THE FOCUS
ON SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY Simon Schwartzman
Published in Burton R. Clark, editor, Perspectives
in Higher Education - Eight Disciplinary and Comparative Views. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984.
Summary:
SCIENCE AND HIGHER EDUCATION: PAST AND PRESENT
SCIENCE IN LATIN AMERICA The
Iberic Heritage
The Introduction of Science and the Search for a New University
Postwar Optimism: University Science and Technology Development
The Modern Crisis
Out of the Ashes?
CONCLUSIONS
POLICY IMPLICATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Notes
THE FOCUS ON SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY(1)
The idea that scientific research and higher education are necessarily linked
together is widespread. The relationship is seen as basic in the formation
of educational policies in many countries. A classical version of this idea
has been stated by Talcott Parsons, who believes that the modern scientist
has a social place similar in many ways to the position of the humanistic
scholar in the early universities. For Parsons, the scholar was "the
precursor of the scientist and is of course today his colleague in the most
highly educated sector of the population." Both embody a common tradition
of scholarship and respect for impartial objectivity and evidence, a tradition
that is characteristic of Western culture. "In the most modern era,
this cultural tradition has above all become embodied in the university
as its principal institutionalized frame."(2)
A more modern version of this linkage places the university fully within
the technological revolution of our times. "Throughout the period of
emerging industrialism in Europe and America," states A. H. Halsey,
the principal function of the universities has been that of
status differentiation of elites with some assimilation of students from
the lower strata. But the progressive secularization of higher learning
since medieval times has increased the potential of the universities as
sources of technological and therefore of social change until now they
are beginning to occupy a place as part of the economic foundation of
a new type of society... Both as research organizations and training establishments,
the institutions of higher education in this period have been drawn more
closely to the economy either directly or through the state... The exchange
of ideas, people and contracts between university departments and research
institutes and their counterparts in private industry and government agencies
is such as to merge these organizations and to assimilate the life styles
of their staff.(3)
This marriage, however, not at all well established, has a clouded past.
"Far from being a natural match," observes Joseph Ben-David, "research
and teaching can be organized within a single framework only under specific
circumstances."(4) Historically, this
unification of science and the university found its best example in Germany,
specifically in the University of Berlin in the nineteenth century today,
it is best represented by the leading universities in the United States.
The vitality of these systems of higher education made them models to be
followed and imitated internationally; and the notion that the universities
are the natural setting for research follows naturally. The reverse, however,
is not nearly so clear. The volume that brings together the classic papers
of Robert K. Merton on the sociology of science contains references to universities
on only seven of its 600 pages.(5) A more
recent book, Science, Technology and Society, does not fare much
better: it has about twenty scattered references to universities within
its 600 pages. None of these references make any mention of systems of higher
education in a broader sense.(6)
If the marriage has so many problems, why insist on it? It would be very
easy to show that the overlap between the systems of science production
and those of higher education has not been significant in the past and to
muster good reasons for keeping them apart in the future. There is, however,
an obvious gap between this empirical reality and the strong convictions
about the linkages between science and higher education; this fact is significant
in itself and should be examined with care. let us first examine the evidence,
and then try to understand the tensions and difficulties that are involved.
SCIENCE AND HIGHER EDUCATION: PAST AND PRESENT
With reference to the past, let it be understood that we are not dealing
here with two well-identified social realities, but rather with several
highly changing aspects of social phenomena which often come together under
the same names.(7) "Higher education"
in contemporary' systems, bringing together thousands of teachers and millions
of students, is very different from the type of advanced learning which
took place in the old and exclusive European universities of past centuries.
Aside from the obvious differences in structure and size, the systems of
higher education have traditionally performed (and still do) at least three
quite different but not necessarily convergent functions. First, there was
the national role of training for the scholarly professions, law, medicine,
and theology. This function was later expanded to include the new technology-oriented
engineering careers. Second, the function of general education, first serving
as propaedeutics for the professions, gradually evolved as a cultural and
intellectual function on its own. Third, the function of generating new
knowledge is, in modern times, associated with the idea of "science."
"Science" has different meanings, and sociologists of science
often give to it a narrow definition which makes it only one among several
forms of advanced knowledge. In this specific sense, scientific knowledge
is based on empirical observation, in contrast with classical knowledge
based on hermeneutics and rational speculation; it tends to be systematized
and geared toward explanation, in contrast with practical, applied knowledge;
it is produced by a community of freethinking scholars, in opposition to
all forms of authoritative systems of thought and belief.
Science as technological knowledge is very old, and all forms of higher
education have always implied, if not the production, at least the systematization
and transmission of highly developed knowledge.(8)
Historians of science narrowly tend to link its emergence to the European
Renaissance, as part of the general breakdown of medieval order and the
assertion of individualism in its different cultural, intellectual, and
economic forms. The institutional history' of European science up to the
beginning of the nineteenth century is a tale of its gradual conquest of
a central position in the culture and international outlook of Western societies.
Experimental science, as it is also called, evolved basically outside and
in opposition to the traditional universities. Only in the nineteenth century
did they establish the intimacy that today is often taken for granted.(9)
The starting point of this long process is probably best dramatized by Galileo
Galilei's plight, but less because of his specific proposition that the
earth revolves around the sun than because of the way the truth is to be
established, be it through the authority of "classical" works
endorsed by the Church or through empirical observations and rational persuasion.(10) Galileo's prosecution was one of the last attempts
of the religious establishment of his time to keep the findings of empirical
observation of the physical world subordinated to its dogmas and institutional
authority. From that time on, and in line with the individualist ethics
of emerging capitalism and Protestantism, empirical science has flourished,
moving from its main cradle, Italy, to the much more fertile soils of France,
England, and, later, Germany. In the nineteenth century, with Darwin's evolutionism,
the biological sciences took their turn in establishing their autonomy while
confronting the religious dogmas of the time.
This new and increasingly prestigious type of knowledge did not easily become
a part of the university. The universities in Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge
were older centers of classical learning and as such paid no more than secondary
attention to the empirical sciences. In England, however, scientists of
the new type met at the Royal Society, founded in 1660. Its aim, according
to its founders, was eminently practical and technical:". . . to improve
the knowledge of natural things, and all useful Arts, Manu- factures, Mechanick
practices, Engynes, and Inventions by Experiments (not meddling with Divinity,
Morals, Politicks, Rhetoric or Logick)."(11)
This definition of purposes did not correspond to the full truth, since
many of the leading figures of the Royal Society (Robert Boyle, John Wilkins,
and several other members of the "Philosophical College" that
gave birth to the Royal Society) were strongly identified with Puritanism
and parliamentarianism. The practical purposes of the society tended to
make room for a much more ambitious view of the new science, as the foundation
of a new philosophy. If in its first years the practical influence of Francis
Bacon was very strong; it "declined during the 1670's and. was supplanted
by a 'Galileian' trend as manifest above all in the work of Newton who became
a fellow of the Society in 1671."(12)
A similar practical aim preceded the establishment of the French Academy
of Sciences in 1666. Contrary to its English counterpart, it was not a voluntary
association, but a government-sponsored institution organized with the explicit
aim of helping the expansion of French commerce and industry. Nevertheless,
the scientific success of the French Academy seems to have been inversely
proportional to its devotion to practical tasks.
In both England and France the establishment of scientific societies played
a dual role. On the one hand, practical and useful purposes were served
which benefitted only the economic and political elites of that time. On
the other, groups of distinguished scientists launched a protracted assault
on the traditional culture and philosophy, whose strongholds were the traditional
universities. This new science was, in other words, the foundation of a
new world vision - some authors have called it a "scientistic ideology"
- linked to the emergence of new social groups who benefitted from the social,
political, and economic changes brought about by the industrial revolution
they engendered. The climax of this process was the publication of Isaac
Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Matematica, the mathematical foundation
of natural philosophy. The title was a clear indication of the immensity
of Newton's undertaking, which went far beyond a simple and utilitarian
determination of empirical phenomena. What Newton achieved was a new understanding
of the universe, where reason combined gracefully with empirical observation.
Modern science, with the Newtonian synthesis, finally reached its dominant
position in relation to the old scholastic culture, by means of its own
language and style. There was an obvious analogy' between the harmonv of
Newton's universe and the ideal of social harmony which was to be created
by the advance of individual freedom and rationality.(13)
While Newton provided the empirical sciences with the necessary respectability
to challenge the old scholarship entrenched in the universities, the modernization
of the professions gradually forced open other gates. In the eighteenth
century some institutions began to provide a much more technical and specialized
type of education than that found in traditional universities-medicine in
the Scottish universities and engineering in the École Normale des Ponts
et Chaussés in France and in the Gergakademie in Freiberg were among the
best known. Very often the new professional training was provided outside
the university, and the tendency around I 800 seemed to suggest that education
for the "learned professions" provided by the traditional universities
was about to disappear, taking with it the whole system of professional
privileges it entailed.(14) The new trend
was related to two pressures: the need to bring to the old professions the
new knowledge being produced by the experimental sciences; and the need
to break the privileges of the old professions and their corporations so
as to allow for the emergence of new professions, new schools, new methods
of teaching and learning, and the final substitution of one intellectual
elite for another.
In no country was this substitution more dramatic than in France. According
to Ben-David,
the new system that began to emerge in 1794 consisted of a
series of professional schools for teachers doctors, and engineers needed
by the state. Scientific studies and scientistic philosophy were to inherit
the central place that had been occupied by the classics in both secondary
and higher education. Eventually, under Napoleon, the scientific orientation
was weakened, the emphasis on the new scientific philosophy was completely
abolished, and classical learning was restored to its former importance
in secondary schooling. But higher education remained identified with
specialized education for various professions.(15)
Gradually the old privileges were replaced by new ones. The Grandes Écoles
created by the Napoleonic system to form the technical cadres for the state
became centers for training the new French intellectual leadership. While
these schools provided a high-level education for the elite, a second tier
of higher education was created for the larger population, eventually incorporating
some of the institutional elements of the old universities. The Grandes
Écoles performed, in practice, a subversion of the old notion that general
education should precede and provide the foundation for professional training.
In the new system, specialized education was perceived as the best way to
intellectual development, and those who passed through these schools were
considered men of a new type of culture.(16) Scientific research was never a central activity
in this system; it was tangentially taught by some scientists, who did most
of their work in separate institutions.
Changes in Britain were more complex and less dramatic. The old, traditional
universities never abandoned their role of training the country's aristocracy,
but they gradually included in their programs the specialized studies of
modern science, while insisting, according to Ben-David, that "the
purpose of specialized study was not necessarily the acquisition of practical
skills, but that it was the best way to the education of the mind and was
an end in itself."(17) At the same
time other institutions of higher learning, more directly geared toward
professional education, started to appear. Ultimately, professional training
became the main aim of the country's higher education system, but the emphasis
on scholarship and general education provided fertile ground for scientific
research in the leading universities.
The most widespread revolution, which would become the model for other countries
in the late nineteenth century, was the one that began at the University
of Berlin. The more general social context seems to have been provided by
the emergence of an educated middle class which lacked the alternatives
of economic and social participation existing in England and France at the
time, and which placed all the pressures for mobility; on the state and
on the educational system. The university became one of the few channels
of social mobility available to this emerging group, and its social role
was perceived as much more than a simple ground for professional training.
The philosophical meaning of the new knowledge developed at German universities
tended to be emphasized by the preeminence given to the German philosophers
(beginning with Kant, who sought to provide the philosophical foundation
for modern science) and by the development of Naturphilosophie, a much more
humanistic and romantic vision of the world than the Cartesianism and positivism
that had spread to the rest of Europe from France. The strength and vitality
of the German scientific community is expressed by the establishment, in
1822, of the Deutsche Natufforscher Versammlung, an association of German-speaking
scientists and doctors which preceded the political unification of Germany
by several decades.(18)
It was in this context that an effective integration between teaching and
research was achieved for the first time. It occurred early in the fields
of chemistry, pharmacy, and physiology, disciplines that were systematized
enough to allow for coherent and integrated teaching with an experimental
content. More important than the content, however, was the fact that a large
educational system was being created in German-speaking countries and scientific
production became a decisive factor in the competition for prestigious positions
in that system. The universities, to enhance their reputation, searched
for researchers, while they, in turn, demanded laboratories and other research
facilities. Students who wished to enter university careers were obliged
to follow the path of their masters, and physicians, chemists, and pharmacists
had the opportunity to obtain scientific training in their schools. From
the beginning this university system benefitted from the strong ties it
established with the emerging German chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
The notion that teaching and research should necessarily be joined arose
from this context and became the model in spite of obvious difficulties.(19)
Scientific research tends to absorb resources and time, which is often a
liability and a problem for institutions geared to professional training.
Also, the qualifications needed for a scientific education are often superior
and much more specialized than those required for the competent exercise
of the professions. These difficulties have been overcome in some places
and times; in Germany they led to the creation of a differentiated system
of scientific research, the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (today the Max-Planck
Institutes). The American system, when it later revived the linkage between
teaching and research, did so through an absolute innovation: the establishment
of scientific careers in graduate schools side by side with education for
the classic professions. A doctoral degree in this new system became an
alternative to a professional title. In the European system, in contrast,
the degree is mostly a preparation for advancement in a teaching career
within the university. In other words, scientific research in the American
model is not a propaedeutic activity in the teaching process but a goal
of its own, with its own requirements, resources, and dedication. This system,
though not enough to bring all research into the universities, provided
science with much more room than it ever had in other countries and places.
This historical overview confirms the lopsidedness of the relationship between
science and higher education. From the standpoint of science, systems of
higher education are not necessarily very important. For those who think
of science in Mertonian terms - as the work of a community of scholars engaged
in the search for truth - what is paramount is the absence of social and
political pressures that might challenge the scientist's commitment to the
norms of the scientific ethos. The university can provide a favorable environment
for scientists, but it can also threaten them with the imposition of external
criteria and demands on their work.(20)
For those who think of science and technology as an integrated component
of modem industrial societies, the emphasis is much more on the linkages
between science and economy than on those between science and the educational
system(21) With this perspective, as exemplified
by Halsey's comment at the beginning of this chapter, university research
is nothing but one sector of a large research and development establishment,
and the educational process is identical with manpower training.
The picture is not the same from the point of view of the higher education
system. Here, the notion that the university is basically a community of
scholars engaged in the pursuit of knowledge plays a highly significant
role in the legitimation of its demands for social recognition, autonomy,
resources, and prestige. This role is no doubt more strongly stressed in
countries where other functions of higher education - professional training,
general education-are still not well established. It is certainly not by
chance that, in a country such as Brazil, the expressions "higher education
system" and "university" are used almost interchangeably,
so that the aura of prestige usually associated with the latter is extended
to the former. This legitimation function explains, according to Joseph
Ben-David, the resistance of most university systems to accepting the differentiation
of their functions. For Ben-David, "this combination of advanced research
and study has been realized only in small parts of the university, but those
parts, in which teachers and students use their freedom for its original
purpose of research and study, have legitimated the turning of freedom by
others who do not do research or study into unjustified privilege."(22)
Systems of higher education in general, then, need science more than the
scientific systems need them. For this reason the notion that science finds
its "natural" place in the university seems to be self-evident
(when seen from the latter's standpoint) and is so even in societies where
linkages between the two are rather weak. If this is true, one might expect
that systems of higher education would commonly reserve a special place
for scientific research. In fact, they very often do, but the coexistence
of scientific research with other explicit and implicit functions of the
educational systems is not always pacific.
In short, the study of higher education systems from the perspective of
their relationships with scientific research calls attention to some paradoxes
that, if properly understood, lead to a better understanding of the systems'
mechanisms of social legitimation. The basic paradox is that there is a
large gap between the ideology of the centrality of scientific research
in the higher educational systems and the historical fact that the overlap
between the two is problematical and often reduced to a small number of
elite universities. If the empirical and historical analysis is not done
properly, there is the danger of taking ideology' for reality and of overlooking
the other functions performed by systems of higher education as well as
the different institutional settings where scientific research tends to
base itself. When properly understood, however, the analysis illuminates
some basic inner tensions and conflicts frequently observed in higher education
systems which are often ignored when they are seen only from a strictly
educational or functional point of view.
SCIENCE IN LATIN AMERICA
Latin America is a living laboratory, a privileged ground in which to examine
the interplay among scientific research, scientistic ideologies, and the
realities of higher education systems. The I,,,atin American educational
institutions have always been part of Western culture, but they very often
are superimposed upon a completely different society. This duality sometimes
has been interpreted as a contradiction between the "ideal" and
the "real" Latin American societies, leading to the notion that
the "ideal," or "European," parts are false and alienated
and should be replaced by the "real" ones. In fact, this contradiction
is part of the reality itself, and this is probably one of the reasons why
ideologies play so important a role in these societies. Science, as the
ideal of Western rationality, is an obvious candidate for ideologies that
affect educational systems most directly(23).
The Iberic Heritage
Spain, from the early sixteenth century, brought its university system to
Latin America, but Portugal did not.(24) At the time of independence, in the early nineteenth
century, there were universities in Mexico, Peru, Cuba, Guatemala, Chile,
and Argentina, among other countries. In Brazil, under Portuguese influence,
the first schools of higher education were established no earlier than 1808,
and only in 1920 was the first university created in Rio de Janeiro. The
ties with Spain were severed during the wars of independence, and the old,
church-controlled universities were transformed according to the French
Napoleonic professional model: different schools, or "faculties,"
for each profession, and official licenses for professional practice granted
by the government to students upon graduation. In Brazil, where there was
more continuity with Portugal, a few technical schools and institutions
were established by an exiled Portuguese king in the first decades of the
nineteenth century: a botanic garden, a library, a naval and military school,
two schools of medicine, two schools of law, a museum of natural history,(25) Eventually, the Brazilian system also developed
in the direction of the Napoleonic model, and the universities and professional
schools became a necessary step for access to bureaucratic and political
positions by the children of the elites.
Without trying to cover the wide variety of experiences throughout the continent,
it is safe to say that the professional schools did not emphasize technical
training and, even less, scientific research. Medicine and engineering are
supposedly technical professions and, therefore, should command some measure
of technical expertise. But the requirements for professional licensing
tended to be formal and bureaucratic, rather than substantive and technical,
and the professional schools tended, as a rule, to expel or push to the
margin those who tried to bring them closer to the European standards of
proficiency.
Scientific research was typically brought to Latin American countries in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by foreign immigrants
who worked in government research institutions outside the university systems:
astronomic observatories, geographic and geologic institutes, botanic gardens,
museums of natural history, and, later, institutions for public health and
disease control. There, the newcomers eventually trained their own disciples
and sometimes taught at the engineering and medical schools and at the universities.
They usually tried to expand research beyond their institutional charters,
and sometimes they were successful, as in the case of the Manguinhos Institute
of Bacteriology in Rio de Janeiro.(26) In
general, however, they could not expand or institutionalize their work as
part of a long-lasting scientific tradition; the impact of their work, if
it was transmitted, was mainly perceived in Europe.
By the time of World War II research in science had already made significant
inroads in the university systems of some of the largest Latin American
countries, and the notion that these universities could become the preferred
place for the scientific development of these countries did make some sense.
A few centers of medical and biological research attained high standards
of scientific work, among them the Instituto de Fisiologia of the Universidad
de Buenos Aires, under Bernardo A. Houssay (Nobel prize in physiology and
medicine, 1947), and later the Instituto de Biofísica of the Universidade
do Rio de Janeiro, under Carlos Chagas Filho.
Advances in medical and biological research tended to have a limited impact
on the higher education system as a whole, as they were largely restricted
to the medical schools and related institutes. The introduction of modern
mathematics and physics, on the other hand, was usually coupled with projects
for comprehensive reforms of the universities and of the educational system
in general. These projects were often inspired by some version of the nineteenth-century
German model of integration of science and teaching, even when the most
apparent influence was French, as in the case of the Brazilian initiatives
in the 1930s. (The old Escola de Medicina, however, incorporated in the
Universidade de São Paulo in 1934, was already receiving support from the
Rockefeller Foundation and established full-time teaching and research in
the decade 1910- 1920.(27)
The Introduction of Science and the Search for a
New University
The most comprehensive attempt to launch science within a new university
in Brazil was the establishment of the Universidade de Sao Paulo and its
Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras in 1934. This university was created
during a period of intense mobilization by the state of Sao Paulo's economic
and intellectual elite in the wake of their defeat in the conflict with
the Vargas regime. The state of Sao Paulo was already the country's economic
leader, thanks to the coffee plantations and to an emerging industrial complex
that had started to grow in association with it, benefitting from a large
mass of European immigrants. A new university, structured around a school
of sciences, was thought to be a long-range project that could give the
state the leadership position its elite desired. At the same time it could
provide the state with the intellectual, technical, and professional cadres
needed in a rapidly modernizing economy. All members of the new Faculdade
were recruited in Europe. German chemists and biologists, Italian physicists
and mathematicians, French historians and anthropologists, all came with
different motivations and for different periods. Some remained throughout
the years of World War II and afterward.
Thanks to the quality of some of the new professors and students, to the
autonomy granted the university in its first years (which contrasted sharply
with the growing centralization that was the landmark of the Vargas regime),
and to the resources that a growing state economy provided, the Universidade
de Sao Paulo became the most important teaching and research establishment
in the country. As a center for scientific and technological research, however,
it was limited by the initial constraints of the Faculdade de Filosofia
as well as by established interests in professional careers.
A similar, if less successful, attempt was made a few years later in Rio
de Janeiro by Brazil's Ministry of Education. In 1937 most of the city's
higher education institutions were brought together under a newly created
Universidade do Brasil, which was supposed to be the model for all institutions
of higher education in the country. According to its plan (which became
law in 1937), the university had to establish courses and research facilities
in all areas, and a new Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras was to
be created, also staffed with foreign scholars. This project was less successful
than the earlier one in São Paulo for several reasons, one of which was
the authoritarian climate that prevailed in the Brazilian national government
from 1937 to 1945. The new school never attained São Paulo's quality, and
it had little influence over the older parts of the university. The notion
that a single model could be established for the whole country, however,
together with the idea that all higher education should be buttressed by
scientific research, became an undisputed assumption for Brazil's education
policy in the years that followed.(28)
Postwar Optimism: University Science and Technology
Development
Optimism was high in the first years after World War II regarding the positive
role science and technology might play in raising the levels of social and
economic development in Latin American countries. The war, having shown
the awesome destructive power of science and technology, led to the hope
that if oriented constructively these forces would have a positive impact
upon society. The wave of technological change which swept the industrial
and agricultural sectors in those years seemed only to confirm this idea.(29)
In Chile, the formation of the National Council for Scientific and Technological
Research was suggested in the early 1950s by the dean of the Facultad de
Ciencias Fisicas y Matematicas of the Universidad de Chile. He believed
research, government, teaching, and economic development in Chile, and in
South America in general, should be joined: " . . .development agencies,
linked closely with the universities, must necessarily influence the orientation
and priority given to large-scale national-level research in areas relating
to these countries' natural resources and their improved exploitation. We
also believe that technological research should be closely related to high-level
scientific training, and through this medium to scientific research and
teaching."(30)
This idea was implemented with relative success during the tenure of Juan
Gomes Millas as rector of the Universidad de Chile (1953-1958). A law in
1954 created the Fund for University Construction and Research, which specified
that plants, laboratories, experimental stations, and research institutes
be created and oriented "toward cooperation with the Corporation for
the Development of Production, with state technical organs, and with private
entities and firms. A council, made up of the Rectors of all the universities
in the country, headed by the Rector of the Universidad de Chile, was to
prepare annual plans for coordinating all the technological research which
the universities carried out."(31)
The view that science at the universities could play a central role in socioeconomic
development was part of a "developmentalist" ideology that emanated
from the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC).
In a document published in 1970, Raul Prebisch emphasized the need for the
adaptation and recombination of international technological knowledge to
meet the specific conditions of Latin America. He pointed out that priorities
should be established from an economic planning point of view, and that
research programs should be organized to respond to these priorities. "All
this has a close relationship with education. It will be necessary to promote
educational programs that, besides the diffusion of technologies, should
have as one of their main purposes, the stimulation of the creative capacity
in this field."(32)
While agreeing with Prebisch that the educational system could do little
by itself without an overall policy of socioeconomic development, Jorge
Graciarena, a sociologist who also belonged to ECLAC, believed that "until
now, the Latin American university has remained at the margin of the problems
of underdevelopment because of its little or no capacity to identify and
solve them... Today, however, it is difficult to conceive future solutions
for the basic problems of development without a more active and large participation
of the university," which had two strategic roles to play: to train
manpower and to produce knowledge - not any knowledge, however, but knowledge
that would be relevant to local conditions. Thus there was need for a "national,
scientific ideology" and even a Latin American ideology, which in fact
was present in the frustrated attempt to organize a continentwide system
of graduate courses in the social sciences.(33)
This idea also found support in the United States and was a significant
part of the Alliance for Progress program during John Kennedy's tenure,
both directly through the United States Agency for International Development
and indirectly via several private foundations which increased their activities
in South America during the 1960s. Chile was a privileged recipient of this
type of international support. In 1965, after a long internal discussion,
the Facultad de Ciencias was established at the Universidad de Chile. Its
creation coincided with an ambitious convenio between the University
of Chile and the University of California, with support from the Ford Foundation;
the agreement specified reciprocal acknowledgment of courses of study and
degrees between the two institutions and several cooperative programs. During
the 1965-1978 period, 323 Chileans and 287 Californians took part in the
program: "127 Chileans obtained degrees from the University of California;
42 in Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine; 4 in Arts and Literature; 6 in
the Library Development Program; 63 in Natural Sciences and Engineering;
12 in Social Science. Close to 1,000 books, articles in journals, papers
presented to conferences and meetings, dissertations, theses, audio recordings,
films, paintings, resulted from research projects supported directly or
indirectly by Convenio funds during the period 1964-78."(34)
A similar, optimistic view preceded the creation of the Universidade de
Brasilia in the early 1960s under the inspiration of Darcy Ribeiro. For
him, "the mastery and cultivation of science - as the language of the
emerging civilization - can be fruitfully achieved only within the universities,
specially in underdeveloped countries. Isolated institutes tend to become
wasteful institutions of low scientific creativity, with almost no contribution
in terms of technological research and nothing whatsoever regarding the
education of highly qualified personnel. The university, on the contrary,
as it performs its role as a teaching institution at the graduate level,
can and must not only contribute to the understanding of man and nature
but must also develop, as a by-product of its day-to-day activities, the
multipliers of research that could lead to the development of science, self-awareness
of the national reality, and the search for solutions of its problems."(35)
This was not to be a university simply for professors and scientists; it
was to be for intellectuals, "each of whom would project his own field
through a personal and sometimes dramatic experience of the Brazilian reality.
That is, each one, instead of alienating himself, had to confront the Brazilian
problem with his whole body and soul, on questions not only about the university
but also about its social, political and economic aspects. Although not
all of them had the same level of experience, they all knew the derogatory
meaning that used to be attached in Brazil to the label 'intellectual,'
and they did not hide their disposition to change it through the active
transformation of our social and political process."(36)
The modernization of the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales of the
Universidad de Buenos Aires, after the end of the first Peronist period
in 1955, followed a similar inspiration. In 1966 its director, Rolando V.
Garcia, presented a paper to the Fifth Pugwash Conference containing one
of the stronger and more explicit endorsements of the notion that science
should develop through the universities. Comparing Latin American with northern
universities, Garcia said that "Latin American universities are much
more complex living organisms. They are, on many occasions, the vanguard
of the most progressive forces in the country. Historically, they have always
taken an active part in every important political or social struggle. No
wonder that most governments, the armed forces, and the Church are afraid
of the universities."(37) The political
turbulence of the Latin American universities contrasted with the serenity
of Harvard, Oxford, or the Sorbonne, "quiet places where students are
given regular doses of academic wisdom and provided with a detached attitude
toward those problems which are the concern of professional politicians."(38)
This turbulence was a good thing, according to Garcia, and implied a continuing
two-front struggle. One side of the conflict was political, external to
the university, and was to change the social, economic, and political conditions
that were responsible for underdevelopment. The other was internal, a conflict
against the "sacred cows" who did not allow for the development
of institutions that could he fully aware of their responsibilities. The
internal task was, essentially, "the process of transforming an institution
dominated by lawyers and physicians into an institution where physicists,
mathematicians, chemists and biologists share with specialists in social
science and public health the highest priority." This transformed university
should work according to a global plan that should be established as "a
body at the highest governmental level where economists, scientists and
technical officers of all (technical) branches of government meet to consult
and to lay down the scientific policy of the country'. The participation
of the universities is here of primary importance."
The Modern Crisis
It is obvious that these different projects included individuals with different
ideologies and visions of the role science, higher education, and the universities
should play in the transformation of their societies. More seriously, experience
has shown that it was relatively easy to improve the quality of small graduate
programs, much more difficult to change the higher educational systems as
a whole, and almost impossible to make significant improvements beyond that.
Besides, the expansion and modernization of the economy in the region after
the war were based in large part on the introduction of foreign capital
and ready-made technology from outside, with little demand for local advanced
research and highly trained manpower. In fact, the changes required the
services of only a limited portion of the region's population, leading to
increased differentiation between its "modern" and "traditional"
sectors. Chile and Argentina, which already had a sizable and modernized
middle sector from prewar days, witnessed a process of slow educational
obsolescence and professional downgrading of large sections of their urban
and educated populations; this led to potentially explosive cleavages between
the latter and the smaller sectors that followed more closely the postwar
pace of change. In the first few years it was probably hard to foresee the
difficulty of bringing native technological and scientific resources to
bear on the industrialization and modernization process through higher education.
As time passed, however, an ideological cleavage emerged between those who
believed that science, technological research, and education should play
a central role in the creation of a new, autonomous, and more egalitarian
society and those who accepted the realities of a limited, dualistic, less
autonomous, and dependent model. This cleavage eventually led to left-right,
or liberal-conservative, confrontations.
Scientific research in and institutional modernization of the Latin American
universities benefitted extensively from North American influence or support,
ranging from the Ford Foundation grant to the Chilean Convenio
to large fellowship programs given to Latin American scientists by the United
States Agency for International Development and by the Ford, Rockefeller,
and other foundations. North American influence on the organizational model
of the new Universidade de Brasilia was obvious. The American support, however,
did not preclude the nationalist and often anti-American perspective of
many of those engaged in these projects, for the United States was perceived
as the main source of the region's foreign dependency and internal balkanization
and dualism. As political life be- came more polarized in the late 1960s,
ideology increased its weight. This contradictory situation was expressed
very clearly by Felipe Herrera Lane, a Chilean who was for many years president
of the Interamerican Development Bank, which played an important role in
the financing of educational projects throughout Latin America. "In
several countries there were those who considered . . . [the bank] to be
a mere agent of the United States attempting to gain control of the higher
education systems in Latin America, in spite of a Latin American 'image'
we tried to develop with much sacrifice. I remember that, in my constant
travels through the continent, one of the most stimulating challenges was
the dialogue with the academic communities, explaining to them how Latin
America was the true inspiration of the bank, and that the resources at
the universities' disposal were meant to make them effective instruments
in a task that included not only our economic independence, but also the
affirmation of our traditions and cultural values."(39)
Crisis struck at these optimistic experiences with differing degrees of
intensity and violence during the sixties. The intellectuals responsible
for the organization of the Universidade de Brasilia entered into confrontation
against the military regime that took power in 1964 and were forced to resign.
Several of the organizational innovations of the Universidade de Brasilia,
however, were later adopted in a nationwide university reform movement which
introduced the departmental structure, set up the credit system for courses,
and abolished the system of "chaired" professorships in Brazil.
The following years saw sweeping changes in Brazil's higher education system,
not only because of the reform, but mainly as a result of an extremely rapid
increase in enrollments, which went from 142,000 in 1964 to 900,000 ten
years later, and then to about 1.5 million in 1980. This expansion was followed
by the creation of a huge system of graduate education: with only six graduate
programs in the country before 1960, 123 were created between 1960 and 1970
and 620 in the ensuing decade(40) The establishment of graduate schools, however,
coincided with political mobilization and repression at the universities,
which culminated in extensive student mobilization in 1968 and in the forced
retirement, in the next two years, of dozens of the most talented professors
and scientists at the country's leading universities and research centers.
Argentina was next. In 1966, the year in which the military government took
power, it intervened in the Universidad de Buenos Aires with a violent invasion
of the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. As a consequence, thousands
of professors in all departments of the university - but mostly in the physical
and social sciences - resigned.
This occurrence is still hotly discussed in Latin America: some believe
that the university suffered because it was involved heavily in politics;
others think exactly the opposite. Looking back at these events from the
perspective of 1980, one of the major participants, Professor Manuel Sadosky,
concluded that "our main weakness was that we did not do enough politically,
in the best sense of the word, to convince the students that they were making
a commitment to the country which they had to fulfill by placing their knowledge
to work for the socioeconomic change that was indispensable for breaking
the structures of the status quo." He partly accepts the charge of
"scientificist" when he says that "we raised the requirements
for study and work so much that, unwillingly, we contributed to the isolation
of the students from political life. " He believes, however, that it
was the consciousness-raising activities that finally brought on the wrath
of the conservative sectors in his own country and also in the United States:
"Not only the local reactionaries considered us their enemies; in the
North American Congress itself some representatives ex- pressed their concern
for the impetus that some of the more progressive universities in Latin
America were getting. It is certainly not a coincidence that the most brilliant
achievements of the universities of Buenos Aires, Brasilia, Montevideo,
and, later, Santiago de Chile were annihilated with similar methods and
harshness."(41)
In Chile, the crisis was slower to come. The implementation of the Convenio
with the University of California slowed down after the university reform
in the last few years of Eduardo Frei's government, and activities were
kept limited during the Salvador Allende years. After the intervention in
Chilean universities which followed the 1973 military coup, the Ford Foundation's
remaining resources were restricted to helping only Chilean students who
were already at the University of California.(42)
The Convenio showed, in 1978, mixed academic results, with better
scientific performance in the fields of agriculture, veterinary medicine,
and the hard sciences than in the social sciences. But the links established
by the program became a liability when funds started to dry up. "Not
only current activities are affected. Since libraries are forced to cancel
subscriptions to journals, and equipment cannot be repaired or replaced
with up-to-date ones, new research projects cannot be developed by the Chileans.
The researchers themselves, frustrated by their working conditions, which
they find particularly unbearable because of their firsthand and detailed
knowledge of the working conditions of their Californian counterpart, end
up leaving the University, or the country altogether."(43) After so much effort and hope the final balance
was rather dismaying: "Whatever the Convenio is able to create
in the University of Chile in the area of science and technology lacks roots
in the Chilean soil. If foreign support does not come to the rescue (in
the form of grants of foundations other than from Ford) these activities
are bound to disappear." "The new University of Chile that resulted
is unable to keep its programs working in these areas (veterinary medicine,
basic science, and engineering) without a constant flow of resources, people,
and ideas from the center. Instead of producing a modern higher education
institution capable of self-sustained growth, the Convenio contributed
to the creation of a subsidiary of the international centers of higher education
(particularly the University of California)(44)
Out of the Ashes?
It is difficult to evaluate the impact of the crisis in the different higher
education systems throughout the continent. Most of the confrontation and
repression that occurred in these years had little to do with scientific
research at the universities, but a great deal more with the radicalization
that swept the continent when the expectation of social, political, and
economic participation, which was generated partly by the educational system,
was not realized.
In Latin America the universities have often been a training ground for
political leaders, but this did not necessarily mean that they were as progressive
and vanguardist in educational, scientific, and technological matters as
they were in politics. In an overview of the role of universities in national
development in Spanish American countries, John P. Harrison tried to show
how "co-gobierno," the institution of student participation in
the universities' decision-making bodies which has been a tradition in Latin
America since the reform movement of 1918, tended, in fact, to he a conservative
force in this specific sense. "I am not aware," he stated, "of
any indication that the students differed from their professors in regard
to modernizing the curriculum or placing any greater emphasis on research
or technical training not tied to the practice of a licensed profession.
The most obvious evidence is that thirty years after Cordoba, the internal
structure of the few universities where co-gobierno operated did not differ
materially from those where control of the university remained in the hands
of the catedraticos" (chairholding professors)(45).
Broadly speaking, there seems to have been a correlation in each country
between the capacity for reorganization of higher education systems and
the possibility of economic expansion. Nowhere was the destruction more
sweeping than in Uruguay, where the dismantling of the university coincided
with massive migration of the young and educated to other Latin American
countries, Europe, and even Australia. Argentina followed a similar, but
less radical, process. In Venezuela, where the Universidad Central had been
the center for and the basis of the urban guerrillas who shattered the country
in the early sixties, the oil revenues allowed for a generous policy of
co-optation which brought the radical leadership to legitimate political
roles and allowed the universities to remain centers of intense political
activities and relatively low academic standards. A similar pattern was
followed in Mexico after the 1968 massacre before the Olympic Games.
Scientific research did not necessarily disappear in this process; rather,
it often increased in quality and quantity, in spite of the somber predictions
of those who directly suffered the blows of political repression. As new
manifestations of institution building and program development started to
appear in the seventies, it became clear that science and higher education
could continue to grow and improve in some Latin American countries, even
in the absence of sweeping social and political revolutions, and that they
could even he fostered by some of the political regimes that were considered
essentially anti-intellectual and anti-scientific.
One change, however, could be observed everywhere: Latin American scientists
in the years after the crisis lost much of their traditional European image
as savants seeking an intellectual leadership role and adopted the more
Americanized one of professional and specialized researcher. It is possible
to follow this change in some of its manifestations. The first, which began
several years before the crisis became apparent, was to create new, elite
institutions that could be developed outside the mainstream of the higher
education system and maintain high levels of quality. There are several
examples in Brazil: the Instituto Tecnológico da Aeronáutica created in
the forties; the Universidade de Brasilia in the early sixties; the graduate
programs in engineering at the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro (COPPE) in
the mid-sixties; and the Universidade de Campinas in the seventies. All
these institutions, organized outside the country's higher education system,
tended toward a maximum concern for quality and a minimum regard for formal
procedures of bureaucratic administration, corporate autonomy, and long-term
stability for its faculty. They tended to attract young and aggressive professionals,
with little patience for any encumbrances on their work. They were open
to international standards of scientific work and provided their students
with unusual learning opportunities. All these initiatives eventually suffered
institutional crises that derived from their marginality and innovativeness
and from the threat they presented to the established institutions. They
never entirely disappeared, however, and at their peak they set new patterns
of academic excellence which their students and teachers would later try
to develop and implement wherever they went. There are several examples
in other Latin American countries, including, for instance, the Fundación
Bariloche in Argentina and the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela.
The second manifestation was the attempt to place scientific research as
far away as possible from the educational systems. Writing in 1973, Edmundo
Fuenzalida suggested that the Chilean university should completely give
up the attempt to develop scientific research on its own, since its goals
included the transmission of knowledge and skills but not the "production
of new knowledge, scientific or otherwise."(46)
In 1971 Amilcar O. Herrera, who believed that research in the universities
was an irreplaceable casualty of the years of repression, proposed the establishment
of national agencies for scientific and technological planning at the higher
political levels, without looking back to the higher education systems as
significant actors in this project. The experience of Argentina's National
Atomic Commission, which was able to work continuously and successfully
in spite of the crisis that shattered the Universidad de Buenos Aires, has
certainly inspired these and similar projects. Possibly the most impressive
Latin American attempt in this direction is the Instituto Venezolano de
Investigaciones Cientificas, established in the outskirts of Caracas as
a nucleus of pure and high-level scholarship and research. This alternative
amounted to looking at scientific research from the standpoint of science
and technology, and not from the perspective of the educational system,
a shift that almost necessarily led its proponents to the conclusion that
divorce was the best solution.(47)
The third approach was to insist on the presence of science at the universities
and on its important, but not exclusive, role in social and economic development.
Emphasis was to be placed not on intellectual leadership, social awareness,
and responsibility, but simply on the benefits of science and technology's
products. This view was fully adopted by the Brazilian government when,
in 1974, it presented its National Development Plan II (1975-1979). The
first part of the plan, entitled "Development and Greatness: Brazil
as an Emerging Power," stated that "science and technology, in
the present stage of Brazilian society, represented the driving force, the
conveyer of the idea of progress and modernization."' 'In the economic
field, technological development will have in the next stage the same driving
and modernizing role that the emergence of industrialization played in the
years after the war."(48) The plan distinguished technological from fundamental
research; for the former, the National Council for Scientific and Technological
Development was organized, as an outgrowth of the former National Research
Council, and the ambitious National Plan for Scientific and Technological
Development was established. The estimation was that $2 billion would be
spent for science and technology during the 1975-1977 period.(49)
This ambitious project was conceived at the end of a period in which Brazil's
economy grew at more than 10 percent a year in real terms; the resources
poured by the development agencies into the educational and research institutions
after the late sixties were more than the latter could absorb and still
grow in a balanced way. One of the consequences was the extraordinary growth
of new graduate programs and research institutions in Brazil, usually alongside
mainstream programs in higher education. Whereas the education system had
grown through private, isolated schools, graduate training and research
developed at the public universities, and although the increase in enrollments
was seen mostly in the social professions, resources tended to go to the
technological and exact sciences. The resources were provided directly to
research and graduate program leaders, who gained autonomy from the administration
of the university and were able to offer much better salaries and working
conditions than other institutions in the higher educational system.
The situation was, at least in intention, almost ideal for those who, inspired
by the ideas of J. D. Bernal, had for years defended the placement of science
and technology at the center of national planning, although it came from
a military (and supposedly right-wing) regime and not from a university-led
social revolution, as had been expected by many in preceding years.
The oil shock of 1973 marked the beginning of the end of the so-called Brazilian
miracle, and the project of national greatness had to be postponed for an
indefinite period of time. It was replaced by policies of short-term troubleshooting,
which made all long-term plans moot. A direct consequence was that programs
of higher education and research which were geared to provide human resources
and know-how to the big national project were left empty-handed. According
to the director of the most outstanding advanced engineering course in this
entire effort, located at the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, his program
was initiated in order to graduate a type of engineer who did not exist
before, one with a master's ora doctoral degree: "We had the idea that
this element, which was necessary for the technological development of the
country, was missing from the professional picture." But he adds: "What
we expected to happen did not happen. We were throwing a sophisticated product
into the market which we believed was required by the country's technological
development. We thought that, if we did our part in training M.A's and Ph.D's
in engineering, that is, creative people, they would be absorbed by a country
that was really interested in the internal development of technology. But
this did not happen ."(50)
The crisis at the Graduate Engineering Program of the Universidade do Rio
de Janeiro did not take on the dramatic overtones of the interventions at
other places and times. Slowly, the program turned its efforts toward the
more traditional fields of engineering, mainly civil engineering; it developed
its competence in terms of routine technical assistance to the local industry;
it trained students well at the master's level, although it enjoyed little
success at the doctoral level; and having been created with independent
resources and completely outside the administrative arm of the Faculdade
de Engenharia, it gradually fell under its control and supervision.
Brazil, with probably the most ambitious program, certainly did not make
the only attempt in the past decade to develop scientific research and to
offer highly qualified training in Latin American universities; and its
frustrations are not unique. A detailed case study of the areas of chemistry
and chemical engineering in Venezuela suggests major pessimistic conclusions.
"The project of developing a scientific Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
in Venezuela was part of the long-term strategy, based on the expansion
of the modern industrial sector, that was raised in the forties and redefined
in the late fifties." Today, however, "the façade of international
cooperation in science and technology can no longer hide the harsh reality
lying behind it: the preoccupation of some of the most powerful govern-
mental and corporate actors with using superiority in science and technology
to force the poorer countries into a dependent relationship and thus maintain
dominance and control. Thus, instead of being a training place for self-reliance.
science and technology education constitutes, in fact, a major factor of
dependence. The educational system produces overskilled qualified workers
in the sense of being highly specialized watchdogs of 'automated factories,'
just as deskilled ones, in the sense of being deprived of certain general
purpose skills or of traditional innovative capacities that have been downgraded
or abandoned."(51)
Thus the experiences of Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Venezuela seem to
lead to the same dead end: increased scientific and technological capabilities
producing overskilled professionals and increasing dependency . Would these
countries be better off and more independent with less science and technology,
and with underskilled professionals? This conclusion would be only slightly
more absurd than its opposite, that is, that science and technology, within
or outside the university, could by themselves determine the socioeconomic
development and the self-reliance of a country, The introduction of scientific
research in Latin American universities did not play the revolutionary role
that so many hoped for and others feared. Nor did it help to solve in a
significant way the problems of technological backwardness and dependency
which could not he solved through other means. When crisis came, it did
not lead to an overall setback in development, but only to a period of more
or less violent disruption and to some changes in emphasis, tone, and ideology.
The actual effects of the huge investments in graduate training in scientific
research in Brazil in the past fifteen years, and of corresponding efforts
in other countries, should not be judged solely in terms of their avowed
goals, but rather by a series of less obvious and long-range consequences
which affected changes in the perspectives and world outlooks of the thousands
of persons who are to play a central position in their countries in the
years to come.(52)
CONCLUSIONS
There are no easy solutions to the problems of underdevelopment, inequality,
and restricted social and political participation which plague, in different
degrees, all Latin American countries. Science, technology', and higher
education constitute just a small part of a broader picture, and they do
not hold a privileged key to a country's transformation. We can, however,
understand their interrelations and their broader social role a little better
if we consider a few propositions, some of which follow from the preceding
discussion; others are necessary for a proper interpretation.
First, science and technology, regardless of their effective content, play
a legitimating role for the claim of autonomy, resources, and social prestige
of the Latin American universities. This role, stated by Ben-David and quoted
earlier in this essay, applies in Latin America as well as elsewhere.
Second, the institutional instability of Latin American higher education
systems makes this ideological role not only a matter of institutional self-
defense and protection, but also the basis of a claim for social, political,
and ideological leadership that goes far beyond the boundaries of the educational
systems. The instability does not result from any supposed Latin American
"cultural trait," but rather it stems from the extraordinary rates
of urbanization, demographic growth, and modernization these societies have
experienced in past decades, with corresponding changes in labor structure,
social and political roles, and cultural values and aspirations. Because
of these changes, there is a poor fit between the educational system and
the labor market, leading to a pervasive feeling of frustration and protest
among the educated. This situation is not new, but it becomes more serious
as higher education systems grow.
Third, the main actors in the higher education system - teachers and students
- are unhappy not only with their own institutions but also with the non-academic
elites who hold the highest economic and political positions and who are
blamed, often with good reason, for the precarious economic and social conditions
of the region's population: This is fertile ground, as it was earlier in
Europe, for the idea that science and technology can provide better socioeconomic
conditions and, incidentally, a new elite.
Fourth, the educational systems have been much more amenable to change and
growth than other institutions in Latin America. International cooperation
provided well-defined patterns and resources for the creation of the new
graduate and research programs; enrollment can grow very quickly, if there
is not much concern about educational quality; and new professions can easily
be specified on paper and be given supposedly coherent academic programs
in the schools. This situation contrasts very sharply with the saturation
of the labor market for university-trained people, the decadence of the
inflated urban centers, the increasing technological gap between these countries
and the industrialized ones, and the growth of capital-intensive industries
in Latin America to the detriment of labor-intensive ones. These factors
are proving to be very difficult to change.
One consequence of this entire situation is the relative isolation of the
educational system and its institutions from the rest of the society. This
isolation has both positive and negative consequences. Positively, it eventually
allows for the development of competent teaching and research within the
higher education system, without the pressures for short-term adaptability
to the low requirements of the labor market or the industrial system. Negatively,
it produces people trained in obsolete professions, scientific institutions
working in outdated subjects with outdated methods, and the substitution
of status symbols and behavioral patterns associated with them for proper
education and scientific and technological work. In the absence of external
checks and controls, it is often difficult to distinguish one from the other.
They are not, however, the same thing. Given the difficult and often dramatic
social conditions in many Latin American countries, it would be unfortunate
if there were a good fit between the educational system and the scientific
community in these countries, on the one hand, and the local conditions
on the other. A scientific community working with standards of high quality
and a broad view of other possibilities and alternatives for their roles
can be a dynamic factor of change and innovation, provided that other conditions
are forthcoming.
At the same time, the emphasis placed on the role of scientific research
for education, even if properly done, may have a detrimental effect upon
other important functions in the areas of general education and professional
training which higher education systems might have. In Brazil, the assumption
that teaching and research are inseparable has led to the downgrading of
professional training without academic degrees, and the creation of still
another tier in the educational life for those who enter the higher education
system. In practice. the new academic, scientific-minded graduate pro- grams
often work as a way of postponing the student's entrance into the labor
market and as a filter that partly compensates for the swelling of the undergraduate
system. Thus, instead of helping to increase the quality of undergraduate
courses, the strengthening of scientific education has helped to bypass
and avoid a direct confrontation with the difficult problems of the system.
Scientific research is not a panacea for underdevelopment; it is not even
a solution to the problems of higher education in its varied implicit and
explicit functions. It may be detrimental, as when it loses its content
and gains weight and relevance as sheer ideology; but it may also be a factor
for change, innovation, and social awareness. What is needed if higher education
is to play a better role, in this context, is not just more or less science,
but more differentiation and complexity, so that different and frequently
contradictory functions can be performed simultaneously. The sociology.
of science should help to uncover the uniformity that the ideological imagery
of modern science often brings to higher education in conditions such as
these and should open the way for a richer and less naive understanding
of the different mles and possibilities of each.
POLICY IMPLICATIONS
What are the policy implications to be drawn from the above? It is clear,
first of all, that there is a place for scientific research in some segments
of the higher education system in Latin America, as elsewhere. But the role
played by research universities today in setting the standards for an entire
system in a country' such as England or the United States, where there is
room for institutional competition and innovation, can become detrimental
in more rigid and less well-established contexts, where the real contents
of research and teaching can easily be replaced by formalistic and bureaucratic
impersonations of academic behavior.(53)
From the standpoint of scientific research, as from that of higher education,
it is advisable to limit scientific research to those centers that offer
the necessary conditions for doing it, and to try to stimulate other educational
values and goals, more related to teaching and community services, in the
remaining, larger part of the higher education system.
What are the chances of scientific research really taking hold in a social
and cultural context that is without a previous scientific tradition? We
may start by brushing aside some extreme misconceptions: there is nothing
in the "Latin culture" which is intrinsically inimical to modern
science; there is no future in the attempts to develop an "alternative"
science that would be more congenial to Latin (or other) cultures and might
compete with "Western" science in any significant way; and injections
of money, fellowship programs, and visiting professorships are not sufficient,
and they may even be counterproductive.
In the underdeveloped countries of today, as in western Europe centuries
ago, modern science was brought in from outside. If we compare the conditions
of the growth of science in Latin America with those of the early years
of the European universities, we see that in both instances scientific knowledge
was perceived as an instrument of social advancement for a relatively marginal
group of people, who railed against the entrenched positions of the traditional
universities. There are, however, important differences. One is that the
scientistic movements in Europe occurred when "science" was relatively
simple and the university culture was extremely complex and elitist, based
on the mastery of formal logic and the classical languages. This situation
permitted the emergence of the amateur scientist, the nonprofessional scientific
societies, and the stereotype of the self-taught and slightly crazy, scientific
genius which is still today part of international folklore. The contemporary
situation is completely reversed: science is an extremely complex activity.
requiring the mastery of advanced mathematics, a large literature, and a
knowledge of foreign languages, whereas the system of formal education is
mass-oriented and tends toward standardization and democratization of access.
The Latin American scientist is marginal in the sense that he or she does
not follow either the traditional paths of elite education in the traditional
professions of law, medicine, and engineering, or the more popular lines
of mobility through the new technical or semiprofessional careers. While
his early European counterpart participated in a widespread movement for
social mobility which was part of the bourgeois and rationalistic revolution,
the Latin American scientist is much more isolated as a member of an emerging
learned aristocracy.
How the scientist defines his social role, and how this definition is related
to his social origins, might be an intriguing research topic for the future.
Some scant information available on the Brazilian experience suggests that
scientists in the biomedical field tend to be recruited from higher social
strata and to define their role as members of the medical profession aristocracy.
The physical scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to be recruited
from immigrant and upwardly mobile sectors and tend to play a more active
role as part of their country's new intelligentsia. Researchers in more
applied fields are likely to define themselves as part of emerging new professions,
who possess specialized knowledge and who assume appropriate rewards for
their work. Social scientists are closer to those in physical science than
to other types.(54)
The future of scientific research in this context will depend on the possibilities
of institutionalizing science as a permanent and relatively stable professional
career, without depriving it of its aura as a prestigious and socially meaningful
activity and without submerging it completely in the mainstream of the higher
education teaching population. The aura of prestige and social relevance
is necessary' if science is to recruit the best- qualified people and extract
from them their greatest efforts, since other gratifications. those of a
more material kind offered by other professions, are seldom forthcoming.
Moreover, a complete identification with the professional teacher may mean
a decreasing involvement with the scientist's academic community. Institutional
questions and trade-union and professional (but non-academic) concerns might
easily lay claim to most of his or her social commitments and interests,
an attachment that might be harmful for scientific work.(55)
Professionalization of science depends on a complex combination of economic,
political, and institutional elements; we need, then, to consider the different
activities that are usually brought together under the name of "science."
The consolidation of technological research, for example, requires an economic
and industrial policy that includes a significant volume of autonomous technological
development and adaptation, if not creation. These policies may take different
shapes, from military buildups to barriers to imported technologies. If
this requirement is fulfilled, the next one is to create an educational
system that will respond to this demand in terms of qualified education.
More academic and "basic" research may survive much more easily
without direct industrial counterparts. if the necessary institutional ingredients
are forthcoming. The most obvious one is money for salaries, equipment,
office space, and the like. Then, the resources must get to the right people.
Because of its limited size and political strength, scientific research
tends to be organized as small sections of large educational or governmental
institutions, units that receive low priority and are unable to marshal
their own criteria of priorities, excellence, and organizational procedures.
Brazil has been quite successful, in past deczdes, in establishing a series
of financing institutions that go directly to the scientist or to his department
or research group. bypassing the educational or ministerial hierarchy.(56)
The corresponding increase in volume and quality of scientific research,
however, combined with budget limitations, is leading to attempts to centralize
and coordinate the available resources for research, and such centralization
is being perceived, with good reason, as a threat to the previous ability
of effectively getting the resources to the right persons.
There is a final and unavoidable political aspect. The development of scientific,
technological, and educational prowess takes time and requires institutional
stability. These conditions are impossible to meet when society is subject
to constant oscillations between social mobilization and political repression,
combined with successive and sweeping attempts at institutional reform.
This view is not necessarily conservative, since it is obvious that not
all forms of stability are conducive to good science and education and there
are other social values and goals aside from these. However, it does explain
why it is common for people engaged in educational and scientific institution
building in contexts of political instability to become exasperated with
the futility of their work and to decide that only politics can open the
wav for everything else. Unfortunately, this is a self-defeating prophecy,
since overpoliticization contributes further to the weakening of the scientific
and educational institutions, making them still more vulnerable to political
uncertainties.
In short, institution building in the field of scientific research and higher
education is a difficult and risky adventure. It deals with activities that
are very different from one another, and even conflictful in many ways,
but which cannot be fully disconnected. It may have unexpected and contradictory
results. And it depends on variables that are usually out of the control
of those who try to undertake it. Scientific research, however, is a necessary
condition for knowledge, and no human society can willingly renounce it.
That is why, like Sisyphus. we must persevere.(57)
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Notes
1. I am grateful to Roger Geiger, Morizaku Ishiogi, Edmundo
Campos, and Burton R. Clark for their comments and criticism, some of which
I was able to incorporate.
2. 'Parsons, "The lnstitutionalization of Scientific
Investigation," from Social System, 1951, in Barber and Hirsch,
Sociology of Science, pp.12, 13.
3. Halsey, "Changing Functions of Universities",
pp. 460-463.
4. Ben-David, Centers of Learning, p. 94.
5. Merton, Sociology of Science.
6. Spiegel-Rösing and Price, eds., Science, Technology
and Society.
7. This stability of names for changing realities is
central to Harold Perkin's analysis of higher education as a historical
system (see chap. 1, above). See also his overview of the development of
modern universities from its medieval origins and the impact of the nineteenth-century
German model in other countries.
8. About non-Western forms of scientific knowledge in
a broader sense, see Needham, The Grand Titration.
9. For this history see Ben-David, Scientist's Role
in Society.
10. Galileo's telescope "did not prove the validity
of Copernicus' conceptual system. But it did provide an immensely effective
weapon for the battle. It was not proof, but it was propaganda. " After
Galileo's observations Copernicanism could not he dismissed as a mere mathematical
device, useful but without physical support." This explains in part
the strong opposition it aroused (See Kuhn, Copernican Revolution.)
l am grateful to Sheldon Rothblatt for calling my attention to this point.)
11. Quoted by Mason, History of the Sciences,
p. 259.
12. Ibid, p. 260.
13. See Crosland, ed., Emergence of Science in Western
Europe; Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth
Century England; Bernal, Science in History.
14. Ben-David, Centers of Learning, p. 36.
15. Ibid., pp.15-16.
16. Gilpin, France in the Age of the Scientific
State.
17. Ben-David, Centers of Learning, p. 75.
18. Mason, History of the Sciences, pp.578 ff.
19. It has been noted that the German Wissenschaft is
much broader than the English "science", since it includes a component
of scholarship which is not necessarily part of its Anglo-Saxon meaning.
Cf. Mayr, "Science-Technology Relationship."
20. See Merton, "Science and the Social Order,"
in Sociology of Science, p.256, for the plight of scientific research
in German universities during the Nazi regime.
21. For an overview, see Böhme, "Models for the
Development of Science," pp.319-354
22. Ben-David, Centers of Learning, p.166.
A recent publication from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development lists four arguments against the differentiation of careers
for researchers and teachers in the universities of the OECD countries.
They are, first, the creation of a stratification between them with first-
and second-class citizens; second, the loss of quality of teaching; third,
the creation of an institutional split between teaching and research institutions;
and fourth, the instability of the research institutions themselves because
of their dependency on the countries' R&D changing budgets and policies.
While acknowledging all the difficulties of the relationships between research
and teaching at the universities, the OECD concludes that new organizational
forms should be tried to reestablish the old belief in the indivisibility
between them. (OECD, L'Avenir de la Recherche Universitaire, pp.
49-50, 86.)
23. For an earlier version of the problems discussed
in the following section. sec Silvert, ed., Social Reality of Scientific
Myth.
24. The following analysis is based in part on Schwartzman
"Universidade, Ciência e Subdesenvolvimento," which is published
also in Lavados Montes, ed. " Universidad Contemporanea, pp. 57-78.
25. For the contrast between Portuguese and Spanish
educational practices in their colonies, see Carvalho, "Political Elites
and State Building." For a detailed history of Brazilian developments
in science and professional education, see Schwartzman, Formação da
Comunidade Científica no Brasil. For specific information on different
scientific traditions, see Azevedo, ed., As Ciências no Brasil.
For an overview of Argentina's experience, see Babini, La Evolución
del Pensamiento Científico en la Argentina and Las Ciencias en
Argentina.
26. Stepan, Beginning of Brazilian Science;
Fonseca Filho, "A Escola de Manguinhos."
27. See Schwartzman, Formação da Comunidade Científica
no Brasil, chapter 7, for the creation of the University of São Paulo),
and chap. 8, pp. 242-249, for the presence of the Rockefeller Foundation
in Brazil. For an overview, see Schwartzman, "Struggling to Be Born",
pp. 545-580.
28. See Schwartzman, "A Universidade Padrão."
29. The idea that scientific research should be brought
to bear upon a central role in national planning was first put forward by
the Soviet Union, was adopted by the French in the years of the Front Populaire
(which led to the creation of the Centre Nationale de Ia Recherche Scientifique).
and was supported very strongly in England by the group of Marxist scientists
led by J. D. Bernal. In the United States it was adopted during World War
11 by the Organization for Scientific Research and Development which, under
Vannevar Bush, had direct access to President Franklin Roosevelt. See, among
others, Graham, "Formation of Soviet Research Institutes"; Bernal,
Social Function of Science, Gilpin, France in the Age of the
Scientific State; McGucken, "Scientific and Technological Advice
in the United Kingdom during the Second World War."
30. Quoted by Fuenzalida, "Institutionalization
of Research," p. 12. The following presentation of the Chilean experience
is based on Fuenzalida's paper.
31. Ibid, n 19.
32. Prebisch, Transformación y Desarrollo, quoted by
Graciarena, Formación de postgrado en ciencias sociales en America Latina,
p. 32. For an overall view of Prebisch's role and ideas, see Love, Centro-Periferia
e Troca Desigual." See also Balan, "Social Sciences in the Periophery."
33. Graciarena, Formación de postgrado en ciencias
sociales en America Latina, pp.33-34 (my translation). This project
was nursed for several years by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences,
and had it succeeded, it could have counted on the support of the United
Nations Development Program.
34. Fuenzalida, "Institutionalization of Research,"
pp.51-52
35. Ribeiro, A Universidade Necessária, p.
245 (my translation).
36. Heron de Alencar, "A Universidade de Brasilia,"
p.272 (my translation).
37. Garcia, "Organizing Scientific Research,"
p.12. For a historical view of the Universidade de Buenos Aires and its
sociopolitical context up to this period, see Halperin Donghi, Historia
de la Universidad de Buenos Aires.
38. On student political activism, sec Albornoz, Ideologia
y Politica; Lipset, .; Altbach, "The International Student Movement."
39. Herera Lane, "Dinámica Social y Desafios Educacionales,"
p.30 (my translation).
40. Unpublished data from the Brazilian Ministry of
Education. CAPES, 1982. For data on Brazilian graduate programs after 1975,
see "Pósgraduação no Brasil." For a discussion of the crisis in
the undergraduate system, see Schwartzman, "A Crise da Universidade."
pp. 96-126.
41. Sadosky, "Una Experiencia Educativa Argentina,"
p.108 (my translation). A similar view was expressed by another eyewitness
of the events, Amilcar O. Herrera: "If any doubt remained that these
were not mere irreflective acts, simple consequences of momentary political
passions, it can be dispelled by pointing out that all subsequent acts show
the intention of keeping these scientific centers (Facultad de Ciências
Exactas of the Universidad of Buenos Aires and the Universidade de Brasilia)
in the deplorable state they were in after the interventions" (Herrera,
Ciencia Politica en America Latina, p.40; my translation). The fact
is, however, that the Universidade de Brasilia was not destroyed in spite
of its successive crises, and today it is well above average among Brazilian
higher education institutions.
42. Fuenzalida, "Institutionalization of Research,"
p.74, n. 6.
43. Ibid, p. 56.
44. Ibid, p. 57.
45. Harrison, University versus National Development
in Spanish America, p 13
46. Fuenzalida, "La Universidad Chilena no debe
hacer investigación científica." p. 202.
47. For Latin American thinking on the matter in the
postcrisis years, see Herrera, Ciencia y Politica en América Latina;
Sábato, ed., El Pensamiento Latinoamericano; Suarez et al.,
Autonomia Nacional o Dependencia; Boeninger et al., Desarrollo
Científico-Tecnológico y Universidad. A partial history of the Argentinian
atomic energy program may be found in Tanis and Sábato, Desarrollo de Recursos
Humanos en Metalurgia.
48. República Federativa do Brasil, Projeto do II Plano
Nacional de Desenvolvimento (1975-1979), p 3 (my translation).
49. See data in Schwartzman, "Struggling To Be
Born," p. 574.
50. Coimbra, quoted in Nunes et al., "Pós-Graduação
em Engenharia", chap. 6.
51. Vessuri, "Science, University and Graduate
Education in Venezuela," p.3.
52. One of the main determinants of attitude change,
in this connection, is the experience of studying abroad. There are innumerable
differences among countries in the way this program is implemented, including
the return of students to their countries of origin. Argentina and Colombia
tend to lose a significant number to the host countries; in Brazil, on the
contrary, the return rates are very high. The rate of return depends, among
other things, on who pays for study abroad, the proper fit of the students
to the host country's educational system, and the attractiveness of work
conditions in the country of origin. For a summary of an international study
on the subject, see Glaser, Brain Drain. The most ambitious program
of fellowships for study abroad in Latin America today is provided by Venezuela
through the Fundación Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho, which awarded more than
3,000 fellowships for that purpose in 1980. Of these, only a third were
for graduate training. See Mauch, "Sudying Abroad."
53. On the role of the research universities as models
for higher education systems, see Martin Trow's paper (chap. 5. above).
For different interpretations of academic roles in an underdeveloped context,
see Ilchman, "Hybrids in Native Soil," pp 85-114.
54. See Schwartzman, "Foreigners in Their Country".
" See also Becher's approach to the different cultures of academic
specialties (chap. 6, above).
55. The identification of the university teacher with
his union or professional association adds another dimension to Clark's
"moving matrix" of academic and institutional affiliation, which
is for him a central element in higher education organizations. The distinction
between academic and professional associations is not very clear in fields
where the professions are defined in terms of their academic contents. In
the I,atin American context, however, there is an obvious difference between
professional associations of lawyers, economists, statisticians, psychologists.
and the like, which are mainly concerned with the corporative rights of
their constituents, and associations in the corresponding academic institutions,
which are more oriented toward the advancement of knowledge and the exchange
of information When these two functions are not clearly distinguished, the
second tends to suffer. (See Clark's chap. 4 above.)
56. These institutions include the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento
de Pessoal de Ensino Superior (CAPES) in the Ministry of Education; the
Finaciadora de Estudos e Projetos (FINEP) and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento
Científico e Tecnológico in the Ministry of Planning; the Fundação de Amparo
à Pesquisa in the State of São Paulo; and several permanent, single-purpose
research programs and agencies such as the Instituto Nacional de Estudos
Pedagógicos, in the field of education, and the Programa Nacional de Pesquisas
Econômicas, in economics.
57. There are those, of course, who support the notion
that both scientific research and higher education should be abandoned as
significant goals for Latin America and that they should be replaced by
other forms of cultural and emotional participation in society which are
more direct, less westernized, and often more mystic and more hedonistic
As the promises of higher education grow dimmer, this view tends to take
a stronger hold on better educated people. The importance of this phenomenon,
which in a way replicates the counterculture movements of the 1960s in the
United States and Europe, is becoming increasingly evident.
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