CARACAS - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has nationalized scores of private companies and entire industries in his push toward socialism, is also training his sights on universities.

Chavez sent a message via his Twitter account to students of privately funded Santa Ines University, letting them know their school was being taken over by the government and tuition will be free.

"Students of Santa Ines University, I just approved a nationalization plan for the good of everyone. Now: FREE!" beamed Chavez last week on the microblogging website, which he uses frequently after having set up an account last month.

University officials weren't available to comment on the charges, but students said the government's reasons for taking it over were just an excuse to tighten its grip on the country's education system.

"This is the worst of many bad moves by Chavez," Carlos Chavez, a leader of the university's 3,000-strong student body and who is not related to his president, told Dow Jones Newswires. "He's going to impose his revolutionary, Marxist, socialist agenda on us students, and he'll kick out good professors who allow us to study capitalism."

The nationalization of the school was made official Monday, when the government's newspaper of record, the Official Gazette, announced the "forced acquisition" of Santa Ines, and said it has been renamed Jose Felix Ribas University, in honor of a Venezuelan independence hero.

Chavez's government said it expropriated the school because it "wasn't meeting the ethical and legal requirements for a private institution." Evidence the university was "falsifying documents" was discovered during an inspection, one government official said.

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