Researchers in Nicaragua say the government’s takeover of a prominent private university has dealt another serious blow to academic freedom and scientific autonomy in the country.
Last week, President Daniel Ortega’s administration confiscated the assets of the Central American University (UCA) in Managua and closed its campuses, alleging the Jesuit-run institution had become a “hub of terrorism” and that its leaders were “traitors to the country.” It then reopened the campus with new leadership and a new name: the Casimiro Sotelo Montenegro National University, in honor of a Sandinista student leader assassinated in 1967.
The 15 August move was the latest in a yearslong effort by Ortega, who has led Nicaragua since 2007, to consolidate power and crack down on perceived political opponents, including academics. In recent years he has closed some two dozen other, mostly smaller, private universities and the nation’s National Academy of Sciences.
UCA officials have rejected the government’s allegations. But faculty members fear the move eliminates one of the nation’s last relatively independent centers of academic research and will result in more researchers and students leaving Nicaragua.
“The [university] was the last bastion of quality higher education, where research institutes were creating knowledge and doing science,” says one member of its faculty, who requested anonymity because of fears of retaliation. “I believe that independent scientific investigations are over in Nicaragua.”
Considered one of Central America’s top private universities, the 63-year-old UCA has about 500 faculty members and currently enrolls about 6000 students, mostly undergraduates. (Ortega was briefly a student there in the 1960s.) It houses a wide range of research efforts, including a center for molecular biology, an institute of natural sciences, and an herbarium holding some 80,000 plant samples. UCA also provided space and other support to the National Academy of Sciences, which apart from its research efforts sponsored courses for teachers and journalists, as well as debates on issues including climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the proposed construction of an interoceanic canal through Nicaragua.
Over the past decade, the university has faced increasing scrutiny from Ortega’s party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front. After the university became a hub of student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in 2018, Nicaragua’s National Council of Universities did not renew its license to operate. Since then, “we have been operating, you could say, illegally,” says a university official who requested anonymity.
The government also tightly regulated faculty research efforts, especially in the social sciences. “If I was going to do an investigation on anything [off campus], it didn’t matter what, I had to inform the local representative of the ruling party, and they had to accompany [me] to each household,” a UCA professor says. Researchers were also barred from accessing public records such as national statistics and faced criminal prosecution if they failed to report foreign funding for their work. As a result, many researchers stopped publishing and the university stopped hosting international meetings.
UCA once received nearly half of its $16 million annual budget from the government, but that funding ended in 2018. To cope, the university downsized staff and increased tuition fees. “I think they wanted to make it so difficult that we would close down on our own, but we didn’t,” the university official says. But, “In the end, [the government] got tired of us, and had to kick us out.”
It’s not yet clear how many faculty will now return. Many researchers have already been exiled or decided to leave the country under mounting threats from the government. Some will stay “only because they don’t have any other options,” the university official says, adding:, They will be “forced to say that everything is wonderful.”
“The trend is becoming really totalitarian,” a faculty member says. “I feel like we’re living in a dark medieval village … where there is no rule of law, no social contract, where no one can say anything.”
