The Politics of Academic Autonomy in Latin America

Abstract

Fernanda Beigel's edited volume The Politics of Academic Autonomy in Latin America constitutes a formidable example of genuine editorial involvement and collaborative scholarly commitment. Starting with an inspirational introduction by the editor herself, the individual contributors—all recognized experts in their respective fields of specialization—manage to capture the reader's attention all the way through the book's four thematic sections: “The Institutionalization of Research and Professional Training in Latin America: Peripheral Centers, Academic Diplomacy, and Scientific Missions” (chapters 1 to 4), “International Cooperation, Foreign Aid, and Academic Mobility” (chapters 5 to 7), “Politicization versus Professionalization?” (chapters 8 to 10), and “The Contraction of Academic Autonomy” (chapters 11 to 13).Section 1 offers an intriguing panorama of milestones in the institutionalization of the social sciences in a number of Latin American countries, most notably Argentina, Chile, and, to a lesser extent, Brazil and Mexico. It is fascinating to learn about how the relative international weight of peripheral centers has shifted from São Paulo in the 1950s to Buenos Aires and (most notably) Santiago in the 1960s, and from there to Mexico City in the 1970s. The reader also finds compelling examples of how neatly and chillingly the respective shifts can be associated with military coups (i.e., 1964 in Brazil, 1966 in Argentina, and 1973 in Chile) and the resultant authoritarian regimes. All four contributions to this section (especially chapter 2) point to the central part played by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), with a recurrent emphasis (mainly in chapters 1 and 3) on its role in the creation of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO). Other core drivers of relatively autonomous peripheral centers include public administrations and national foreign services (chapter 4), as well as international academic mobility and interregional competition for international aid. In the subsequent section, the curious reader finds a well-balanced expansion of these themes in authoritative contributions about the Fulbright Program (chapter 5), Catholic international cooperation (chapter 6), and international academic mobility (chapter 7).Sections 3 and 4 share a common concern for the politics of (control over) academic autonomy and the struggles for symbolic power that they entail, drawing on a range of illustrative examples from Argentina and Chile during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The case of Chile's relatively short-lived Research Center for American History (CIHA), which owed its birth to an important extent to financial commitment by the Rockefeller Foundation, testifies to the complexities of competing academic stances, interests, and vanities (chapter 8)—as do the more institutionally resilient cases of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and FLACSO in Argentina (chapters 12 and 13, respectively). Chapter 10 grants fascinating insights into the peculiarities of career building in times of social and political turmoil. Chapter 11 discusses present-day global phenomena of academic dislocations and relocations via a thorough discussion of the World University Service-United Kingdom return program for Chilean exiles who had left Chile following the violent overturn of President Salvador Allende's government. Finally, yet importantly, chapter 9 stands out not only in that it offers an interesting account of second-generation university reforms in Argentina but also in that it anchors this account within a comparatively more comprehensive historical review.As is the case with most edited volumes, the collaboratively constructed discourse here does not always and consistently evolve around an explicitly developed conceptual framework. One way to productively build on the book's many insightful and thought-provoking contributions—that would not betray its theoretical inspiration from critical dependency theories and Pierre Bourdieu's project of a reflexive sociology—could lie in the systematic, comparative historical analysis of processes of intercultural capital realization. The latter could account for different forms of intercultural capital (i.e., objectified, embodied, and institutionalized) across time and at different points of realization—with a particular emphasis on the relative autonomy of their respective intra- and intercultural exchange value in different academic and nonacademic environments.In spite of its limitations, the book does succeed in demonstrating both the importance of distinguishing “between ‘peripheral science’ and ‘science in the periphery’” and the need to recognize “that academic autonomy in peripheral circuits cannot be measured with the stick of international comparisons, based on the universals construed by those who have wielded their power over ‘scientific truths’” (pp. 18–19). It constitutes a welcome resource for all those interested in the production (and reproduction) of academic autonomy within dominated and dominant fields of symbolic power—in Latin America and far beyond.