LA Times on Guatemala’s freedom-loving university

Today’s Los Angeles Times profiles Guatemala’s Universidad Francisco Marroquin, which I’ve had the pleasure to visit on a few occasions, and its founder, Manuel Ayau, better known as “Muso.” As the Times notes, the university has become a bastion of libertarian scholarship, supported by high academic standards.

“The poor are not poor just because others are rich,” said Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordon, a feisty octogenarian businessman, staunch anti-communist and founder of the school. “It’s not a zero-sum game.”

Welcome to Guatemala’s Libertarian U. Ayau opened the college in 1972, fed up with what he viewed as the “socialist” instruction being imparted at San Carlos University of Guatemala, the nation’s largest institution of higher learning. He named the new school for a colonial-era priest who worked to liberate native Guatemalans from exploitation by Spanish overlords.

Ayau believed universities should stay out of politics and “place themselves beyond the conflicts of their time.” Easier said than done, considering that at the time, Guatemala was under military rule and in the midst of a civil war.

A CIA-backed coup in 1954 had toppled the country’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. His proposal to redistribute unoccupied land to peasants infuriated the nation’s largest landowner, U.S.-based United Fruit Co., and stoked fears in Washington that Guatemala would become a Soviet satellite. Arbenz’s ouster unleashed a bloody internal conflict that lasted nearly four decades.

Whereas San Carlos University actively aided leftist guerrillas, Francisco Marroquin preached the sanctity of private property rights and the rule of law. The cheeky Ayau chose red as the school’s official color “on the theory that it had been expropriated by the communists and we shouldn’t cede them exclusivity.” He wore a bulletproof vest under his academic gown at the first graduation ceremony.

Tensions have mellowed since peace accords were signed in 1996. The same cannot be said of Ayau, whose nicknames include “the curmudgeon” and “Muso,” short for the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. His once-ragtag school now ranks among the finest in Central America. And he continues to irritate diverse factions of this impoverished nation with his unshakable faith in free markets, personal liberty, small government and his insistence on “no privileges for anybody.”

Some leftists deride him as a lackey of the ruling classes, dishing up neo-liberal dogma to rich kids in a nation where a few powerful families still call most of the shots. Conservative elites chafe at his op-ed harangues about their cozy oligopolies and government protections.

Ayau delights at the potshots coming his way from both ends of the political spectrum: They signal that someone is listening.

In addition to its freedom-loving orientation, UFM is providing something also sorely lacking in Latin America: academic excellence. As Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer observes, the region’s universities rank low by world standards, which isn’t surprising — for decades, Latin American professors and university administrators have been more concerned with (often violent) political activism than with any serious learning. Kudos to UFM for swimming against the region’s left-wing tide. Michael Moynihan also blogs about UFM at Reason Hit & Run. (Thanks to Brian Doherty for the LA Times link.)