University Autonomy and Academic Freedom in Latin America

Abstract

Latin American universities have surprisingly little in common with universities in the United States. They have their own distinctive traditions, operate in a different environment, and have functions and prerogatives not normally associated with institutions of higher learning in this country. Unlike the Constitution of the United States, which makes no reference to education, all Latin American constitutions make provision for education, sometimes at great length. The tone of higher education in the United States has, at least until recently, been set predominantly by private institutions; the opposite has been the case in Latin America ever since the founding of the first Royal and Pontifical universities in Peru and Mexico in I55I. In the United States, discussions of academic freedom have often centered on educational considerations, primarily in terms of the role of teachers as educators rather than as citizens, and have dealt only very secondarily with the role of students. In Latin America, freedom of instruction (libertad de catedra) has been but a small part of the controversy centering on university autonomy, which has encompassed students as much as professors, and social and political issues as well as educational ones. During the twentieth century, major questions have been raised, usually with little agreement, about the function of universities in changing societies. The issue of university autonomy has thus been combined with, and complicated further by, that of university reform. The modern history of the Latin American university is thus largely the story of the effort to make higher education relevant to Latin America and its problems. This struggle, waged in the name of university autonomy and reform, has involved the simultaneous affirmation and rejection of past university traditions, and, since few could agree on either the needs or the means by which the universities could best fulfill them, it has also projected the university into the political arena. This in turn has created new political traditions from which most Latin American universities can today escape only with difficulty even under the best of circum-