The Owl of Minerva: The Political Contributions of Latin American Public Universities

Many scholars in Latin America would argue that we stand on the "precipice of a planetary cliff."¹ Before us we have two options that correspond to two distinct futures. One future involves the expansion of democracy, extension of human rights, and concerted efforts to address the growing threats of global climate change.² Meanwhile, the other future involves the dismantling of democracy in lieu of populist and authoritarian rule, an increase in attacks on marginalized populations, and the continued environmental degradation of our planet.³

As we move forward with our choice, we must recognize the importance of higher education on global policy. In Latin America, higher education has had a regional and global impact, and analyzing this impact on both domestic and international affairs is a difficult but necessary exercise. This article briefly traces the development of higher education in Latin America with a particular focus on public universities, since it is their contributions that have moved theoretical and political arguments toward positions critical of neoliberalism in the postcolonial era.⁴ Public universities are marked by an institutional "public trust" in their pursuit of the common good, but this in no way obviates private universities in Latin America, especially those that conduct rigorous scholarship and were not intended to be models of private accumulation of capital.⁵ From this perspective, the identity of the public university is distinct from the subtypes of universities that emerged after the eighteenth century.

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latin American universities have increasingly confronted the economic model and cultural politics of neoliberalism. The financial presence of China in the region, reaching universities to some extent, has shifted the nature of Latin American economies and deserves attention as well. I conclude by exploring potential alternatives for social emancipation in the pursuit of scholarship in public education, which require strong leadership and collaboration.

A Historical Excursus

The powerful Spanish and Portuguese empires both colonized what is now Latin America by building on the alliance of the hisopo and the sword. The hisopo is the utensil traditionally used by priests to dispense holy water in ceremonies, and the Inquisition dominated the Catholic Church, which brandished the hisopo in both Spanish and Portuguese confessional societies.

However, while the styles of Spanish and Portuguese colonization may have had their similarities, one area where the two differed was the role assigned to higher education. The Spanish developed universities almost immediately following their conquest, colonization, and settlement. Portuguese colonists, on the other hand, delayed the organization of a modern system of higher education until the early twentieth century. The Royal Academy of Artillery, founded in 1792, was the basis for the organization of the oldest and largest Brazilian university, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, founded in 1920.⁶ Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, major changes occurred in neither Portuguese nor Spanish higher education. Later, the emblematic Argentine Córdoba educational reform of 1918 gave rise to a democratized university model in Latin America that proved impactful for the region as a whole.⁷

Historically, the establishment of the University of Bologna in 1088 marked the dawn of the medieval European university. The modern university, however, emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inspired by reforms occurring in European countries such as England, Prussia, and France. These reforms led to the development of another model of higher education—the pragmatic American university, which developed from the US adoption of a modified German research university model. While these university models profess different orientations, they share the lineage of the Western canon. This lineage includes the English model, exemplified by Cardinal Newman's promotion of liberal arts; the von Humboldt model in Prussian-dominated Germany, representing the research-oriented university; and the French Napoleonic university model engineered to support state administration and the training of state civil servants. These traditions, particularly that of von Humboldt, impacted the creation of the pragmatic American university.⁸

In Latin America, the 1918 University Reform in Córdoba, Argentina, created yet another model of higher education that emphasized the free and...