Student-led protests have shut down 10 of the 11 campuses at the University of Puerto Rico—a system that enrolls more than 65,000 students—halting research, postponing graduation, and altering this year’s academic calendar.
The four-week protest, which has been called an “indefinite strike,” opposes budget cuts and changes to the academic program. It began at the Rio Piedras campus on April 21 when, according to one professor, a group of students overpowered campus security officials with pepper spray and closed the university’s entrance gates with chains and padlocks.
“They didn’t allow me in,” said Manuel Gómez, who directs the university’s Resource Center for Science and Engineering and is a principal investigator with its Institute of Functionalized Nanomaterials. Finally, the guards cut the chains and pulled the gates up, he said, “but then the students sat in the way of my car, so I could not enter.”
Since the strike began, students have taken control of all six gates of the Rio Piedras campus, and protests have ensued at nine other campuses. Only the Ciencias Médicas—a graduate-level health-professions and medical school—remains open and free of protests.
Ana R. Guadalupe Quiñones, interim chancellor at Rio Piedras, obtained a court order that allowed about 250 police officers to seize the Rio Piedras campus May 15 in an attempt to prevent anyone else from entering the campus.
Several hundred students are now protesting inside the gates, which they have barricaded with construction materials, while supporters protest outside.
The police are not allowing food and water into the campus, the president of the student government and one of the leaders of the protest, Gabriel E. Laborde, said by telephone on Wednesday.
However, some parents of the protesters tried to throw food over the gates, which led to the beating of the father of one protester by a police officer, said Mr. Laborde, a senior majoring in business administration.
Protesters are demanding that the university make public its $1.6-billion operational and research budget, continue to offer summer classes it had planned to cancel, and change its policy concerning tuition exemptions that favors students with high grade-point averages, athletic ability, or a parent employed by the university.
Some of those concessions have already been made, said Mr. Gómez, the resource-center director, yet the protesters continue the strike. He said administrators have already reinstated summer classes, which had been canceled to help close a budget deficit of about $200-million, but the protests have prevented the classes from starting.
Ways to Close the Budget Gap
The deficit, Mr. Gómez said, is a result of poor financial planning by the university. “We were not financially responsible, but now we have to be because there’s no more money,” he said. He added that administrators should consider fiscal changes like lowering faculty salaries, decreasing the amount of health benefits for faculty members, and increasing tuition.
Student leaders also blame administrators. They had wanted to meet with the university’s president Wednesday morning to negotiate some of their demands, but the president never showed up, Mr. Laborde said. University administrators could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. Calls to administration offices on the Rio Piedras campus and at the system’s headquarters either were not accepted or went unanswered.
“I’m really hoping that this ends soon—in one week or in two weeks, tops—but it’s really in the hands of the administration,” Mr. Laborde said.
Protest Consequences
Meanwhile, classes and research remain suspended. The Rio Piedras campus closed the Institute of Functionalized Nanomaterials, which generates about 40 percent of all peer-reviewed nanotechnology papers in Puerto Rico, Mr. Gómez said, because student blockades would prevent emergency personnel from entering if a fire or other accident occurred.
More important than any financial costs caused by the shutdown, Mr. Gómez said, is the damage to the university’s reputation as a research institution. Every day that research is unable to be conducted, he said, is a day that it can fall behind rival institutions.
Another threat posed by the protests, he said, is a slump in student enrollment in future years. In the past, enrollment has fallen about 20 percent during the year after large protests, according to Mr. Gómez, because students do not want to enroll in a university that might have to shut down.
Heated protests are not new to the University of Puerto Rico. In 2005, students held a three-week protest against a 33-percent tuition increase, which administrators planned to enact without consulting the student body.
Administrators say the campuses will remain closed through the end of July, and they plan to reopen in August, allowing students to finish the interrupted spring semester and begin the new semester later than usual.
