-
profit institutions. As mentioned above, according to the legal system in Chile,
universities are prohibited from making a profit. The legal principle is that all
earnings obtained by universities should be invested in the universities themselves.
Nevertheless, in recent years, illegal actions taken by the owners of some private
universities were uncovered (Mönckeberg, 2013). For example, some of the
owners of these private universities, who were often linked to firms in the building
industry, paid high prices to rent premises for educational purposes that they
themselves owned. They were thus effectively paying themselves. It was also dis-
covered that some of these universities paid money for consultancy to members of
their own governing boards. In this way, owners of private universities were
obtaining profit indirectly, a matter that was not subject to legal penalty.
At the same time, in 2013, it was discovered that some private universities
which belong to the Laureate group – an international group that owns the three
largest Chilean universities and two professional institutes and that has oversight of
a large number of higher education students (around 100,000) – transferred mil-
lions of dollars to foreign enterprises linked to this group instead of investing the
money in their Chilean institutions (El Mostrador, 2013). In response to these
discoveries, students protested and were able to paralyze academic activities.5

The curtailment of the role of the state

During the dictatorship, a general shrinking of the role of the state took place. In
higher education, this reduction manifested itself through the sudden decrease of
50 Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela

direct public funds for universities, as a result of passing on the burden of the cost
of the fees to students, and an unwillingness to create a proper national quality
framework for higher education until 2006.6
Through the first mechanism, the decrease in public funds, traditional universities
that had historically been subsidized by the state under a means-tested fee scheme
that allowed students from lower classes to study free of charge saw the proportion
of their income that was directly funded by the state reduced from 41 per cent to
15 per cent (Arriagada, 1989; Contraloría General de la República, 2012).7 At the
same time, a system was created through which universities were able to obtain more
state income through their capacities to attract students with the highest scores in
the entrance examination test. This is called ‘indirect fiscal funding’ and is open to
both state and private universities. Over the years, the two most prestigious and
selective universities in Chile – the University of Chile (a state university) and the
Pontifical Catholic University (a private university) – received the biggest portion of
these state resources, leaving the rest of the state universities in a vulnerable position.
In 1981, a loan system supported by the state for students of the 25 traditional
universities (both state and private) was created to cover entrance fees, while students
of new private universities (created after 1981) had to pay from their own pockets.
This situation remained until 2005 when the government established a new loan
system that benefited students from new private universities and was controlled by
external financial companies that charged high interest rates to students (a situation
that was modified after student protests in 2011 so that interest rates for loans granted
to students of both traditional and non-traditional universities are now similar).
The second mechanism was the lack of regulation, through the failure to establish a
proper quality assurance system. Only in 2006 (16 years after the resumption of
democracy) was an accreditation system implemented for both individual under-
graduate and postgraduate programmes as well as for universities as institutions. The
establishment of this system – compulsory for traditional universities but optional for
private universities – is also key to understanding the Chilean student protests for
two reasons. Firstly, through this system, universities were evaluated with respect
to their ability to offer a high-quality education. However, as accreditation is not
compulsory, private universities that decided not to put themselves forward for
this were not regulated by any kind of external organization. Secondly, because
the achievement of the status of ‘accredited university’ allows the institution to
apply for public funds, accredited new private universities are also able to receive
public funds. The way the system of accreditation has worked over the years has
become a matter of controversy and turned into a matter of public concern. New
private universities needed to obtain the quality seal of the accreditation system in
order to secure additional money from the state, and national scandals ensued when
it was discovered that some of these universities literally paid members of the
accreditation committee to secure the necessary approval (Mönckeberg, 2013).
The combination of these factors, namely, the reduction of public funds to
universities and the inability of the state to regulate the quality of educational
services, plus the confirmation that some new private universities were making
 Neoliberal discourses and Chilean students 51

profits, caused unrest among students. In the following section, I will discuss
other factors that explain why student protest erupted in 2011 and not earlier.

The return of democracy in Chile: more of the same?

The two first democratic governments after Pinochet’s regime (1990–2000) (see
Table 4.1, which provides a synopsis of the Chilean governments after the dictator-
ship) were conceived as transitional governments with presidents belonging to
centre-oriented parties; it was expected by citizens that neither of them would
implement large changes in a divided country composed of supporters and opponents
of Pinochet’s legacy.
There are several facts that might explain this. Firstly, Pinochet remained as
commander-in-chief of the army until 1998, a year in which he also became a
member of the Chilean parliament for life. During this period of time, his presence
and power were evident, and were reinforced by the immunity from prosecution
that he granted himself before leaving power. Therefore, no legal action was taken
against Pinochet in Chile. In 1998, a Spanish magistrate, Baltazar Garzón, indicted
Pinochet for human rights violations that ended with his detention in London.
Pinochet remained under arrest in that city until March 2000. Only after his
release in London did the Chilean judicial process begin; however, Pinochet died
in 2006 before he was brought to trial.
Between 2000 and 2010, two left-oriented presidents governed the country
and both caused great disappointment among citizens as they introduced few
changes to the economic model of the country – it thus remained pretty much as
it had been under Pinochet. Furthermore, public policies in general reinforced a
neoliberal model with little resistance from the population (Taylor, 2006). The
lack of regulation by the state and the growing privilege of wealthy groups, to the
detriment of more vulnerable sectors of the population, were especially evident in
both the health and the educational systems.8 Although higher education became
a high-participation system (Marginson, 2010), it is highly differentiated, comprising
not-for-profit elite/selective universities, not-for-profit non-selective universities,9
and several new private universities that are more focused on making profit than
delivering a quality education.

Table 4.1 Presidents of Chile after the military regime

1990–1994 1994–2000 2000–2006 2006–2010 2010–2014 2014–2018
Patricio Eduardo Ricardo Michelle Sebastián Michelle
Alwyn Frei Lagos Bachelet Piñera Bachelet
Member of Member of Member of the Member of the Right wing Member of
the centrist the centrist left wing party left wing party parties the left
party forming party forming forming the forming the coalition wing party
the coalition the coalition coalition coalition forming the
‘Concertación’ ‘Concertación’ ‘Concertación’ ‘Concertación’ coalition
‘Nueva
Mayoría’
52 Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela

During Bachelet’s first period as President, there was a first explosion of dis-
comfort from secondary school students. In 2006, the same year Pinochet died,
the so called ‘penguin movement’ – alluding to the traditional black uniform of
secondary students – went to the streets to claim free education, the elimination of
for-profit providers, and non-inclusive practices, as well as the defence of public
education (Bellei and Cabalin, 2013). These protests received wide coverage by
the mass media and led to the President’s announcement of several measures to
respond to the students’ demands. These measures were considered insufficient
but the movement lost force (Cabalin, 2012)10 without having an impact on
education policy. This absence of impact became evident after the release of a
report on the challenges to Chilean higher education (CAPESUP, 2008) prepared
by a group of experts in higher education (both politicians and academics) to
advise President Bachelet. This report was rejected by the students’ union federa-
tion as they considered it did not address the main challenges to the higher edu-
cation system and reinforced the predominant educational model based on a
subsidiary role of the state (CAPESUP, 2008).
A fall in Bachelet’s popularity cost the coalition ‘Concertación’ the next pre-
sidential election. In 2010, a new centre-right-oriented president, Sebastian
Piñera – a businessman who belonged to one of the richest families in South
America – was elected. Political opponents were vociferous in their rejection of
him since, to them, he represented the world of private enterprise that had been
growing in power for the last 30 years and was associated with the Pinochet
regime (Araya and Farías, 2014). During the first two years of his government,
Piñera tried to gain popularity by promising to respond to the people’s demands
in relation to higher education, among other things (Araya and Farías, 2014).
Nevertheless, several developments produced more discomfort among citizens.11
Specifically, in the higher education sector, the President promised several measures
in order to support students from low income classes but it was widely perceived
that these promises were not fulfilled (Espinoza and González, 2013). What is
more, policies implemented in higher education distributed public funds without
differentiation to both private and state universities, and reinforced a loan system
for students that bore a high rate of interest (Orellana, 2014).
The combination of the elements described above created a fertile ground for
student protests and helps to explain the students’ indignation and their motivation
in creating spaces for resistance. Nevertheless, the fact that this latent conflict took
so many years to emerge leads us to reflect on how historical processes work – in a
complex way in which several factors are involved – and how, over time, structures
and agents interact to produce changes.

The naturalization of the neoliberal discourse

A process of naturalization of a neoliberal discourse took place in Chile (Simbürger
and Donoso, forthcoming) as a result of the imposition and strengthening of neo-
liberal policies with respect to the provision of public services over a 30-year period,
 Neoliberal discourses and Chilean students 53

services that had previously been provided by the state. Such policies produced a
‘world of common sense’ (Bourdieu, 2007: 94) implemented according to ruling
class interests and accepted by the Chilean community (Gramsci, 1971). Common
sense includes ‘those things commonly known or even tacitly accepted within a
collectivity; it also includes the consensus of the community as articulated in a variety
of public discourses; and finally, it includes the sense of community that this
commonly shared sense of the world provides’ (Holton, 2000: 88). Common
sense is locally and historically constructed (Geertz, 1975).
In Chile, discourses around the public/private divide are blurred (Guzmán-
Valenzuela, 2016) and privatization processes tend to be justified by the
inefficiency of the state and its institutions and services. For example, the public
education system does not perform very well in national and international academic
tests (Bellei, 2013) and the national health system is not popular since it is
perceived that it does not offer high-quality provision (Aravena and Inostroza,
2015). Moreover, neither of these public services are comprised of appropriate
infrastructure and facilities.
The belief that the market can largely regulate itself, with minimal state steering,
has been broadly accepted by Chilean society. Furthermore, the generation of a
stratified society in which the gap between rich and poor grows over the years has
also been accepted as natural. In higher education, the idea of the ‘entrepreneurial
university’ (Clark, 1998; Etzkowitz, 2004; Slaughter and Leslie, 1997) guided by
principles of competition for public resources, rankings, income generation, students
as customers, and academic productivity has gained traction (Guzmán-Valenzuela
and Barnett, 2013a, 2013b; Guzmán-Valenzuela and Di Napoli, 2015).
The colonization of every sphere of a country by neoliberal discourses does not
necessarily imply a conscious following of the rules and ideologies imposed by the
military regime. In the first stage, this ideological colonization was imposed by
force and fear during the military dictatorship and citizens were not in a position
to resist. Over the years, however, this colonization was progressively naturalized
and reinforced through the implementation of public policies and the production
of legal devices (the formal constitution, for example) on the part of the government,
and intellectual devices (such as reports on the higher education system) created
and supported by what Joignant (2011) calls ‘technopols’, namely, social science
intellectuals who have occupied high-ranking political positions in Chile from
1990 onwards. Over the years, this neoliberal ideology was internalized by citizens,
constituting a ‘pre-given force’ (Massey, 2013: 15), i.e. markets came to be conceived
as natural. The neoliberal world became part of people’s common sense; it became
invisible and lacking in ‘objective intention’ (Bourdieu, 2007: 95) in Chilean society.
Nevertheless, since Pinochet’s death – which symbolized the fall of the personi-
fication of neoliberal models – students have been able to problematize the presence
of a system based on the commercialization of education. Fleet (2012) points out
that students involved in the 2011 protests were the first generation born ‘free’ of
dictatorship and, unlike their parents, they had no fear of becoming a political
force and rejecting policies that were affecting them directly. Students saw that
54 Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela

their obtaining a professional degree depended more on market forces and profit-
like behaviors than on a reliable education – neoliberal practices that had been
promoted and reinforced by the government and its public policies. Students came
together, organized themselves, and articulated a common understanding of their
concerns. They acted collectively and strategically, thus exercising their agentic
capacities (Archer, 1995, 2003, 2012) and struggling for what they considered a
right – to both a free and high-quality education.

Illuminating students’ resistance movement

There are other possible explanations of the factors that led students to express
their opposition to the imposition of a neoliberal model in higher education (apart
from the dissipation of fear of a dictator and what he symbolized). One of them is
the conception of Latin American history as built around permanent struggles and
revolutions. Over the years and after the foundation of the first universities in
Latin America in the 16th century, there have been a series of social movements
struggling against colonialism, oligarchy, and imperialism (Guzmán-Valenzuela
and Bernasconi, forthcoming) led by academics and/or students. All of them have
had in common a battle against hegemonic processes imposed by dominant
groups and ideologies (Dinerstein, 2014) originating within and outside the
region. The Chilean student movement, therefore, represented this Latin American
revolutionary legacy.
Chilean university students inherited a Latin American tradition of student
movements that goes back to the early 20th century (Arocena and Sutz, 2005;
Van Aken, 1971). These movements have transferred the ideals, values, duties,
and commitments of previous leaders of student protests to a new generation of
students. Historically, student movements were characterized by the development of
political ideas opposed to the predominance of certain groups of power (oligarchies)
and successfully fought to restore the autonomy of universities (Guzmán-Valenzuela
and Bernasconi, forthcoming). University students in Latin America, therefore, have
historically been active and successful in resisting dominant ideologies; the current
Chilean student movement is a continuation of this pattern. What is more, the
Chilean student movement has served as an example to other students in Colombia,
Brazil, and Mexico, who initiated their own protests against the privatization of the
higher education systems in their own countries.
Another aspect of the Chilean student movement of the 21st century that
deserves attention is the origins of the movement. Protests were initiated and
convened by students at the two most prestigious, selective, and oldest universities in
Chile (Universidad de Chile and Pontificia Universidad Católica). These universities
enjoy a higher status than other universities; they conduct most of the research in
Chile and their students obtain the highest scores in the national entrance examina-
tion test – something that might be interpreted in terms of higher cultural capital
(Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977)12 – and they also receive most of the available
public funds. In these universities, there are longer-standing traditional student
 Neoliberal discourses and Chilean students 55

unions that are much better organized than in the new private universities (indeed,
in some of the newer universities, student unions are not allowed) and they have a
protected place in the governance arrangements within these universities. Conse-
quently, students of these elite universities have felt, to some extent, more
empowered to articulate and lead a protest movement and have been able to
involve students of private universities, as an initial step, and other sectors of the
wider society subsequently.
Leaders of these two universities have been able to create and sustain a discourse
in Chilean society that has inspired new student protests. Although 2011 was a
milestone year for the student movement, new protests have taken place in each of
the following years. Slogans such as ‘an end to the commercialization of education’,
‘non-profit education’, ‘public education as a right’, ‘free and quality education for
everybody’, and so on, have become banners of the student movement and Chilean
society. As well as prompting a reform agenda that is currently being discussed in
parliament (Bernasconi, 2014), this movement has been able to legitimize itself by
placing several of its leaders in parliamentary seats (one of them is now leading the
parliamentary education committee).

Student movement as an agentic field

According to Bourdieu (1993), a field is a social configuration with its own rules,
symbolic representations, and principles in which agents occupy certain social
positions. These positions are a consequence of a complex interaction between the
rules of the field and both agents’ capital (financial, social, and cultural) and their
habitus. According to Bourdieu, fields compete with each other to promote their
interests and are hierarchically configured in terms of power and class; moreover,
fields might themselves be internally differentiated. My thesis here is that the
Chilean student movement is a social field in which students enrolled in the most
prestigious universities occupy the most powerful positions and lead the movement –
thus, the movement is itself stratified. At the same time, the student movement as
such is an agent that acts against other agents (political or financial groups, for
example) and so constitutes an agentic field. Specifically, the student movement is
struggling to pursue what it considers to be desirable outcomes, namely, a changed
relationship between the state, the higher education system, and the market.
Protests and demonstrations of power in the streets, and the occupation of
university premises on the part of students, have had both an almost immediate
effect (a reduction in the interest rate for bank loans, for example, and the destabi-
lization of a government in 2011) and a more long-term effect on the political
landscape (Bellei and Cabalin, 2013). The student movement not only destabilized
Piñera’s government but also articulated a package of reforms of the higher educa-
tion system to be implemented by the presidential candidate they were supporting –
Bachelet – who was finally re-elected to power in 2013. The Bachelet government’s
commitment to students has materialized in several concrete measures that are now
being discussed in parliament, most of them focused on free higher education.
56 Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela

University students have learnt how to take advantage of their power and have
located themselves in a position so as to advance a view of the higher education
system in opposition to a naturalized neoliberal discourse which transformed
educational goods and services into commodities. Students have created both poli-
tical and intellectual mechanisms in order to contest a dominant economic model.
Among them, students have: produced banners with phrases against the commodifi-
cation of education; organized artistic and creative protests; used social media such as
Twitter and Facebook to convene and organize student protests (Bellei and
Cabalin, 2013); collaborated with the mass media to put their claims on the front
page of newspapers and television programs within and outside the country; con-
ducted several studies and generated reports to support their claims; and seen their
former leader take up a seat in Parliament.
The student movement, as an agentic field in permanent antagonism with other
fields, has gained a status from which students actively struggle for what they
consider a social right. Students have created and disseminated an alternative per-
spective around education and they have demonstrated that change is possible
when active citizens organize and claim their rights as they see them. In other
words, the student movement has been producing symbolic capital (Bourdieu,
1998) through the promotion of practices, values, and ideas in which they have
invested time, effort, and energy and which have been recognized and supported
by the broader society. Students, as a collectivity, have become active agents
(producers of social relationships and symbolic systems) and have exerted pressure
on recent governments. Indeed, the legitimization and stability of the current
government partly depend on its capacity to respond to students’ demands –
although what the government is offering at the time of writing (free education
for the 50 per cent most vulnerable students in traditional universities) does not
satisfy students’ requests. Students are pushing to change the history of a country
and oppose the global tendencies of marketization of the higher education
system.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have described the main historical milestones that provided a
fertile ground for university protests in Chile in 2011, milestones that were
marked by the imposition of a neoliberal ideology in Chilean society by the military
regime that was then reinforced by subsequent democratic governments. Over
recent decades, government and political structures have created a series of symbolic
power devices and implemented public policies that have been underpinned by a
dominant project based on the market and a private sector with little regulation on
the part of the state. But a new agentic force located between the state, the
market, and the private sector, in the shape of a powerful university student
movement, has been growing, and consolidating and legitimizing itself.
What has been described in this chapter shows a permanent tension between
solidified structures and new agentic responses in the form of social movements
 Neoliberal discourses and Chilean students 57

that have emerged over time. In Chile, this social movement led by students
resisting and struggling against hegemonic processes and powerful groups has
been changing the social and political landscape of the region. It has thus been
demonstrated that revolutions can emerge from the bottom of a society and are
able to destabilize government structures.
Given the effect that this and other young people’s movements have had or are
having,13 we may observe the ability that young people and students in particular
have to problematize, and act as agents in contesting, a common sense view of
society that seems inevitable and unchangeable. Chilean students can be fear-free
agents – not yet crushed by the dominant structures – since they have spaces to
offer resistance and to create new and alternative discourses that hope for a better
society. Chilean students have demonstrated that what has been taken for granted
for decades can sometimes be defied.
To conclude, I make two observations about social movements in general and
the Chilean student movement in particular. One is that the pressure of a dominant
ideology sustained by powerful groups can maintain hegemonic processes in politics
and economy (both nationally and globally) such that without the action of
agents, change is not possible. Here, the absence of the (Chilean) intellectuals is
significant (Gramsci, 1971): instead of problematizing the state of affairs, intellec-
tuals have behaved, as suggested above, as ‘technopols’ (Joignant, 2011). In
Chile, they have supported and indeed contributed to the naturalization of a social
project characterized by a gap between those who have not only wealth and
political power but also the highest cultural and cultural capital and those who
are in vulnerable positions. However, students have been able to recognize and
reflect on such hegemonic processes and have been able to encourage other
sectors of society to struggle together for a fairer society. With this, it seems that
social change and the construction of a new common sense might emerge from
popular attitudes rather than political, state, or economic structures (Gramsci,
1971).
A second reflection is related to the core of the discourses that diverse powerful
groups – in both the political and financial spheres – have been trying to instill and
legitimize across society according to their interests. In this chapter, I have
described the ways students – in constituting an emergent agentic field – have been
able to shape a new discourse that has opposed the marketization of the higher
education system. Through these actions, students have sought legitimization and
have successfully pressured the current government into initiating legal reforms in
the higher education sector (which in turn suggests that the legitimation of the
current government depends – at least partly – on the student movement). What
is not clear, however, is whether students’ claims for a free higher education for
everyone and the government’s response are addressing an even more significant
social problem that Chile, and the whole Latin American region, has being
experiencing for centuries, namely the stratification of society. If Chile, its citizens,
and its politicians, really want to change the higher education system, then the
aims, actions, and the articulation of public policies should be even more explicitly
58 Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela

addressed to those who historically have had limited access to social and cultural
capital. On such a basis, real social change might be possible.

Acknowledgments
I want to thank Rachel Brooks for her helpful comments on an earlier version of
this manuscript. Work on this chapter was supported by the Chilean National
Funding Agency CONICYT and the research grant Fondecyt Regular 1141271.
Funding from PIA-CONICYT Basal Funds for Centres of Excellence Project
BF0003 is also gratefully acknowledged.

Notes
1 An agreement was signed – supported by the Chilean government – between the
Catholic University of Chile and the School of Economics of the University in Chicago
(in which Milton Friedman was an academic). Thanks to this agreement, several
Chilean economists were trained following Friedman’s theories and returned to Chile
to be appointed in key government posts and to put these theories into practice
through the introduction of specific public policies.
2 Following the Cordoba movement in the early 19th century, Chilean universities –
especially public universities – became autonomous institutions that created spaces for
political formation as well as the promotion of ideals of ‘democracy, academic freedom,
widening participation and social responsibility’ (Guzmán-Valenzuela and Bernasconi,
forthcoming).
3 There are two kinds of private universities in Chile: new private universities (created
after 1981) and the so-called traditional private universities that were created at the end
of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. These private traditional
universities (9 in total) plus state universities (16 in total) constitute what is known as
the traditional universities (25 in total).
4 Figures show that this is the case for several non-selective private universities (Brunner,
2009).
5 Just to illustrate this point, students of law of the Universidad Andrés Bello went on
strike because they had to sit on the floor due to the large number of students in the
classroom and a shortage of seats (La Nación, 2014).
6 Quality assurance as well as accountability systems began to be implemented in Latin
America mainly in the 1990s (Acosta-Silva, 2002; Villanueva, 2010) following a global
tendency in the Western world.
7 It is important to note that some state universities receive around 7 per cent of their
income from the state while the University of Chile receives around 21 per cent
(Contraloría General de la República, 2012). These differences depend on several
factors that will not be explained here but that are due to historical reasons.
8 Chile shows one of the highest disparities in distribution of incomes in Latin America
with a Gini index of 0.54 (World Bank Group, 2012).
9 This is a tendency that has not been experienced only in Chile but also in other regions
(see Carnoy et al., 2014 for the case of BRIC countries).
10 Nevertheless, some point out that some of the students of the penguin movement
would become part, later, of the university student movement of 2011 (Bellei and
Cabalin, 2013).
11 One such development was the approval of a controversial project to build several
hydroelectric power plants in the south of Chile in 2011. This was thought to be
 Neoliberal discourses and Chilean students 59

ecologically damaging. Another national scandal that was uncovered in 2011 was ‘La
Polar’ case: a big and well-known retailer was accused of unilaterally refinancing customers’
debts without their knowledge, charging high interest rates and forcing customers to pay
large bills.
12 Most of the Chilean intellectuals have studied in one of these two traditional
universities.
13 The role that students and other young people have had in the Prague revolution (Ash,
2010), the ‘Indignados’ movement (an anti-austerity movement) in Spain (Castañeda,
2012; Postill, 2014), and the protests in Hong Kong (see Macfarlane in this volume)
have been well-documented.

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