Venerable Peru University Reflects Nation--a Shambles : South America: But the loss of cherished autonomy at San Marcos, the region’s oldest college, is an anomaly in the ‘90s.

A forum featuring harsh criticism of the Peruvian government was almost over when five or six soldiers, armed with automatic rifles, appeared in the doorway at the back of the crowded university lecture hall. “Nobody leaves here!” an army officer barked.

When students began forcing their way out, the soldiers shot into the ceiling and walls. Outside, more troops fired into the air. With the shooting came shoving, shouting, scuffling, running. For a while, it was pandemonium.

In the end, no one was hurt and no one was arrested; the July 16 incident would merit no more than a footnote in this country’s current history of turmoil and violence had it not involved a cherished tradition in one of the Western Hemisphere’s most venerable universities.

The soldiers were shooting up San Marcos University, founded in 1551, the oldest university in South America. And the troops were treading on a Latin American tradition of university autonomy, something students throughout the region have struggled to establish and maintain since early in this century.

The tradition holds that governments cannot legitimately interfere with a university’s administrative or academic freedom--let alone violate its sovereignty with troops.

But, in fact, army troops have occupied San Marcos since May, 1991, in a show of force aimed at discouraging campus infiltration by radical Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

The occupation is an example of authoritarian measures favored by President Alberto Fujimori, who seized dictatorial powers April 5 in a military-backed “self-coup” that he said was necessary to combat the guerrillas and solve other serious problems.

The soldiers on campus, necessary or not, are out of step. The early 1990s have become a new heyday of university autonomy in Latin America, where venerable San Marcos is now a notable anomaly. Elsewhere in the region, violations of university autonomy have become increasingly rare since the 1980s, when civilian governments replaced military regimes in country after country.

Of course, this latest crisis is but a recent development in the long history of San Marcos University. Although its claim to be the oldest university in the New World is a matter of historical dispute, at 441 years old, it holds a clear title in South America at least. The university’s royal charter, issued by King Charles V of Spain, predates by 85 years the founding of Harvard, the oldest college in the United States.

With Peruvian independence from Spain in the early 1800s, San Marcos became this country’s national university. For more than a century, its graduates included many of the country’s most illustrious intellectuals and politicians, as well as leading professionals. It was the school of Peru’s dominant elite.

In the 1960s, Peru’s national universities grew rapidly, and many of the new students came up from the country’s lower classes. San Marcos moved from downtown Lima to a new suburban campus, a spacious compound with four-story buildings of concrete and glass.

Radical political causes became increasingly popular on campus, and rival Marxist groups vied for power in student and faculty organizations. In some departments, leftists controlled curricula, professorial appointments and administration. Efficiency declined.

And as the university grew more isolated from Peruvian society and successive government administrations, it received less financial support.

Now, San Marcos suffers an administrative and financial crisis that is all too apparent in run-down buildings with broken and dirty windows; parched campus grounds, planted here and there with alfalfa patches and vegetable gardens, and complaining professors, who make less than $300 a month.

“That creates a terrible malaise,” said Winston Orrillo, the school’s spokesman.

For three years, the university has collected small fees for matriculation; previously, it was free. Students have protested. But the fees, like the army occupation of the campus, have failed to prompt anything like a campus revolt. San Marcos is no longer the revolutionary university that emerged in the 1960s, Orrillo said, adding: “Would that it were. I am ashamed of it. I am a leftist, and we shared the ‘60s, the glorious years.”

In general, students today are less political and more studious, according to Orrillo and others. They say that with the decline of international communism, revolutionary politics holds less attraction. “You don’t see many people in movements, in student parties anymore,” said Angelica Motta, 19, who was working with other volunteers on a project to plant trees and shrubs on a bald, rocky patch of earth near the humanities building.

Many poorer students are said to lack the leisure time for campus politics. In Peru’s hard economic times, they no longer can count on official subsidies or even much family help to get them through. They must work in their spare time and want to get their degrees as quickly as possible.

Signs on campus of the impoverished condition of many students include makeshift snack stands that sell cigarettes one at a time, and a newsstand that rents newspapers and magazines by the hour. It also sells $2 books on the installment plan.

The university reflects the nation, a shambles after years of economic crisis and political strife.

The devastating guerrilla war, which has taken a toll of more than 25,000 lives in 12 years, has stunted investment and drained resources. National economic production has continued to shrink in the two years since Fujimori took power, and tough austerity measures imposed by his administration have added to the hardships of Peru’s poor majority. The average wage of government employees is less than $100 a month.

At San Marcos University, maintenance workers and janitors earn less than $70 a month, said Raul Montesinos, campus maintenance supervisor. “You’re ashamed to say, ‘Hey, work harder,’ because of the miserable salaries they make,” Montesinos said.

Others say that much of what is wrong at San Marcos is because of bad administration; they blame that partly on autonomy. With no one to answer to but politically motivated student and faculty representatives, university managers and bureaucrats have a tendency to let things slide, the critics say.

“The political forces put in their own people, not so much on the basis of competence but because of their militancy,” said Manuel Castillo, a sociology professor at another Peruvian university. “That resulted in a low quality of professors.”

Strikes by administrative personnel and faculty have devoured class time in recent years. “Strikes lasted up to six months,” Castillo said. “Semesters were lost.”

Private universities have filled the gap left by deterioration in San Marcos and other national universities. Today, many companies and even some government agencies openly discriminate in favor of private university graduates in hiring. “Private firms generally do not hire personnel from national universities,” Castillo said.

Nicolas Lynch, another sociologist, blamed autonomy for at least part of San Marcos’ problems. Lynch said he does not approve of military intervention but added that autonomy “has permitted the university to isolate itself from the society, and its crisis comes from that somewhat.” He said that the concept of university autonomy is needed to protect academic freedom but that it must be redefined to prevent universities from becoming isolated.

The tradition in Latin America dates to 1918, when a university reform movement prospered in Cordoba, Argentina. Chilean social scientist Jose Joaquin Brunner observed in a recent book on higher education in Latin America that the student movement was part of a broader transition from oligarchic domination of society toward “a modern cultural constellation.” Cordoba was “the first sign of a sea change” that swept through the universities of Latin America, Brunner wrote.

Sometimes the process was interrupted by military governments, then resumed with the return of civilian rule. According to Brunner, the “heroic cycle” of university reform finally played out in the 1970s as the region fell under an extended wave of military dictatorships.

While military rulers rarely sent troops or police onto campuses, they controlled universities by intervening in their administrations and arresting suspected rebels from the schools, sometime torturing or killing them.

After Chile’s 1973 coup, for example, universities there knuckled under to the hardfisted rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. “There was no need to occupy them because the military controlled everything,” Brunner said in a telephone interview.

At San Marcos University, autonomy was consolidated in the 1930s and 1940s. The late President Juan Velasco, a left-leaning general who ruled the country from 1968 to 1975, intervened in San Marcos to replace the rector but never sent in troops.

But Alan Garcia, Fujimori’s civilian predecessor, sent troops into the campus briefly on two occasions to search for subversives. In February, 1988, troops and police arrested 350 students in a night raid on the San Marcos dormitories. The students were released later without charges.

These days, soldiers are scattered around campus, mainly in unobtrusive but strategic points such as the roofs of classroom buildings.