University autonomy and the reform of higher education

Abstract

We start our argument from the philosophical foundation underlying the idea of university autonomy, suggesting that its realization is only possible within a long-duration process. Along this process, the historical development of the university has shown the unavoidable tensions between the university communities and the public powers pushing for its control. High within those tensions are the policies of demand subsidy, implemented within strategies directed at weakening the state, and promoting the commercialization of higher education, as it has been happening in the United States and Latin America in the last decades. We introduced the notion of public goods in order to overcome the false dualism between the public and the private, so keen to the government’s vision, and from where springs the idea that attributes public universities’ inefficiency to their autonomy and their notorious lack of market discipline. Our hypothesis is that there is a positive relationship between the systematic reduction of university autonomy and the fall in the quality of public higher education, premised on the political composition of university’s boards of trustees, in which governments and external groups are dominant transforming university autonomy into heteronomy. In that context the state controls and measures educational quality but does not invest on it. We suggest that the key to reach an effective development path for higher education is neither in its social and economic capacities, nor in the specific educational reforms chosen, but in the capacity to adopt a long–run set of shared values that makes those in charge of educational activity (students, teachers, administrators, families, communities) the best evaluators of their own performance, within processes led by public purposes that overcome private and individual interests. But of course that would be a very unlikely outcome without full university autonomy.