The Superior Council of Universities (CNU), through a circular sent on Thursday, August 4, ordered the universities “legally established in Nicaragua” to report, seven days in advance, on any “migratory movement of teaching and administrative staff ”.
“With the interest of knowing the migratory movement of teaching, administrative and managerial personnel of that educational community, as well as of the scientific academic personnel that the university receives on the occasion of events or for the performance of activities contemplated in the plans, programs and projects that carry out, we kindly ask you to formally inform us of the entrances and exits of the country”, refers part of the document.
The CNU justified its decision on numeral 14 of article 58 of Law 89 or Law of Autonomy of Higher Education Institutions, which establishes, according to the reform ordered and approved by Ortega on March 31, 2022, that the governing body can “require the IES (Higher Education Institutions) the information that it considers necessary for its better performance and that of higher education”.
The information that universities must send includes: full name of the person who is going to leave or enter Nicaragua, identification or passport number, country of origin or destination, date of entry or exit from the country, reason for the visit, duration of visit and port of entry or exit.
Universities are subjected to “partisan control”
The jurist and academic María Asunción Moreno, according to reports from CONFIDENTIALpointed out that the claims of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, through the reform to Law 89 —which gave the CNU ample power over HEIs—, erto “legalize control over public universities, through the elimination of university autonomy and academic freedom, and in this way subject universities to the total domination of the regime.”
The education specialist, Ernesto Medina, also warned that said reform showed the clear interest of “subjecting universities to total partisan control, which also means the total loss of university autonomy.”
The professor recalled that the centralization of higher education also took place in the 1980s, through the National Council for Higher Education, considered an instrument to suppress the autonomy of universities, at that time, in favor of the revolution .
In the first quarter of 2022, the Ortega-Murillo regime unleashed a hunt against the country’s private universities, closing ten study houses, annulling their legal status. Among those canceled are: the Hispanic American University (Uhispam), the Polytechnic University of Nicaragua (Upoli), the Catholic University of the Dry Tropics (Ucatse), the Nicaraguan University of Humanitarian Studies (UNEH), the Popular University of Nicaragua (Uponic) and the Paulo Freire University (UPF).
