1. Development
Economic globalization led to the reduction of the welfare state and led to social exclusion. The transformations of the globalized world have led to the emergence of a new culture in which people are increasingly removed from power and feel a growing indifference to the institutions of society that are crumbling and see their work and lives individualized.
In these circumstances, the societal matrix of the last forty years begins to fade. Today a new type of society is assumed in which the only thing that gives meaning to this is the market. New situations of inequality, poverty, marginalization are emerging. A new subject without rights is being given that does not recognize the right of the other and attempts against him, because it is denied by society.
New social actors are emerging that are only guided by the present, no matter the past or the future. Thus, man has been shaping the world more and more in a field of forces at his service, where structures are violated. In this context, a fundamental role is attributed to intellectuals as social agents of the world, from the perspective of class interests.
In the midst of this context, there is an educational system that has plenty of speeches and that, in the best of cases, prepares work but lacks efficient actions to train men committed to life. This motivates the evolution of the university to the current debate.
But, the incorporation of the University to the postmodern debate provokes the urgent need for a reflection in the light of the new times that pass, where there is talk of the "Loss of the tragic feeling of university life." A negative atmosphere is manifested against the centrality of an institution, which until recently had a privileged social place for the implementation of the program of freedom and happiness for all, because it houses the enlightened subject of modernity.
If society went as planned, universities would inevitably become privileged centers for the production and dissemination of universal transformative knowledge, where scientific-technical knowledge would occupy a leading place. Thus the universities had to become the social laboratory from which all the developmental democratic projects that began to manifest themselves throughout Latin America in the last twentieth century would be elaborated and executed.
Today, on the contrary, nobody believes that the University is going to lead to some revolutionary change, but there are strong doubts about its participation in the most elementary modernization process that society must carry out in order not to be totally disincorporated from the globalization process. The crisis finds a deepening that can be basically summarized in a central objective: to liquidate the possibility of state higher education and, with it, to prevent the public university from consolidating and developing as the only way that vast sectors of the population have to access to higher level training and knowledge.
Public universities belong to the state and, in the opinion of governments, they are unnecessary, precisely because private initiative can or should cover the service of higher education, and the same occurs with health, housing and public services, sectors that have main influence on the life of the majority of the population of the continent. The privatization of universities is the way to limit or deny the entry of the majority of the population to the higher level of education.
This problem has led Latin American public universities to lose much of the space they occupied within continental society. The situation of university education, like the educational sector as a whole, today presents an accumulated crisis that is the product of the application of a very defined policy for many years for public education in general and in particular for higher education and higher education. they have ended up sinking into institutional bankruptcy due to the role of the current state of macroeconomic policies of structural adjustments, within the world process of globalization, which demands a higher quality. The University asks to evaluate itself to face the threat of the environment where it is subjected to a severe budget suffocation,to a control that violates university autonomy and to a regime of indicators that discourages research and seeks to eliminate the labor rights of university teachers.
The current teaching system is so "rational" that it is designed more in terms of the subjects to be mastered by the student than in terms of the student himself. The difficulty is in the process of criticism that is not encouraged in formal education systems. It is not encouraged in creative processes because it is easier to understand with the security of the known, than to venture to look for the artificial chains that academics themselves create.
There is a clear and very evident systematic and historical neglect on the part of governments in financial terms to support research, science and technology initiatives inside and outside the universities.
This is precisely the essence of the current problem in understanding: how do Public Universities face this loss of space, what challenges do they have to overcome, how are they going to solve each one of them?
It is stated that Public Higher Education is the main factor of social mobility of peoples, which "have a strategic role in their ability to generate knowledge and technological innovations, as inducers of national development"
They are the ones who dedicate themselves, for the most part, to exploring the technological development of the countries in the area, a function that today more than ever is closely linked to the economic and social progress of nations. Public Universities provide a large accumulation of cultural, social, and economic information, where a truly broad vision of the peoples is really formed, "they give an important social and strategic impact".
It is said that Higher Education is an activity that generates particular benefits, the usufructuary have to assume not only the advantages but also the costs that such activity implies. For the Private University this is a very conflictive and management efficiency problem, especially for students, but what is clear is that pensions do not solve the problem because the amounts to be collected would not be very significant, furthermore, because they would discriminate against the poorest.
The way used to finance all Higher Education institutions by the state has been paternal; and detached from the criterion of evaluation of quality, equity and management efficiency. In order for it to make an important contribution to the progress of society and the state, it must understand that financing it is not a burden on public funds, rather, it is a long-term national necessity, to increase economic complexity and cultural development and Social.
Universities play a fundamental role in any perspective of the country's development, both for Latin America and for the world. They have to face these challenges, challenges and problems and integrate different approaches, given the diversity of economic, political and social contexts in which Higher Education is immersed in this region. Higher education must be able to respond to the needs of society in the 21st century.
Therefore, it is necessary to place Higher Education institutions at the disposal of governments, as active agents that formulate and implement policy in general, and education, science and technology policies in particular.
In this context, addressing the problems of society jointly by academics from the various disciplines is not merely an academic exercise. "Placing this concern at the center of political discourse implies ceasing to assume politics as an act of great men to frame it in the historical struggle of social movements"
Globalization, therefore, taking into account what has been stated before, is a reality because today integration, finance and information are creating a single global culture and market. We are in what Friedman calls "a train without brakes."
We see how in education, on a global scale with respect to other fields of society, the agglutinating symptoms of this global pandemic are less alarming, Latin America «only participated with 2% of the world's total investments in Science and Technology, ten years later it fell to 1%, while Asia rose from 15% to 21%. This was reduced since Latin America spent at the end of that decade an average fiscal amount per student enrolled in higher education less than in all regions of the world.
Today academic life in any Latin American university, both private and public, does nothing more than debate between "theoretical-ideological opportunism", as an exercise of avant-garde academic thought, intellectual drowsiness and a need to reproduce all existing structures ", the University professor who was supposed to have a given capacity to make the change repeats the knowledge elaborated in spaces other than universities and even more so in very distant latitudes of our countries.
Thus, there has been an increasingly systematic and frequent talk of a situation of structural bankruptcy of academic situations that could be called the end of all universities, a metaphor that contains a look of pain when observing that the most intrinsic functions of these institutions as they are creation, preservation and transmission of knowledge, they can be perfectly carried out today in a broader and much more efficient way by instances that have nothing to do with the academic world. Telecommunications networks (TV, cables, Internet) are concentrating a critical mass of information and knowledge in general that could hardly be generated and deposited in the university given the conditions of closed and obsolete structures that it has.
In other social places, which are not those that constitute the University, the cutting-edge knowledge is being produced and stored that allows the design of the levers that mobilize life today. The University has thus become a mere center for the consumption and reproduction of knowledge and knowledge that comes from private and governmental research institutions. Already at this moment it is not clear that the place from which it was conceived continues to be the natural habitat of enlightened reason par excellence.
That knowledge that must be built is not just a product, it is also a way to build new realities. But what is our concrete responsibility? What to do so that economic policy is also a policy of social integration?
Should academics be just aggregators of demands or social actors that generate projects? This task is not easy because when one has been immersed in disciplinary training, it is difficult to break with it, it is difficult to pose problems in a different way, to open up the knowledge of new realities. The problem is to break with these obstacles that make up this way of thinking, to solve the great challenges of this environment because in them lies the future destiny of the continent's development.
The state, therefore, must be the maximum responsible for financing the needs of all Higher Education, for the benefit of society itself and this in turn must be used to the maximum, it has to perform the function of guaranteeing human security in a manner may we successfully link the spheres of daily life at the individual and local level and of economic life at the regional and global level.
It is not a question of choosing between a change of state or market, but rather of seeking that the protest of society does not become a mere denunciation without perspectives; to contribute to the formation of new social actors and indirectly, to new economic and social policies. To recover the capacity of each country to act within itself to reduce the dissociation between economics and politics. The University has to be present here, it can have a great future, which implies choosing one, because this future is not something that we have to wait for it to arrive, but it will exist as long as it is built.
The situation of Public Higher Education is very peculiar, it has a function of extraordinary importance within society, when it transmits information for society and prepares a large number of professionals who will then go to the job market to satisfy their needs, this makes it that actually has an extremely high social value, as high as basic education, or more at times. It therefore deserves government support.
If the Public Universities are privatized, as reaffirmed in the FTAA agreements and which is an approach that has been carried out for several years by the different local governments as part of their financial adjustment policies, giving the possibility to their research centers of incorporate all the necessary information through new scientific advances and that which navigates the world through the Internet, thus limiting on many occasions the internal talents capable of generating new knowledge on the basis of local and regional solutions that can maintain identities, sovereignties and why not independence. And what is sought is to deny these Public Universities the right of their commitment to the future of the Latin American continent.
All the archaic and closed structures of a disciplinary institution cannot compete on equal terms with the possibilities of openings that information technologies offer today, applied to the process of transmission of knowledge.
Public universities are basic pieces of our society that require dynamism and flexibility to adapt - and anticipate, as much as possible - to the changes that surround us. We need public universities, endowed with a good government system and with sufficient means to create, produce and disseminate knowledge, both scientific and humanistic as well as technological. Universities to permanently train our men and women today and tomorrow, so that they can develop a task that allows them to achieve a decent quality of life, within the framework of a fair and progressive society.
Today, they have to fulfill their critical function within society and must fulfill their public mission - the development of citizenship education - in order to face the current challenges of Higher Education of "globalization", regionalization, marginalization, and fragmentation on the society".
In this context, universities have their functions to fulfill. The first function of the university is the training not only of its students, but also the transmission of their positions to society. This means that you have to teach how to learn and, in turn, learn to teach, this affects both the users of the service and the teachers of the system. The second function is to produce knowledge, that is, to investigate. This function implies, firstly, having the capacity to produce new innovative knowledge and, secondly, equipping itself with a teaching staff with the capacity to compete in this field.
The third and last function is the social one. Here the society-university relationship cannot be seen today as we did a generation ago. Neither then, nor at the moment, has the concern of political or economic leaders for university activities been too intense, of which, often, they have ignored elementary data both in relation to their activity and their organization. To guide this relationship in accordance with what our society demands, it is essential to continue expanding the exchange of information between universities, political leaders, and social and economic leaders.
It is necessary for the University to maintain its vital function, of production and preservation of knowledge, since it is in charge of preparing the machinery for work under capitalist market conditions for all qualified labor.
These are reflections that these universities practice despite the growing limitations that they suffer from state funding, both scientific and technological. That is why the University has to change to continue being what it is, a center for the transmission of knowledge, because it is part of the solution to the current problem of humanity.
Many universities are not clear about the way forward to achieve the development of the country, they understand it in different ways. "The most important thing is to know that this process of changes that exists in the University is to continue being what it is, not to transform it into something else", as certain adjustment plans that are being applied today intend.
It is said that it is necessary to maintain the autonomy of thought of the University, without ties from outside, to achieve a University that trains human beings open to anyone who wants to make the effort to study. The University as a generator of the most important wealth that nations have today, which is knowledge about humanity.
But autonomy is not only a right, it is also a duty. The concept of autonomy is also closely linked to the concept of university, which university and for whom is that university. In defining these matters, we demand that university students can be autonomous, without any type of outside interference, without pressure from any of the public powers. This is the very essence of the university. The university community needs to be able to define the course for the university, not with its back to the country, but with the country, with its needs and perspectives. Not to put ourselves in a glass urn but to think and act as members of a national community that fulfills a specific function.
In this sense, a new scheme of change is oriented, where an open university is observed, that there is an open and multiple curriculum that adapts to the transdisciplinarity necessary to achieve a total change within the institution, which raises the formation of a lucid subject, capable of adapting to new changes in the environment and who knows how to take advantage of and consistently use each and every one of the scientific and technological advances that the new challenges impose.
But what will not change is the need that these institutions will have to prepare the new generations for the future, a future that today is changing more rapidly and transcendently than ever before, such a perspective should not cause fear, but rather look good. as a challenge. It is time for the change to enter a new stage of humanity in which many of the ambitions for peace and the progress of peoples can be realized. Preparing the new generations for this challenge and giving them the means to change things is a challenging task for all those who are directly involved or interested in higher education today.
In this framework, the special responsibility of social science academics becomes relevant, interested in replacing the dominant logic of the market with another that seeks new forms of people and social and political actions that make a sustained alternative development model a reality.
2. Conclusions
Higher education must continue to be a priority of public policies since it is a basic element of competitiveness. That is why it is necessary for political representatives and society to have a better knowledge of the university world and its possibilities of providing a quality offer. It is necessary to work with a system of universities, rather than with the sum of them to work with restructuring criteria of the current organizations that allow us to continuously adapt them to the changes that surround us. It is necessary to introduce flexibility in university organizations, distort academic life and bet on a new system of government.
The main challenge facing Latin American and Caribbean education is to adequately face the rapid pace of technological development and the other transformations of the contemporary world.
But the great challenge for academics is the decision to adopt a stance on social problems, adopt new ways of thinking and acting in the changing environment shaped by an increasingly complex and globalized world. To find new ways of thinking to find a meaning in life that results in better levels of well-being for everyone.
The problems of current Latin American society are so complex that it requires the common effort of all academics in Latin America and the Caribbean with a multidisciplinary approach to jointly face the problems and aspire to a general social project. But it requires a collective conscience that is capable of discussing change, facing it and having a great will to act and on each of the circumstances to save ourselves.
This is a complex task, it involves an effort not only intellectual, but of the entire society.
3. Bibliography
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