Venezuela’s entrenched political and economic crises are having a devastating impact on the country’s university students, professors, and higher education sector at large. Severe restrictions on universities’ autonomy, massive decreases in research funding and faculty salaries, and general insecurity have crippled scholars’ ability to conduct their work and left many universities on the brink of paralysis. By some estimates, nearly 60 percent of Venezuela’s professors and researchers been compelled to leave the country. Those who remain encounter deteriorating conditions on their once-vibrant university campuses, where resource-deprived classrooms and laboratories stand largely abandoned. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the difficulties for academics in Venezuela, who have been forced to grapple with increased repression, a worsening economy, and an under-resourced health care system. The higher education crisis has led to a dramatic increase in requests for support from Venezuelan academics to IIE’s Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF). In the first 10 months of 2021 alone, IIE-SRF supported more of the country’s scholars to safely resume their work abroad than any year in the program’s history. |
