Subversion Si, Study No

Latin America's troublesome students go out on strike at the pop of a firecracker: against the government, for Cuba, to oust professors, or anything else that catches their fancy. Last week, on the eve of final exams, the 18,725 students at Caracas' Central University were on strike for a brand-new reason: the right to flunk forever and still remain in school.

Students of Venezuela's state-supported universities won flunking privileges in the euphoric period following the 1958 ouster of Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez. The government guaranteed admission without an entrance exam to any high school graduate, and wiped out all penalties for failure except a nominal fee for repeating a course. The result was chaos. While academic standards tumbled, the university became a base for communists and subversives. They were rarely seen in class, and their ages ran well into the 30s. All during turbulent 1963, Castroite F.A.L.N. terrorists took refuge on the campus--which is off limits to police. Recently, Castroite students beat up two policemen found on campus; and two others were forced to kneel and beg for their lives.

The cult of university autonomy is so strong in Latin America that the Venezuelan government is reluctant to put the campus under ordinary law. But it is trying to do something about students obviously uninterested in learning. Last month the University Council began a crackdown, adopting a "repeater's rule," which expels any engineering student failing two subjects twice or one subject three times. Rector Jesus Maria Bianco thinks that the reform, modest though it seems, is long overdue. And he intends to make it stick.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.