Latin American Universities

Abstract

This commonly quoted article by Chilean scholar Andres Bernasconi interprets the relationship between governments and universities as a linear development to a new form of social organization: I argue that an overarching model for the postindependence Latin American university existed during the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. (…) In more recent times, for reasons having to do with the knowledge economy, globalization, financial restrictions, loss of legitimacy, and mission shifts, the grip of the model on public universities has also weakened, and the competing paradigm of the U.S. research university, long the dominant inspiration in the private sector, began to make inroads into public universities as well. The result is that, notwithstanding the persistence of elements of the old paradigm in some parts of the public sector, the model of the Latin American university is now to be found chiefly in the idea of the research university, especially as expressed in the most research-intensive universities in the United States. (Bernasconi, Is there a Latin American model of the university?, 2007)