By Paul Jeffrey
Special to the National Catholic Reporter

     Chalatenango, El Salvador - In the war-torn north of El Salvador, Catholics are building a university in a cow pasture.
     Named for this country's martyred archbishop, Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero University (MOARU) is Central America's first rural university, an institution designed to serve the people of the countryside whom Romero loved so much.
     "Monseñor Romero's great ideal was to promote a better life for the peasants, for people who have few resources and opportunities. It was his longing," said Eduardo Alas, the bishop of Chalatenango. "Because we have a great devotion to Monseñor Romero and his vision, we wanted to respond in whatever way we could."
     Alas is one of a group of local residents working to reconstruct Chalatenango--a scene of some of the war's cruelest violence--as well as slow down the brain drain caused by students travelling to the capital to study, often never to return. The group founded MOARU to provide rural residents the opportunity to study close to home, thus avoiding the time and money it takes to travel to the nation's capital.
     Romero University opened its door three years ago in a rented house along the highway that leads north from the capital to the Honduran border. Today the school has land of its own, and some 270 students gather in recently-finished classrooms. A library and laboratory building are under construction.
     Starting a university from scratch is an expensive proposition. Because much of Chalatenango was under rebel control during the civil war, university founders first approached leaders of the FMLN guerrilla movement--now respectable politicians--to ask for their help. According to Chalatenango native Francisco Acosta, one of the founders of Romero U., FMLN officials said they would participate only if they could control the school's finances and select the faculty. Acosta said the group rejected the FMLN's conditions.
     Where guerrillas couldn't help, the Catholic diocese of Chalatenango came to the rescue. The diocese paid for one-third of the 16 acre campus, which is located near the village of Aldeita, the last parish created by Romero just four days before his assassination in 1980. 
     The diocese plans on getting a return on its investment. In addition to majors in law, education, agronomy, and veterinary science, Romero U. plans to add a philosophy department that will allow Catholic seminarians to complete part of their studies here.
     MOARU's rector, Fr. Gabriel Rodríguez, said that by providing seminary training in Chalatenango the church will help prospective priests "to live the reality of the countryside while they do their university studies, which will help them later as priests adapt to their environment."
     Studying here will also reduce the time they have to spend in the country's interdiocesan seminary at San José de la Montaña, where the conservative archbishop of San Salvador, Fernando Sáenz Lecalle, has purged progressive faculty and imposed a curriculum in line with his Opus Dei background.
     While Alas described the Chalatenango school as an "alternative," he denied it's a reaction to the changed environment at San José de la Montaña. "This is a new initiative that has nothing to do with the posture of other bishops," he told NCR.
     Besides training priests, the church's involvement in the university will help insure that new professionals possess social commitment. "We don't form professionals just to go out and earn a salary, but to be of service," Rodríguez claimed.
     The most popular major here is law. According to Alfredo Lobo, an educator and another MOARU founder, lawyers traditionally "seek out the big cities, but we're forming a social conscience in them. The lawyer, for example, has to help peasants legalize their lands. Many times the lands they possess haven't been legalized because there's no one to help them do that."
     El Salvador has experienced an explosion of new universities in recent years, a trend beginning in the late eighties when President José Napoleón Duarte encouraged the creation of alternatives to the politically progressive University of El Salvador and the Jesuit-sponsored Central American University. While some of the new schools have been created for political reasons, others are simply businesses, "created for mercantilistic reasons, exploiting the student market that exists rather than delivering an alternative to the people," complained Felix Orellana, MOARU's vice rector of humanities.
     Several universities in the capital have opened rural branches recently, but Rodríguez claims the main campuses in San Salvador continue to absorb most institutional funding and attention.
     Late in 1995 the government decided to crack down on the proliferation of new universities, and in June of this year Education Minister Cecilia Gallardo de Cano began a formal review of the country's 45 institutions of higher learning. In October she announced the closure of four schools for failure to meet strict minimum standards. More closures are expected early next year.
     While Rodríguez supports the government's campaign of quality control for university education, he said MOARU has to hurry to get its basic infrastructure in place to meet the education ministry's strict requirements. "Our neck is in the guillotine," he quipped. Because it wants to keep tuition low--currently under $30 a month--earlier this year the school had to borrow $85,000--at 15 percent interest--in order to get library construction underway.
     The Catholic diocese of Milan donated several computers to the school this year, and Rodríguez said school officials are looking for additional support abroad. Acosta, who now lives in Maryland, is trying to raise support among U.S. Catholics.
     Lobo said the school is looking for scholarships in order to send promising graduates abroad for further study. He said they would go with the understanding that they will return to teach at MOARU.
     Rodríguez said foreign donations are essential if the university is to offer income-based tuition rates and scholarships, which he claimed were essential if the school was going to continue to serve the poorest of the poor in Chalatenango.
     Such international solidarity would help Romero University avoid the fate of many church-sponsored educational enterprises in the Third World, where quality education often ends up as a privilege of the rich rather than a right of all.
     Bishop Alas said he's aware of that danger. "In many ways this university is a reaction against the tendency that higher education is something that belongs only to the elites," Alas said. "Our university is an alternative to this trend. As such it's really a pastoral ministry. We've designed the university to serve everyone here, so it's not likely it will convert into an institution that serves just the elite classes. It's a place for people who don't have access to the other universities, who can't afford to quit their job and pay a lot to travel to the capital and rent an apartment there. We've put it out here in the countryside within reach of the people."
     MOARU is distinctively different from the other two Catholic universities established in neighboring Central American countries during the nineties.
     The "Redemptoris Mater" Catholic University of Nicaragua was formed in 1993 by Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the archbishop of Managua. The government of President Violeta Chamorro gave the university a recently finished office building and campus in which to begin operations. It's a conservative--and expensive--bastion of Vatican-style Catholic orthodoxy, an intentional alternative to the progressive Jesuit-run Central American University in Managua.
     The "Our Lady Queen of Peace" Catholic University of Honduras opened its doors in 1993, offering primarily business and technical degrees. Originally sponsored by the entire episcopal conference of Honduras, the project was hijacked by Tegucigalpa Archbishop Oscar Andrés Rodríguez and a group of wealthy Catholic business leaders. Its relatively high tuition has kept it from filling all the spaces on its three campuses.
     Here in the boondocks of northern El Salvador, students at Romero U. come not from the urban upper and middle classes, but rather from the poor and middle class families of this mountainous province. A few even come from Honduras. José Wilfredo Gómez, for example, travels to Aldeita every weekend from his home in Nueva Ocotepeque, Honduras, a journey of less than two hours, including time consumed by immigration procedures at the border. "If I was going to study in Honduras," he told NCR, "I'd have to travel eight hours to Tegucigalpa and find a place to live there."
     With classes on Saturday and Sunday, Romero University students don't have to quit their weekday jobs to get a higher education. That helps many women--especially single mothers--to get a university education.
     Agronomy student Wendy Carranza said the school offers women "a different paradigm than that in many other schools. The majority sell beauty, not capability."
     Carranza says the school has already developed a reputation as being tough. "Just because you're the son of someone important doesn't help you here," she said. "It's a university where, God willing, you'll graduate because you've learned something."