Latin America

NUMBER 52, SUMMER 2008

Is There a Latin American University Model?

Andrés Bernasconi
Andrés Bernasconi is associate professor and Vice-Rector for Research and Graduate Programs at Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile. E-mail: abernasconi@unab.cl.

Postindependence Latin American universities developed during the 19th and most of the 20th century largely under the normative influence of a Latin American idea of the university institution. In the last few decades, factors both related to the development of higher education and external to it have combined to challenge the clout of that model. As a result, notwithstanding the persistence of elements of the old paradigm, the model of the Latin American university is now related chiefly to US research universities.

The Shaping of the Latin American Model
Throughout the 20th century universities were created from scratch or revamped from colonial predecessors to lead the postindependence endeavor to create a modern nation-state. The new universities were to train the professional, secular elites, especially civil servants. These universities were called upon to serve as the state's educational arm, for the promotion of national unity and an enlightened citizenry. Professorial chairs were largely served part-time by noted members of the liberal professions, grouped in loosely formed faculties, which in turn corresponded to professional fields—typically, law, medicine, and engineering.

The reform movement set off in 1918 by students at the University of Cordoba, Argentina, was a turning point for the predominant university model in Latin America. The tenets of the reform movement evolved over time and spread across Latin America. The stylized doctrine included democratic governance, or "cogovernance," by students, professors, and alumni who elected deans and rectors and shared in decision making through collective bodies; democratization of access through tuition-free education and expansion of enrollments; the orientation of the university's mission toward the solution of social, economic, and political problems, autonomy from state intervention, and academic freedom.

By the late 1960s and the 1970s the Latin American model had reached the peak of its influence over the region's universities. However, at the same time higher education was undergoing transformation through the sheer pressure of social change, demographics, and increased secondary education in most of the countries.

Erosion of the Model
Expansion was funneled through the swelling of the numbers of public universities or the multiplication of their enrollments (e.g., in Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, and Honduras), the development of a large private sector (e.g., in Chile, Brazil, and Colombia), or a combination of both strategies (e.g., in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic). This growth, together with the emergence of a non-university-sector of higher education, increased the ideological, functional, and organizational diversity of the tertiary level of education.

The impact upon public universities of massification, unruly growth, deterioration of quality, politicization, and decreased influence over the elites—together with the external shocks caused by the military dictatorships of the 1970s, the economic crisis of the 1980s, and the neoliberal turn of the political economy in the 1990s—provoked a crisis of identity and legitimacy in the public sector from which it has yet to recover.

Latin America has experienced the advent of research activities to meet the longtime research rhetoric and of full-time research faculty who carry them out. The region has been partaking in worldwide trends facing universities: the rising economic value of knowledge, the pressures for self-funding via tuition charges and sale of services, privatization, the demand upon researchers and teachers to work more closely with firms, the creation of schemes to provide more accountability, and the new system that critics call "academic capitalism" and advocates refer to as "capitalization of knowledge." To survive the current fiscal constraints and in keeping with generally neoliberal policies supported by the multilateral lending agencies, universities are forced to seek a closer commitment to the issues of economic growth and competitiveness and to do away with the dominant discourse of social transformation characteristic of the Latin American model.

Rise of the Research University
The ascendancy of the US concept of research university has risen worldwide as the top echelon of North American universities continue to increase their lead in scientific productivity and in harnessing the opportunities and challenges of the new economy. The US research university is known for its focus on knowledge creation and application, departmental organization, professional faculty and administrators, academic governance by faculty, organization and rewards for research and publication, and an elastic balance between autonomy and accountability. This successful model has become an inspiration for university leaders worldwide and a gold standard for universities throughout the world.

New generations of academics, with graduate degrees obtained abroad, who know research universities from the inside, press for a departmental organization, research labs, equipment, funds, and full-time contracts. Where these scholars have come to control their academic units, displacing the part-time practitioners or the full-time professors who only teach, they have brought their units (or their entire universities, when such scholars exist in critical mass across the faculties) closer to the culture of the research university.

In fact, only a tiny fraction of universities in Latin America can be characterized as research-oriented universities (based on their output instead of their rhetoric), and graduate education, especially at the doctoral level is at an early stage everywhere except Brazil. But even if research-oriented universities are not numerous in Latin America, they provide the other institutions with relevant models already adapted to the local culture.

Remnants of the Latin American Model
Professional education at the undergraduate level is still what universities do as their main function, but curriculum reforms stressing general education and examples of "deprofessionalization" of undergraduate programs are ubiquitous.

Part-time teachers still constitute the majority of the faculty overall, but academics with doctorates and with full dedication to the university are gaining ground. With their governance prerogatives, the new generation of academics control their universities, while cogovernance by students and administrative staff is in retreat.

Signs of the model's decline are numerous but not of the same nature across countries or across universities in a given nation. Brazil and Chile, for example, have moved on considerably; but the large national universities in Central America or Bolivia maintain their loyalty to the model, while Colombia, like Brazil, never did absorb much of its influence. And in Argentina and Mexico, for political and cultural reasons, it has been much easier for the newer or smaller universities to relinquish the model than has been the case for the highly visible Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico or the University of Buenos Aires.

The mores of the Latin American university are unlikely to vanish without a trace, given the persistent connection of the largest public universities in the region to some elements of the Latin American model—such as participatory governance, free tuition, and institutionalized political engagement. Further, the traditions of political awareness, social critique, and outreach to the underprivileged seem especially relevant today, both in Latin America and globally. As with other phenomena of cultural diffusion, the concept of the research university is likely to evolve in Latin America into a form that recognizes and integrates in some manner the tradition of the Latin American university.

[Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number52/p10_Bernasconi.htm