ECUADOR: President's push to improve higher education

Rafael Correa, Ecuador's self-styled 'socialist revolutionary' president, is known for grand gestures, writes Marion Lloyd for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Since taking office in 2007, he has temporarily reneged on his country's foreign debt, threatened to go to war with Colombia and pushed through a new constitution to incorporate the cosmology of Ecuador's indigenous minority. Now he has turned his attention to overhauling the country's troubled higher-education system.

Correa has proposed a new law that could be voted on in the national assembly as early as this month. While he has been accused of trying to install a socialist-style higher-education system like the one under development in Venezuela, Correa's ideas appear to be rooted in his experience as an economics professor and are as much a personal agenda as a political one. But despite his being a former academic, the president and his ideas are opposed by university leaders. They charge him with trying to undermine university autonomy in violation of the constitution.
Full report on The Chronicle of Higher Education site