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National University Strike
Despite opposition presented from the beginning towards the Higher Education Reform Project, it was ratified by the National Government before the Congress of the Republic on October 3rd, 2011. From there most of the Higher Education Institutions began to organize committees in which they made decisions regarding how to demonstrate their opposition to the article

Despite opposition presented from the beginning towards the Higher Education Reform Project, it was ratified by the National Government before the Congress of the Republic on October 3rd, 2011. From there most of the Higher Education Institutions began to organize committees in which they made decisions regarding how to demonstrate their opposition to the article.

The National Strike, as a mechanism of student action, had an initial organization process at the national level that began in the month of September, assembling a significant number of universities. It also worked with international consultants. As of October 12, 32 public universities then declared an indefinite strike and asserted that it would not end until the Reform Project was repealed by Congress and were offered guarantees for a democratic design of a new project.​

On numerous occasions national marches against the reform took place on April 7th, ​ September 7th, October 7th, ​  October 12th, October 26th and also included the March of Torches on November 3rd,​   Taking Bogotá on November 10th, ​ and the Continental Day of Mobilization for Education on November 24th.​

In the march of October 12th, 2011, medical student at the Universidad Santiago de Cali, Jan Farid Cheng Lugo, died from the launch of an explosive device by unidentified people (the facts are confidential) during the strike convened by la Mesa Amplia Nacional de Estudiantes.​ La Mesa Amplia Nacional Estudiantil (MANE) reported that the death of the young man was not an accident but a murder resulting from a device thrown by unknown people from a bridge. This version was confirmed by forensic analysis that established murder as the motive behind the death; the details are still being clarified.

Consequences
On November 9th, 2011, one day before one of the largest marches of 2011 took place in Bogotá called Toma a Bogotá (Taking Bogotá), after a meeting with congressmen from both chambers of the sixth commission of Congress of the Republic, President Juan Manuel Santos announced that the government would be willing to repeal through constitutional procedure the Higher Education Reform Project, only if the students returned to academic normalcy. Nevertheless, the students, represented by la Mesa Amplia Nacional Estudiantil (MANE), expressed they would continue with cessation of academic activities and with scheduled protests until the government effectively repealed the proposal from Congress and guaranteed an arrangement for the design of a more democratic proposal, that included the requests and need of the entire educational community, ​ and that allowed the protest scheduled for Thursday, November 10th to remain scheduled

November 11th gave way to what is considered as the first victory of the 2011 student protests, when president Santos agreed to the demands of the students and ratified in the Congress of the Republic the request to repeal the Higher Education Reform project.​ On November 16th, the sixth commission of the House of Representatives approved - with 11 votes in favor and none against - the request to repeal the reform. As a consequence of the measures on the part of the government, the students decided to end the National University Strike that lasted little more than a month.​

The government committed itself to creating democratic spaces for the design of a new higher education reform that responded to the demands of the university community and the rest of the country. The students, on their side, committed to participating in such spaces for dialogue and designing a new reform. Since there didn’t exist word-for-word guarantees of the government’s compromise, the students declared, nevertheless, they would remain alert to any breaches in the agreement. A few months after these agreements, then Minister of Education María Fernanda Campo claimed that the National Council for Higher Education (CESU, the advisory state agency presided over by the minister, would be the only platform for designing a new higher education law, which was interpreted by the student movement as a breach of what was agreed on since they considered they were not guaranteed to participate in the CESU.​

As a result, the students organized under MANE began the design of a Proposal for an Alternative Higher Education Law through multiple meetings in different cities. For its part, the national government, by means of the CESU, undertook the design of Public Policy of Higher Education. In 2014, it presented to the country a document named Acuerdo por lo Superior 2034, that contains guidelines for the sector between 2014 and 2034. Given the design of these guidelines, contrary to what had been agreed on to lift the 2011 strike, the contributions of the student organizations were once again left out. MANE has posed the possibility of a new protest. Likewise, the government document has received criticism on different occasions, like Ignacio Mantilla, Rector of la Universidad Nacional; the Congress of the Republic by means of senator Jorge Enrique Robledo, Jesús Alberto Castilla and Senén Niño; House Representatives Víctor Correa Vélez and Ángela María Robledo, and Andean Constituent for the Republic of Colombia Alexander Ferms, in terms of international representation.