Higher Education in Latin America and the Challenges of the 21St Century Simon Schwartzman Editor

Higher Education in Latin America and the Challenges of the 21st Century Simon Schwartzman Editor Higher Education in Latin America and the Challenges of the 21st Century 123 Editor Simon Schwartzman Instituto de Estudos de Política Econômica Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ISBN 978-3-030-44262-0 ISBN 978-3-030-44263-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44263-7 Translated from the Portuguese language edition: A educação superior na América Latina e os desafios do século XXI, by Simon Schwartzman (Ed.). © Editora da Unicamp, 2014. All rights reserved. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface In the first semester of 2013 I had the privilege of teaching the course on Higher Education in Latin America and the Challenges of the 21st Century at the UNESCO Chair of the Memorial of Latin America in São Paulo, which allowed me to invite several of the main scholars of higher education in the region to present and discuss their ideas and knowledge with an exceptional group of students from different institutions in Brazil and abroad. The first version of this book (Schwartzman, 2014), was a product of that course. I thank Prof. Adolpho José Melfi, then director of the Brazilian Center for Latin American Studies at Memorial, for inviting me to teach the course and for encouraging me to prepare this book; and the University of Campinas Publishing House for making these texts accessible to a wider audience. The chapters were extensively updated and expanded for this English edition. The initial chapter, on “Higher Education in Latin America and the Challenges of the 21st Century”, deals with two related themes that form the backdrop to the remainder of the book. The first is the origin of universities in Renaissance Europe and their evolution since then, together with the motivations and values that pre- sided over their emergence and that still persist: The appreciation of knowledge, freedom of study and scholarship, and institutional autonomy and collegiality placed at the service of the education of new generations. This is also the story of the sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting relationships between universities and the powers of Church and state, and increasingly, the economy, which cannot be told in detail here. The universities of today are very different from those of the past and are merely part of a much broader higher education sector, which increasingly involves more people and mobilizes more resources. And yet, the original values and motivations, related to the place of knowledge, its production, preservation and transmission, and its importance for people and society, persist. This chapter also deals with the peculiar history of universities in Latin America, which were inspired by European models and developed mainly as a channel for the social mobility and political affirmation of new generations (in this sense no different from those of other countries) without, however, incorporating in the same way the values and functions of knowledge, study and research. Higher education v vi Preface institutions in Latin America are still marked by the student movement of the 1918 University Reform of Córdoba, which has not yet completed its cycle in most of the continent. A further theme deals with universities as institutions whose functioning depends in part on the values and orientations of those who live within them— teachers, students, administrators—and, to a large extent, on the reciprocal demands and relationships they establish with the external environment, which includes governments and the market. Jamil Salmi, in chapter “New Challenges for Tertiary Education in the Twenty- First Century”, starting from the standpoint of the future, talks about the technological changes that are revolutionizing the modes of production and transmission of knowledge, and the needs for professional, scientific and technological training required by the new knowledge society. All over the world, there is a race to ensure that higher education systems are able to respond to these demands and thus par- ticipate in the new cycle of production and generation of wealth that is taking place. To what extent can these new technological resources be used to improve the quality, relevance and efficiency of higher education institutions, and thus bring to it the resources they need to play their new roles well? What are the most successful countries in this race, such as South Korea, doing and what should and can countries like Brazil do? José Joaquín Brunner and Julio Labraña, in chapter “The Transformation of Higher Education in Latin America: From Elite Access to Massification and Universalisation”, look at higher education in Latin America as a whole, and note that it has not only become massified, with millions of people seeking a level of training that was previously reserved for a few thousand, but is becoming universal, that is, becoming an aspiration of all people. In this process, the traditional universities, which functioned as relatively isolated islands, have been profoundly transformed and have been overtaken by a great variety of new public and private institutions that have little in common, apparently, with the ideals of the institutions that used to be their models. What is left, in this new scenario, of these old models and the values they embodied? Brunner shows us that, while intellectuals and educators such as Cardinal Newman in Ireland, Abraham Flexner in the United States, Humboldt in Germany and Ortega y Gasset in Spain praised and advocated maintaining and strengthening elite training and high-level research universities, in other parts of the world, starting with the United States, higher education grew and differentiated, with universities becoming multivariate, incorporating new functions and sources of funding, including those arising from a growing demand for edu- cational services in the market. In today’s world, the old metaphor of the classical university, symbolized by the University of Humboldt in Germany, a product of the emergence of the modern era and the formation of the nation states at the end of the nineteenth century, must be replaced by a new metaphor, that of the post-modern higher education institution, whose main characteristic is no longer adherence to a central core of values, but a multiplicity of demands, expectations and ways of functioning that transcend all attempts to fit it into a single coherent model. Preface vii Traditional university diplomas sufficed to ensure the professional and technical quality of their graduates, and the prestige and reputation of their teachers to ensure the quality of their intellectual work and research. In mass and post-modern higher education, this is no longer enough, and all countries in some way seek to establish systems of evaluation and certification of higher education, which is the theme of chapter “The Diffusion of Policies for Quality Assurance in Latin America: International Trends and Domestic Conditions” by Elizabeth Balbachevsky. She shows us that the main Latin American countries have, in one way or another, tried to adopt quality evaluation and certification systems developed in other parts of the world, requiring that the institutions go through more or less complex processes of certification that, however, have their limitations and end up serving different purposes. A very common difficulty is the resistance of traditional universities, which feel, not always wrongly, that external assessments are a threat to their autonomy; another is the difficulty that government agencies have to create quality assurance systems capable of effectively evaluating, and with credibility, the hun- dreds and thousands of higher education institutions that exist in different countries. There are questions concerning the criteria and standards of evaluation—can fac- ulties focused on teaching be evaluated according to the same criteria as research universities?—and also those interested in their results—governments, which fund the institutions? Professional corporations, interested in preserving their labor markets? Future students? Business sectors? Jorge Balán, in chapter “Expanding Access and Improving Equity in Higher Education: The National Systems Perspective”, deals with a central question in all mass higher education systems, which is the inclusion of people and social cate- gories that, historically, had no access to higher education in their countries. As

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