Institution Building and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: The University of San Carlos, Guatemala (review)

The historiography of Guatemala's nineteenth century has come a long way since Lorenzo Montúfar published the first volume of his monumental if partisan Reseña histórica de Centro-América (1878). Yet despite the generations of historians who have come since, and the important ways they have revised and enhanced our understanding of the period, most still explain the development of Guatemala's nineteenth century through the myopic lens of liberal-conservative political conflict. What could a study of the often insolvent, and at times barely functioning, University of San Carlos offer to help us out of this trap? Quite a lot, in the capable hands of historian Blake Pattridge.

Pattridge traces the history of Guatemala's University of San Carlos from the colonial era through the end of the nineteenth century. In seven substantive chapters he places the university's history in the context of the literature on higher education in Latin America and political conflict in nineteenth-century Guatemala. In addition, he significantly contributes to the incipient literature on Guatemalan state formation in the decades following independence from Spain in 1821. Through a detailed examination of the university's records, including curriculum, personnel, degrees granted, students, finances, physical infrastructure, and institutional relations with Church and state, he opens a window into the myriad problems associated with institution building in an impoverished and politically unstable country while simultaneously demonstrating the intimate links between institutional fortunes and larger political and economic trends.

Among the many points Pattridge makes in his study, two are of crucial importance for our understanding of Guatemala's nineteenth century. First, continuity rather than change marked state policy toward the country's main institution of higher education regardless of which political party held power. From independence through the early 1850s, both liberals and conservatives had high hopes for the university, but they were able to realize very few of them due to their consistent inability to generate sufficient revenues from the state. Although conservatives were more supportive of the Church's role in higher education, and liberals preferred greater secularism, both groups accepted modern ideas and greater emphasis on professional programs. All the same, the traditional fields of philosophy, law, and medicine predominated well into the second half of the nineteenth century, and there was little change in university personnel regardless of who controlled the state.

After 1855, by contrast, both conservatives and liberals had much greater success funding the university and moving the curriculum toward greater professionalism and modernity. Why the change? Pattridge points to the 1855 University Reform Law, enacted under conservative president-for-life Rafael Carrera. He argues that greater political stability under Carrera, coupled with greater economic vitality, allowed the state to fund adequately its main center of higher education for the first time ever. This financial solvency persisted after the liberal revolution of 1871, and thus from the mid-1850s until the end of the century the trend was toward higher and higher levels of funding for the University of San Carlos. In sum, this is Pattridge's second major conclusion: successful state formation by the mid-nineteenth century was mirrored in the university's dramatic rise from the late 1850s onward. Hence his claim that the real motor force behind Guatemalan development in the nineteenth century was not whether liberals or conservatives controlled the state, but rather the viability of the state itself.

If this work has one shortcoming it is that Pattridge does not use his study of institution building at the University of San Carlos to explore the intellectual history of the period. Surely Guatemala's main center of higher education would have been fertile ground for examining the ideas and beliefs of the country's elite during the nineteenth century, whether with regard to political culture broadly speaking or elite attitudes toward the Mayan...