Disciplinary paradigm: an unhealed gap in university epistemology

traducción sujeta a revisión. Original en español

When common sense is lacking, problems increase: who benefits from the deception about the university’s supposed overcoming of the disciplinary paradigm?

Luis Bonilla-Molina [1]

Introduction: Let’s Be Realistic: Let’s Demand the Impossible

Historically speaking, the university has been the privileged space for critical thinking committed to social justice, economic equality, and inclusion. At various times, it has served as a platform for important societal achievements. Unfortunately, in recent decades, the capitalist offensive against higher education institutions (HEIs) has been so far-reaching that it has rendered many of these struggles invisible and even generated setbacks that were unthinkable 50 years ago.

In the anti-colonial resistance, the independence process, the construction of republics, the emergence of nation-states, the development of democracy, and the rise of progressive rights, the university played a stellar role. The Cuban revolution led by university students, the revolts of ’68, and the anti-neoliberal battles of the last four decades demonstrate that rebellion is still present. We place this work within that perspective, and since we have considered dedicating an article in the series on The University to the topic of anti-capitalist resistance, on this occasion we will focus on showing other aspects of the architecture of capital’s offensive against university education, especially around attempts to overcome the disciplinary paradigm in the construction of knowledge, science, and technology.

2. The three moments of industrial capitalism in university policies

Capitalism, in its relationship to the construction of knowledge, has three paradigmatic moments. First, a disciplinarycharacter characteristic of the first two industrial revolutions; second, a transdisciplinary demandbeginning with the third industrial revolution; and third, a desire to achieve heuristic convergence in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution.

If we analyze educational policies, using the methodology of international comparative studies, in the time frames of the first industrial revolutions (1760/1780 – 1870/1914), the third industrial revolution (1961) and the transition to the fourth industrial revolution (2011 – ), without the latter having yet been expressed in all its potential in the capitalist mode of production, we can have a more precise understanding of the rationality of capitalism’s proposals for the university sector.

This is due to the epistemology of industrial capitalism, for which there is an immanent relationship between knowledge and scientific and technological innovation, and this only makes sense to the extent that it contributes to the symbolic and material reproduction of the production-market-profit logic. Consequently, when there is a shift in the innovation spiral, the demands of capital for the production of knowledge are modified , and this takes the form of public policies for the education sector.

Assuming this analytical perspective allows us to understand in another dimension, sense and direction events such as the Cordoba reform (1918), the cycles and location of recent university expansion – especially after the Second World War – and the institutional evaluative culture (from 1961 onwards), strengthened by the neoliberal aegis (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, academic-student mobility model and the purpose of the recognition of degrees and studies on an international scale), the STEM paradigm, the Bologna agreements and the contours that university internationalization has taken.

One of the central elements of the tensions established since the third industrial revolution has to do with the hegemonic paradigm for the construction of knowledge – disciplinary – and the need for capitalism to transform it, initially into a transdisciplinary paradigm and now into a heuristic convergence paradigm. In the first case, since 1961, it generated a paradigmatic fissure that was not – and is not – exploited by the anti-capitalist sectors critical of disciplinarity to make way for another possible university, generating an unprecedented anomaly , characteristic of the existence of an epistemic gap : while capitalism and anti-capitalism criticize the disciplinary paradigm, the transdisciplinary school and university have not been born in the long period of sixty years that this fissure has remained open.

Paraphrasing Gramsci’s work on the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will (2011), we would say that progressive and anti-capitalist sectors have relied on the overwhelming optimism of the will to confront capital’s policies regarding higher education within the framework of the third industrial revolution, but the power of intellectual pessimism has failed to grasp the scale of the tasks at hand. One of the causes of this void is the precarious analytical connection between industrial revolutions and university policies. Therefore, the effort to find interpretive keys that contribute to escaping the intellect’s quagmire cannot be confused with despair; on the contrary, it is a triumph of conscious will, a tribute to the utopia of another possible university, powered by the deconstruction of domination.

3. Disciplinary approach: nostalgia for what was successful (first and second industrial revolution)

For the industrial capitalism of the first two industrial revolutions, knowledge took on the characteristics of a driving force of profit , especially when related to technological innovation used to optimize the time and results of commodity production, as well as the extraction of surplus value . In this sense, capital seeks improvement, not the emergence of a new production model, and this «optimization» was initially seen as a process that went from «the parts to the whole.» Abrupt changes called for caution; progressive changes were evaluated based on their performance to avoid breaks in the production chains .

During the first two industrial revolutions, when unusual leaps in the pace of creativity occurred, this required the development of prototypes and limited testing so that their implementation and effects could be scaled, based on the demonstration of their effectiveness in improving production. Only then could innovation become widespread. Consequently, progressive improvement of the parts was more reliable, in order to prevent possible damage to the whole.

Disciplinary specialization became the preferred paradigm of capital during the period of the first two industrial revolutions. Theneed to encourage innovation and its transfer to the mode of production can be explained initially by the proximity to the collapse of the feudal model of accumulation, and later by the incessant aspiration to expand profit margins.

Specialization implies a mechanical view of innovation , in which the object of study must be viewed as an artifact, to be approached by delimiting a specific area of work, seeking to improve its overall functioning. In this sense, the division of fields of knowledge into disciplinesproved particularly useful.

A redesigned screw, made with a lighter, yet twice as strong, material could prevent machine malfunctions. This task, for example, was assigned separately to different disciplines to ensure the viability and reliability of the improvement, minimizing implementation errors, even if experimental error was inevitable. Geology was entrusted to locate new materials and extract them, chemical engineering to combine and alloy them, industrial engineering to determine the required quality of materials, specialized mechanics to redesign the machine for the new coupling, and the adjustment of human processes for producing goods to the sciences of organizational development and the sociology of work. This, in turn, involved controlling the fragmented parts and compartmentalizing their assembly.

Each discipline built its own «corporate» identity , expressed in its own theoretical paradigms, methods, languages, and validation criteria , which also allowed for the systematic and coherent accumulation of knowledge.

This logic also extended to the social structure, with a machine-like epistemology of the human and societal relations, deepening the humanocentrism that subordinated animal life and nature to the improvement of the collective machinery divided into social classes.

To avoid the risk of creating a «Tower of Babel» in the field of innovation , academic hegemony was established by standardizing a unified communication methodfor the processes of research, experimentation, and presentation of results, which is what we know today as the scientific method . This guaranteed the interoperability of innovations and the construction of interfaces between disciplines.

Everyone knows today that knowledge is not built by following a mechanical recipe , but rather that creativity is a chaotic process pervaded by error, in which success is the new inclusion, a dynamic that is provided with theoretical and procedural justification, establishing protocols for replicating achievements, although all of this is presented in reverse, as if theory knew in advance the results of experimentation or prospective analysis of the concrete facts of a specific social situation. Everything was reversed, but it was not proper academic manners to raise one’s voice on the matter. The scientific method is more a route for communicating results than for disruptive creation.

Furthermore, in the first two revolutions, the innovation cycles had particularities that favored the disciplinary approach. The theory of long waves of innovation(Kondratieff, 1984) proposes a duration of 60-65 years for the cycle of each of the two industrial revolutions. Within these, Carlota Pérez (2003) distinguishes the speculative or installation cycle of innovation (20-30 years), and the deploymentor stabilization phase (20-30 years), while Joseph Schumpeter (1939) adds the idea of creative destruction , which refers to the period of obsolescence and technological renewal , which may vary in each case. The trend in the first two industrial revolutions was towards the progressive introduction of substantive innovation that appeared every 15-20 years.

In this sense, the knowledgelearned at the university could be used for long periods in society and in the workplace, and its use was prestigious, enjoying permanence and stability in cycles of at least 20 years. What a biologist, physicist, chemist, or university professor learned was useful for a long period of time, without losing the veneer of innovation and cutting-edge knowledge . These rates of permanence were expressed in institutional protocols and processes.

This facilitated the adoption of the organizational design (structure, operation, institutional evaluation) that we now consider to be the hallmark of universities, when in reality, before the rise of industrial capitalism, there was greater variability in this regard. Universities naturalized the organizational model of faculties, schools, departments, research centers, observatories, and lines of research that favored a disciplinary approach to work, constructing an idea of university tradition —making an analogy with the ideas of Hobsbawn, 1983—that was actually an invention to institutionalize the disciplinary paradigm .

This organizational approach, when useful in experiences prior to the hegemony achieved in the capitalism of the first two industrial revolutions, was due to the fact that it occurred in relatively small universities, considering current standards of the number of students and professors per HEI. The massification of universities and university enrollment, which occurred within the framework of the liberal period of capitalism of the first two industrial revolutions, ended up calcifying the disciplinary paradigm as the structuring factor of institutional management , making a university organizational model other than that of faculties, schools, departments, centers, observatories, and lines of research unthinkable. The popular adage says «if you want to create a problem, found a department.»

In short, the first two industrial revolutions, in late capitalism (Mandel, 2023) and the uneven and combined development (Novack, 1965) of its implementation, not only built academic hegemony for the disciplinary paradigm in the construction of knowledge and innovation, but also enabled the structuring of a university organizational development that made its expansion possible in all spheres of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This functional structure would paradoxically become the greatest obstacle to being able to meet the demands of capital, for the renewal of the paradigm of knowledge construction in the third industrial revolution.

4. Transdisciplinarity: Lying in the Mirror? (Third Industrial Revolution)

The arrival of the third industrial revolution (1961) complicated matters for five basic reasons. First, the incorporation of virtual programming and robotics into industrial production , which entailed an expansion of the Newtonian mechanical paradigm characteristic of the first two industrial revolutions; this meant stretching the boundaries of old disciplines and hybridizing fields that had remained stagnant. The fusion of robotics, programming, process engineering, innovation dynamics, and the reorganization of know-how for the generation of goods required increasingly complex processes of disciplinary integration. For example, a video game (goods) demands the integrated work of psychology, programming, graphic design, anthropology, calculus, algorithm science, legislation, administration, neuroscience, among other fields, not only in its production but also to drive the innovations that underpin the accumulation of capital (profits).

Second, the innovation cycleswithin each industrial revolution began to shorten the creative spiral times , going from 20 to 15-10 years, then to 6, and now in many fields of knowledge we talk about turns of 1 to 3 years. The generation of us who have worked in universities for the last fifty years have experienced the acceleration of innovation in a singular way. For example, in the increasingly ephemeral presence of some artifacts and their rapid obsolescence: from desktop computers with external memory disks, with limited capacity, we quickly went from 8-inch floppy disks with a capacity of 80 KB (1971), to 5-1/2 with capacities between 110 KB and 1.2 MB (1976), until reaching portable memory of several TB and cloud storage, jumping from landline cell phones to analog cell phones, and from these to digital cell phones, the first devices with text messaging, social networks up to generative Artificial Intelligence in devices like Alexa.

Third, the business management models implemented in the first two industrial revolutions (Taylorism-Fayolism, Fordism) were obsolete for quickly incorporating the products of the unprecedented acceleration of innovation into the continuous improvement of merchandise production. Post-Fordist models began to express a loss of interest in degrees and disciplinary approaches , because the novelties of the third industrial revolution were largely the result of the integration of multiple fields of study, and simple disciplinary expertise was insufficient for their implementation. The need for transdisciplinary knowledge management arose , as was expressed at the International Conference on the World Crisis in Education (1967), where capitalism made public and notorious the demand for another way of constructing knowledge, one that transcended disciplinary protocols.

The pressure on academia began to become increasingly evident, as demonstrated by the Faure Report (1973) generated by UNESCO, especially in its Chapter 2, initiating the collective cognitive drama of academics, who were forced to overcome the disciplinary approach to managing knowledge generation and innovation processes; the problem now was how to do it? The seventies and eighties marked the search for ways, means, and paths to achieve this, but all reform initiatives clashed with the formalized institutional structures for managing teaching and learning. UNESCO promoted so-called complex thinking (Morín, 1990) to try to break the deadlock, but changing the functional architecture that made it possible to generate and reproduce disciplinary university knowledge implied affecting internal and external power relations. The «Solomonic» solution was to leave the organizational edifice practically intact—in some cases with a change of name or the addition of other bodies—and to assume transdisciplinarity as a «cross-cutting axis» for the production of knowledge . A nice name, but with serious problems for its concrete operability within the logic demanded by the capitalist mode of production of the Third Industrial Revolution. Many progressive and anti-establishment intellectuals embraced this magical solution, which ended up being a surrender of critical thinking, with no practical effect.

Paradoxically, the educational left that advocated moving beyond the disciplinary perspective ended up trapped in the functional university paradigm , which prevented it from constructing an alternative anti-system proposal; its solutions did not seek to escape the influence of the disciplinary model of faculties and schools.

Neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s found a practical solution to the impasse: privatizing university research and removing a significant portion of laboratories and research centers from the university environment, now transferring them to corporate supervision and funding. More than professional training, neoliberal capitalism was interested in accelerating innovation, controlling its transfer, and implementing it in the most efficient manner using approaches that transcended disciplines. Everything seems to indicate, empirically speaking, that capital developed pragmatic inter- and multidisciplinary ways to maintain the acceleration of innovation and its transfer to the circuits of profit accumulation.

Fourth, the outsourcing of university innovation . In the process of attempting to drive the transition from a disciplinary to a transdisciplinary paradigm, capitalism seems to have lost hope in the university’s capacity for self-reform. Although most universities began a process of updating their vision and mission in the 1970s and 1980s, considering transdisciplinarity as an emerging paradigm, the reality was that the gap between words and actions was—and remains—enormous. One cannot pretend to soar through the skies with the «feathers and beeswax of Icarus»; an adequate infrastructure is required to do so. The university’s organizational model, hegemonized in the first two industrial revolutions (faculties, schools, departments, etc.), made it impossible for the university to escape the disciplinary islandof «Crete.» While the «sun» of accelerated innovation melted Icarus’s wings, making the falsification of the paradigm shift evident, the capitalist «minotaur» opted to promote the externalization of the dynamics it required, leaving academia a prisoner of Daedalus’s attempt. This has meant, for example, that most advances in technology and other fields occur outside the university, which should set off all academic alarm bells. Fortunately, this is not a scorched earth, because the university maintains its inventive capacity; what needs to be recovered is its expansive and counter-hegemonic power.

Fifth, technology companies , which even became part of the great accumulation boom in the era of the financialization of the economy, built a new culture for the creation and management of innovation based on inter, multi, and transdisciplinary dynamics . More than qualifications, skills and competencies for working in inter/multi/transdisciplinary teams that built pragmatic dynamics that enhanced the generation of knowledge that contributed to the acceleration of innovation began to prevail. When it came to strengthening performance capabilities, advanced training in business settings, far from the noise and tumult of academia, was sufficient. Of course, all teams included qualified professionals, but the preeminence of this criterion for selection began to seem overestimated. The explosion of post-Fordist managerialism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s led to the decline of managers as a tribe specialized in leadership, giving rise to a period in which the creators and owners, not only of start-ups but also of large corporations, became their own managers. The trend was for owner-CEOs to now lead creative teams.

From the business world, the university has acquired a new central role in the reproduction of the system, disseminating innovations to guide consumption (profit + income), through the dynamics inherent to the neoliberal evaluative culture (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, academic mobility, and recognition of studies). This shift would facilitate the adoption of what is currently being touted as the great innovation for higher education institutions: microcredentials or microaccreditation .

As the university failed to break free from the weight of the invented tradition of the disciplinary paradigm , a dangerous period of structural instability began across its entire institutional apparatus. Even the Edgar Morín Real World Multidiversity University, so widely touted as the genesis of new functional archetypes, failed to transcend or become a prototype of the new university yet to emerge. During this long period of emptying of the university’s reforming potential (1961-2011), a new twist in the industrial revolutions became evident. The arrival of the fourth industrial revolution found the university in debt (transdisciplinary paradigm), and now a new paradigmatic shift was demanded .

5. Heuristic convergence: If we don’t talk about it, won’t it happen? (Transition to the Fourth Industrial Revolution)

In 2011, the imminent arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution was announced in Hanover, Germany (Schwab, 2016). The anticipated horizon of change was about twenty years; its full deployment is expected around 2030. This was not a simple concentric shift; rather, the spiral was now moving away from transdisciplinarity to demand new forms of convergence between fields of knowledge . Its spokespersons—the Fourth Industrial Revolution—spoke of new ways of thinking and generating the required knowledge, but they did not—and still do not—find a conceptual form for this requirement, communicating only its operational expressions.

Academia, recklessly, seems to have left the terrain of this call to think about a new paradigm of knowledge empty and inert. It’s like a collective impulse to escape, which seems to express the cognitive syndrome that, if it’s not talked about, the event won’t happen. As in love and politics—in this case, education—there is no empty space, and it tends to be filled by other actors, ideas, and desires. It is development banks, multilateralism, technology corporations, and corporate consultants who are beginning to pierce the veil of the emerging. In that sense, we invite you to break free from inertia and reclaim the initiative.

Heuristic convergence

Based on the study of the emerging epistemological demands that accompany the fourth industrial revolution, especially in relation to learning dynamics in contexts of increasing acceleration of innovation, we have made a conceptual approach, in what we have called heuristic convergence , an emerging paradigm for the construction of knowledge in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution.

Although heuristic convergence is not a standardized term, nor has it yet been incorporated into the educational thesaurus, it serves as a way to express the growing demand to transcend the limits of transdisciplinarity. Heuristic convergence has two basic components: the first, convergence , which is not additive but rather integration and complementarity, as appropriate; the second, heuristics, understood as a strategy for discovering and constructing meaning.

Consequently, heuristic convergence can be interpreted as an emerging concept , associated with the integration of various heuristics – methods or strategies based on experience or practical reasoning – with the purpose of reaching a much more precise , efficient, and robust solution to complex problems arising from the acceleration of innovation . It appears as a new cognitive, pedagogical, and epistemic paradigm that transcends by integrating disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity to respond to the demands of soft skills, creative critical thinking, and contingent approach to problems in the knowledge-technology-production relationship.

Heuristic convergence preservesthe analytical rigor and methodological depth of the disciplinary paradigm, transcending its epistemological confinement, its compartmentalization of knowledge, preservingthe coexistence between multiple knowledges characteristic of multidisciplinarity , expanding beyond its limits by enabling real dialogue between knowledges , maintaining the articulation between disciplines characteristic of interdisciplinarity , overcoming dependence on formal academic frameworks; finally, it is called to summon and contain the extra-academic knowledge that entails transdisciplinarity .

The heuristic foundation of paradigmatic convergence is far from being understood as a fusion of parts, it is rather a dynamic and changing integration, which seeks to address uncertainty without the need for absolute certainties , facilitates the establishment of multiple entries and points of inter-paradigmatic contact , postulates learning from error , experimentation, dialogue and intuition, favoring emerging thought processes , characteristic of the activation of lateral and divergent thinking .

Heuristic convergence appears to be a path to developing so-called soft skills , facilitating critical thinking (functional, pragmatic, and consensual, based on the contrast of diverse perspectives), creativity (an unusual connection of ideas), effective communication (translation and mediation between disciplinary and experiential languages), collaboration (negotiating meanings and goals), complex problem-solving (addressing real-life situations from multiple perspectives), adaptability (learning in non-linear and changing environments), and empathy (integrating community knowledge). Approaching it from an emancipatory perspective seeks to be an antidote to the instrumentalism of economic productivism.

In Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) we talk about heuristic algorithms (genetic algorithms [2] , tabu search [3] or simulated annealing [4] ) and hybrid metaheuristics , heuristic rules for decision making, common truth(multiple perspectives grouped around a consensus).

The central issue is not waiting for capital’s definition, but rather seeking its own elaboration from the alternative field, transcending its defensive and reactive nature. We are facing the imminent opening of a new paradigmatic rift , which must urgently be exploited. We cannot repeat the experience of the past, where we failed to seize the opportunity to advance in the empirical, conceptual, operational, and organizational architecture fields. We have a short window of time to do so, as the fourth industrial revolution takes the form of 4.0 factories, and these have not yet flipped the switch that will mark their full beginning. In the accelerated transition between the third and fourth industrial revolutions, we are obliged to think about the alternative from the perspective of those at the bottom.

To talk about the beginning of a fifth or sixth industrial revolution as if it were a process that is objectively underway at this moment, is a technologist view and disconnected from the relationship between innovation and mode of production (commodities, profits, governance, reproduction). Immaterial production is still marginal, its production chains are still closely associated with the materiality of production and the mechanisms for generating additional surplus value are in most cases experimental or unstable. What is currently besieging the university is the imminent landing of the fourth industrial revolution in the programmed production of commodities and profits on a global scale [5] .

The abstract and the concrete

There is too much noise in the room, which makes it difficult to clearly identify the different tones of many of the speeches that are emerging. One of the most interesting debates is the one being waged on techno-feudalism as a critique of the digital economy by Cédric Duran (2025) and Evnegy Morozov (2025). Basically, Durand argues that the digital economy is a regression to the pre-capitalist mode of accumulation, in which the profits of large technology corporations are fundamentally marked by the extraction of rent from connected users and small businesses in the virtual field, while Morozov points out that digital corporations operate within the logic of the capitalist market , investing in innovation, competing for markets and obtaining profits (not just rent); Durand believes that corporate owners act with the logic of landlordism, monopolizing territories, and instead of fostering innovation, they prioritize the control of data and platforms, generating an economy based on dependency. Morozov responds that technology companies are classic capitalist actors, as an evolution of capitalism toward hyper-concentration and financialization, which has innovation as one of its central components, and we are not facing a return to the past.

This debate is not unrelated to university policies in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution . In Morozov’s logic, to maintain the pace of innovation , digital capitalismrequires increasing volumes of investment that are even surpassing the capacity of financial speculation, which is why he turns his attention to public funds, especially those destined for the education sector . Virtuality, hybrid teaching models, and the metaverse constitute mechanisms for capturing public funds through the speculative sale (inflated value, speculative profit) of digital-virtual services; this voracity for capturing resources for investment in innovationis creating a horizon of risk for university face-to-face education , teacher stability , and the return to the (in this case, remote) instructional paradigm .

From our perspective, Morozov is right in defining that corporate owners do not want any vassal relationship that implies dependency, but rather they are committed to the fiercest competition in the social sphere, from which they can set in motion the machinery of profit absorption with parameters that include income (data).

In any case, whether Durand or Morozov are right, what emerges from reading their arguments is that a tsunami is approaching the institutions that express liberal, progressive, and socialist ideas of progressive rights , including universities, and, from my point of view, in-person attendance is an obstacle to illiberal ends . Therefore, hybrid models, as they are increasingly structured in everyday university life, are a dangerous concession to digital capitalism that puts the university as we know it at risk. The abstract is revealed in the concrete ; debates about the current nature of capitalism in the superstructure have a counterpart in the structure.

This is not an academic abstraction, awaiting the university’s will to change. Quite the contrary, a set of initiatives has been launched whose epistemology could be summed up in the phrase » the university is transforming rapidly or it will disappear due to social obsolescence .» Let’s look at some of these proposals that attempt to transfer from the economic-political level to the academic level, which are developed at the superstructural, structural, and concrete levels: university crisis, the STEM and STEM+A paradigm, calls for the reduction of degrees, microcredentials, Generative Artificial Intelligence to overcome routine thinking styles, company-based training, a 180-degree turn in organizational development, and the dismantling of Fordist social security models.

The stable and the changing: technology innovates every day

Eric Sadín (2022) lucidly explains the impact of the acceleration of innovation in its commendatory turn of technology . From the disturbing passion of humans to create doubles of themselves (IAG), through the idea of technologies of perfection, to landing on ergonomic interfaces (technology as human prosthesis) and reaching the externalization of the regime of truth, everything seeks to integrate acceleration of innovation with profit . We would then be entering a kind of psychosphere (Berardi, 2022) of the viral era (the digital transforms the collective psychic environment).

This transformation is diluting institutional and cultural perceptions, a process that occurs most clearly among younger generations. The adaptation of the university world to the system, the perfect fit with the neoliberal evaluative culture (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, neoliberal academic mobility schemes, and degree recognition protocols) is causing the academic world to lose all epic appeal for young people, becoming exclusively a space for training. This surrender of the university world to utopia paradoxically breaks the bonds of affection with the new generations —encapsulated rebellion—and empties in-person presence as a necessary dimension to make intergenerational dreams of change possible. If university is only for training, then other alternatives such as virtuality can be sought , many young people believe. In other words, the university, a product of the impact of digital culture within the framework of accelerating innovation, is being besieged in a liquidationist manner by technological corporatism and sectors of the population that once considered it something unique. As incredible as it may seem, the logic of the market and profit is pushing universities toward virtuality, with all the consequences that this entails.

University crisis to provide, foresee and update

The Faure Report (1972/1973) was the discursive continuation of the debates of the International Conference on the World Crisis in Higher Education (1967). In defining the problems facing school and university systems, the report Learning to Be: The World of Education Today(1972) points out that they have lost their ability to anticipate the future , provide the information required by the present in the context of accelerating innovation and have difficulty in socialising cutting-edge knowledge in a reasonably quick time .

This synthesis of the Faure Report, revised fifty years later, powerfully expresses the logic of capital’s approach to the notion of an educational crisis. Delors’s reports » Education: A Treasure Within » (1996), » Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Common Good? » (2015), and » Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Pact for Education » (2022) express attempts to actualize the elements of the lack of synchronicity in the sphere of innovation and of education with the capitalist mode of production.

This has led not only companies but even powerful governments like that of the United States to enter into open conflict with UNESCO. The Trump administration’s «political rationale» for withdrawing from the multilateral organization (2025) is justified by the argument that it is not in the national interest, especially because its focus is on aspects such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, it actually has to do with the time required by multilateralism to disseminate strategic orientations from the capitalist center, something that occurs more at the pace and speed of the first two industrial revolutions than at those imposed by the current globalizing financialization and the repositioning of American imperialism. This is complemented by its policies regarding the local university sector, which reflect a structural policy aimed at rethinking the role of vocational training in the economy. This «schism» should be a wake-up call, going beyond the superficial interpretation that presents it as Trumpian sensationalism.

Paradigmatic synthesis: STEM – STEM+A

The STEM paradigm was built in the United States, within the framework of the Cold War dispute, especially in the 1960s when the impact of the Third Industrial Revolution on the capitalist mode of production became evident . However, it was not until the 1990s that the National Science Foundation (NSF) coined the acronym STEM as a new educational paradigm, which sought to focus the work of school systems and HEIs on promoting the acceleration and dissemination of scientific and technological innovation, associated with the generation of surplus value and profits. This was followed by STEM+A, which incorporated the arts (design) as a complement.

STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as educational priorities, summarizes the new demands of capital in economic and technological matters (computer science, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, among others), the growing international competitiveness (USA, China, Southeast Asia, European Union), as well as the skills gaps for employment (especially in technical areas), the emergence of the transdisciplinary paradigm as a requirement for the production of knowledge and technology that progressively mutates to heuristic convergence (integrating science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the repositioning of critical thinking (oriented towards applicability) and pragmatic approaches in relation to the social sciences (interoperability, governance, social reengineering).

By promoting training in so-called 21st-century skills , fostering technological innovation , redesigning job training , renewing interest in science that is «useful» to the mode of production, and fostering new social relationshipsthrough the introduction of inclusion issues, this has found concrete expression in policies for the university sector. Initially, this was expressed in curricular reforms (1990s and 21st century), the funding of STEM-focused research agendas(especially through national science bodies), and the promotion of the internationalization of higher education institutions (through bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, new models of academic mobility, and recognition of studies). However, it has since taken shape through outsourced microlearning and micro-accreditation mechanisms . All of this is enhanced by the renewed impetus of the intra- and inter-institutional competitive spirit that has been aligning university policies on a global scale.

STEM is measured using indicators of quality, impact, relevance, innovation, and efficiency, aligning with the guidelines of neoliberal evaluation culture.

Degree obsolescence: scenarios for reducing the number of professions?

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been insisting in its Future of Jobs Report on the obsolescence of qualifications (it projects that 39% of current skills will be obsolete by 2030), the need to strengthen the focus on constantly updating competencies , go beyond transdisciplinarity as a paradigm for learning, knowledge production and technology generation, as well as a new model of public-private collaboration (curricula associated with market requirements, rationalization of the qualifications offered).

In the case of competencies, the WEF proposes replacing specific qualifications with training systems based on micro-credentials, retraining (reskilling) and upskilling , seeking the continuous adaptation of the workforce , without having to go through long qualification processes, which also involve significant public budget expenditures.

This implies a frontal criticism of three aspects: a) the disciplinary model that has not been able to be changed in almost sixty years (1967-2025) of attempts from the system, b) the problems derived from petrified functional structures for professional training (faculties, schools, departments), c) the slowness with which universities incorporate new paradigms , something that is intended to be hidden with the circulation of new information. Capital promotes an eclectic professional model, something that is very difficult to achieve with the current training paradigms of the university world .

The question is: Does this conservative spirit of the university contribute to social transformation? The answer must be ambiguous, because while what is occurring is a form of resistance to the hegemony of corporate economicism in HEIs, a process in which children of the working class and popular sectors still have the opportunity to attend public universities, it is also true that this same conservative spirit increasingly contributes to emancipatory projects in a more precarious manner.

Academic and student mobility model

University internationalization , a constant throughout the history of Latin America and the Caribbean (Bonilla-Molina; Goes et al.; 2025), has relied on academic and student mobility as a dynamic of its own. However, with the advent of neoliberal globalization, this process was reconfigured and expanded, due, among other reasons:

Capitalism’s need to deterritorialize vocational training, in a context of unprecedented acceleration of innovation, in order to transcend the catastrophic impasse between the needs of the mode of production in general and the training for innovation taking place in universities; the ideas for change proposed by the system and the solidification of the organizational structures called upon to do so; the urgency of business requirements and the slow pace of institutional change. External flows could be a catalyst for institutional flexibilization;
The escalation of academic mobility, unprecedented in its active institutional promotion compared to previous periods, aimed—and continues to do so—to provide a less disciplinary, much more multi- and interdisciplinary training, enabling the development of new protocols that pave the way for post-disciplinary organizational developments. Academic mobility is seen as a catalyst for interdisciplinarity in the transition to heuristic convergence;
Breaking with the disciplinary paradigm was not only a change of method, but an epistemic rupture, something that could be facilitated and made permeable through multicultural encounters. Furthermore, the idea of this paradigmatic shift occurred within the center-periphery logic, initially within the United States and the European Union itself, and then from high-income countries as poles of attraction for students from middle- and low-income nations.
The employability and competitiveness approach promoted by neoliberalism through the institutional assessment culture. Thus, academic mobility is expressed in and impacts the remaining components of the measurement and ranking that define the internationalization stage: accreditation, bibliometrics, rankings, and recognition of studies.
Using technological developments, the impact is expanded by combining in-person, hybrid, and virtual academic mobility models. In the latter cases, it was possible to scale the experiences since the COVID-19 pandemic. Mobility is diversified and expanded;
Another model of fragmentation and modularity is established that seeks to pave the way for heuristic convergence, something that would later be expressed in micro-credentials and micro-learning , regulatory instruments (Lisbon Convention -1997; Bologna Process -1999; Erasmus+ -2014- EU Council Recommendation on micro-credentials -2022-; Europass and EUDIW), evaluative instruments (Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance -ESG 2015-; Assessment based on learning outcomes; Rankings and Metrics; Digital Verification -European Digital Identity Wallet – EUDIW);

In short, the current dominant academic mobility model is part of the effort to disrupt the paradigm at the university level, even though the institution continues to believe that this is part of the historical prestige of vocational training.

Bologna Process

The so-called Bologna Process (1999) has been an effort to create and strengthen the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) as a practice to be scaled up globally. Its antecedents were the Sorbonne Declaration [6] (1998), the Erasmus Programme [7] (1987), the European Credit Transfer System -ECTS- (1989), the demands of neoliberal globalization and capitalist cultural globalization . In particular, the Sorbonne Declaration served as inspiration for the creation of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESCG), the Diploma Supplement , the trend towards standardizing credits by vocational training cycles (undergraduate, master’s, doctorate), and micro-accreditation.

The Bologna Process will be very important in establishing the academic mobilitymodel (for faculty, students, and other sectors) that has become central to the neoliberal evaluation culture . It is through the Bologna Process that academic mobility can build the performance and characteristics that allow it to align with university accreditation, rankings, bibliometrics, and standards for the recognition of studies and professional degrees.

Improving employability is one of the central motivations for this process, seeking to align higher education with the demands of the labor market . The greatest challenge in this regard is breaking away from the disciplinary matrix, which runs the risk of becoming blurred in the procedural tangle.

In this sense, the Bologna Process also adopts an educational market approach , seeking to capture the training demand of students from Asia, the United States, and Latin America. This entails making the EHEA an attractive place to learn and graduate in a context of accelerating innovation, demands for a break from the disciplinary matrix, and the hegemony of the STEM paradigm. Therefore, the Bologna Process extends from the superstructure of the educational system to the university structure, building consensus «from above» that is legitimized «from below» in the operational sphere. In this sense, competitiveness takes on the contours of business demands and the tools of neoliberal evaluation culture.

The Bologna Process encompasses more than 4,000 higher education institutions, directly reaching over 38 million students. It also paves the way for reforms in the sector on a global scale, promoting a comparable system of degrees, adopting the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS), implementing student mobility agreements that increasingly involve higher education institutions (HEIs), and recognizing qualifications.

Its implementation occurs through Ministerial Conferences (every 2 to 3 years), common tools for the EHEA (ECTS, Diploma Supplement, QF-EHEA Qualifications Framework, Quality Standards for Institutions), funding programs, especially for academic mobility, and specific projects such as MICROBOL, CertiDigital, and DC4EU. Currently, the central focus of the Bologna Process is on Digitalization and microcredentials, strengthening associated dynamics, and supporting emerging projects such as the Microcreds Plan (which involved 41 participating universities by 2024).

Following the migration and humanitarian crises caused by wars, the Bologna Process has developed agreements and regulatory instruments such as the Tirana Communication (2024) to promote the mobility of people with disabilities or from disadvantaged backgrounds, which has implied a new look at the issue of refuge, associated with the recruitment of human talent in situations of precarious work and life.

The Lisbon Convention (1997/1999) has facilitated progress in the recognition of qualifications and microcredentials in the EHEA. The United Kingdom’s departure (Brexit) has not, so far, meant a break with the Bologna Process.

The Bologna Process cannot be seen as an isolated or singular case, but rather as part of a systemic puzzle to overcome the epistemic gap between knowledge production and university innovation and production modes.

Micro-learning, micro-accreditation, and micro-credentials

Microcredentials have become fashionable in recent years, but the fragmented and hyper-specialized approach inherent in the disciplinary paradigm limits the possibilities of understanding them within the framework of an integrated strategy for reorienting vocational and professional training in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution .

Micro-credentials, micro-accreditation and micro-learning are the names that have been adopted, standardized and are being sought to be standardized for digital certification processes associated with the validation of knowledge , training competencies , and skills acquired through experiences defined by their pragmatic usefulness, which are carried out in the academic, business or extra-institutional spheres.

One of the most complete processes in this direction is the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), which is based on the recognition of a certain number of working hours [8] as educational credit. ECTS , created in 1989 – at the height of neoliberalism – has been part of the European Union (EU) Erasmus Programme to strengthen the student mobility model in that region. The aim is to build flexible mechanisms for educational recognition, given the rigidity and slowness of some school systems and university subsystems in producing the transformations required by the mode of production within the framework of the acceleration of innovation, typical of the third industrial revolution in the period 1971-2025.

The ECTS system establishes parameters for measuring , comparing , and recognizing academic work within and outside of universities . Within the framework of the Bologna Process (1999), it would evolve into an integrated accumulation and transfer system , which would be the basis for promoting the radical outsourcing of vocational training (2021). The results of training processes under this scheme, which on average weight one credit over 25-30 hours of work, are measurable and aligned with the parameters of the European Qualifications Framework (EQF).

All the guidelines of the process are contained in the ECTS Guide [9] , the Course Catalogue [10] , Learning Agreement [11] , Diploma Supplement [12] and the Transcript of Records [13]. One of the undeclared purposes of the system is to broaden the disciplinary base of training, opening up to inter, multi, transdisciplinary and heuristic convergence models, an aspect that has been very difficult to develop in each university, among other elements due to the weight of the false academic tradition, power relations and the microphysics for the construction of knowledge inherited from the first two industrial revolutions.

Between 2020-2022, the Micro-credentials linked to the Bologna Key Commitments (MICROBOL) project was carried out, with Erasmus+KA3 funding, to improve the accuracy of the Bologna Process tools, from which the ECTS system , the Qualifications Frameworks (QF-EHEA [14] and EQF) and the Quality Assurance Mechanisms (ESG) were evaluated, concluding the need for greater flexibility, especially to include non-formal learning.

The ECTS has a wide geographical reach, especially in the 48 countries that form part of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), as well as others in Asia, Turkey, Latin America, among others, and organizations such as UNESCO. It is applied to vocational training (undergraduate), master’s and doctoral degrees, as well as complete and modular microlearning programs. Since 2025, CertiDigital [15] and DC4EU [16] have been facilitating digital ECTS certifications.

Like every process in the logic of capital that tends towards international homogenization, the European University Association (EUA) and the Group [17] Crue [18] -RUEPEP [19] of Spain are advancing in the regulations for the standardization of micro-accreditation processes, something that would facilitate its expansion and consolidation in Latin America (neocolonial expansion from the center to the periphery).

UNESCO’s Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC) has become one of the main promoters of micro-learning and micro-accreditation, as part of the multilateral organization’s current emphasis.

From the perspective of heuristic convergence for knowledge construction, micro-accreditation is aligned to the extent that:

It breaks with the frameworks of university autonomy that were based on the paradigm of change formulated from within. That is, they externalize decision-making processes, cloaked in apparent autonomy from the university sector, when in reality their place of enunciation is the field of economics, production, and profit generation, in the dynamics of the transition from the third to the fourth industrial revolution.
They advance in the political-economic transfer as educational transfer , legitimizing the transnationalization of educational change;
They avoid institutional conflict by creating a culture of the inevitability of alienation due to the weight of innovation ;
They open up different institutional frameworks that guide learning and its recognition, overcoming the institutional bureaucratic obstacles of organizational models based on faculties, schools, and departments, characteristic of the disciplinary paradigm for knowledge construction. A new supranational institutionality is emerging that transcends established organizational charts, with frameworks that allow for evolution based on inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinarity;
They enable the assembly of learning experiences that dilute the barriers of disciplinary fields, which enables decentralized curricular reengineering , typical of the paradigm of heuristic convergence;

However, the risk is that:

Since those who implement it are professionals trained by the disciplinary paradigm, this dynamic ends up stagnating its purpose of transcending it;
The outsourcing of the place of enunciation of micro-accreditation facilitates the shift towards the business employability model and its corporate financing logic, which increasingly materializes processes of homogenization to the STEM paradigm, growing loss of real academic freedom and autonomy, validation parameters that tend towards productivism, competition and hierarchization;
Critical thinking is reconfigured as an element of functionality, that is, for the operability of the training received;
Since the participation of grassroots teacher organizations, unions and guilds of education workers, student organizations, and the pedagogical social movement in the processes of constructing proposals is precarious or nonexistent—because in some cases they are called upon to legitimize them—this can end up increasing the distance between the university and the citizen requirements that exceed employability;

Employability as a surname of the human right to education

At the Third World Conference on Higher Education (WCEH, 2022), the restrictive complement to the right to education was finally legitimized . The international pedagogical social movement had managed to position the paradigm of the human right to lifelong education , which entailed demanding that nation states guarantee timely access to school and university systems. This implied access at any age—although modalities existed for this—regardless of social origin, religious or political belief, skin color, and even whether the individual was a national, migrant, or refugee. From these principles, education was a tool for building critical citizenship at any point in life.

At CMES 2022, the human right to lifelong education for employability was discussed , dangerously opening itself up to economic rationale. The ultimate expression of this variant would be that you are guaranteed the right to education as long as you prove that what you learn will help you access a job . This perspective underlies initiatives like the one being carried out by Google and that Meta and other companies are already beginning to consider. Micro-accreditation is the way this path of thorns without roses builds hegemony.

The way in which economic rationality takes shape in the right to education finds its maximum expression in the demands of the Comptroller General of the Republic of Panama (2025), when he asked the University of Panama (UP) to review—or exclude?—the cases of students over 30 years of age who are studying at this institution, because—in the opinion of the Comptroller—this constitutes a waste of public resources or an example of inefficient use for employability. Of course, this occurs within the framework of a widespread social conflict, in which university students played a special role in defending sovereignty and defending solidarity-based social security regimes.

Sometimes, additions limit rather than expand rights; we should be clear about this when addressing disputes from the perspective of the excluded, the poor, and the subaltern classes. The human right to education must be lifelong for critical, comprehensive citizenship.

Training for employability in the companies themselves

The difficulties in initiating a sustained transition from the disciplinary paradigm to the transdisciplinary paradigm, and now to heuristic convergence, are leading to a proliferation of corporate workforce training initiatives.

Singularity University (SU) was created in 2008. It is not a formally established university because it has a functional structure different from traditional HEIs, a fact that would likely prevent it from being formally accredited. Its organizational design is that of a research center, complemented by training.

Founded by Ray Kurzweil—the guru of transhumanism and director of engineering at Google—and Peter Diamandis, its core business is not aimed at the general public but at national and international decision-makers . They are based on the premise that one of the problems that prevented the evolution from the disciplinary to the transdisciplinary paradigm , transforming the faculty-centered organizational chart and the culture of compartmentalizing knowledge, was due to the leadership’s inability to understand the dimensions, scope, and meaning of the proposed change. Recognizing that the shift in the fourth industrial revolution will be much more drastic, they emphasize high-level training. Their students are candidates for ministers, department directors, heads of political organizations, and techno-politicians in general. Their activities currently span more than 70 countries.

The background that led to justify the creation of the Singularity University are exponential technological change (acceleration rates that challenge university frameworks), the need for adaptive leadership (gap between slow leaders trained in disciplinary paradigms versus disruptive, agile and collaborative thinking), inspiration in technological singularity (point of transformation of the human concept) and the Silicon Valley model (entrepreneurship, rapid innovation, global impact, breaking down rigid educational structures).

Consequently, they seek to educateand inspire leaders , entrepreneurs, and organizations, address global challenges , foster collaborative ecosystems , and replace disciplinary archetypes for generating innovation. In their vision of creative work, teaching, and learning, they posit a transdisciplinary and convergent , systemic , and heuristic matrix for building knowledge associated with creation.

In other words, Singularity University (SU) is a capital project to ensure appropriate, timely, and efficient management of change in general and at the university level in particular. This is complemented by other entrepreneurial training initiatives for the grassroots workforce.

On July 17, 2025, Forbes magazine published an article by Jason Wingard on Google’s promise to create a higher education workforce. In this article, he notes that » Big Tech isn’t waiting for higher education: they’re replacing it .» Just two days earlier, Google had announced the initiative at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, under the theme «AI Works for America,» which is planned to be held in all fifty states. The author asks, what happens when companies like Google stop posting job ads and start building their own workforce from scratch?

A few years ago, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt published his book “ How Google Works ” (2015), in which he highlights as key points the culture of innovation , the strategic hiring of exceptional talent (technical skills, creativity and cultural alignment with the company), data-driven decision-making , flexible organizational structure , long-term vision , for which they have established a collegial management through a triumvirate made up of Google founders Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt himself. In his book, he highlights the growing difficulties the company had in locating professionals with adaptive and creative capacity and who could accompany internal evolution. The key for Schmidt is the culture of innovation , something that he sees increasingly distant in classical university training and is linked to what we have called heuristic convergence .

From this corporate perspective, for Schmidt there is a mismatch between university education and market demands , a product of the difficulties that graduates have in developing continuous and flexible learning, especially due to the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) on education, elements that conflict with the meritocracy and results-based evaluation schemes implemented by technology companies. It could be argued that the university has a social function and its task is not to please the business innovation sector , which is a half-truth, because those who say this usually subscribe to government agreements to place employability as the central axis of higher education institutions . Furthermore, if we review the curricular structure of most professional careers, despite the existence of principles of responsibility and social commitment, the axis is focused on training for employment.

We need to break with a certain conceptual hypocrisy that uses the social aspect to appear progressive , while advancing the transformation of extension as a means of obtaining funding through the sale of services, increasingly neglecting the energy and focus required for social transformation. As we have pointed out, elements of neoliberal evaluation culture (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, academic mobility models, and degree recognition policies) increasingly lead to higher education institutions aligning themselves more with the demands of the market rather than those of the citizenry. Of course, there is resistance, voices of denunciation, and significant milestones of protest against this dynamic, but the trend has not been reversed.

Wingard (2025) argues that Google seeks to provide its students with a real opportunity for employment and professional development, something that university systems do not currently offer, stating that “ it is not altruism, it is market dominance .” This analyst’s position summarizes the logic of a significant portion of current business management, especially in the technological field.

The vocational training offered today in universities is formally designed for employability , but in reality it is based on the principles, frameworks, and stereotypes of the first two industrial revolutions : public administration and government job design . This is not wrong per se . The problem is that, in the latter two cases, the core of state reforms driven by neoliberalism since the 1980s has led to the downsizing of the state, highlighting the potential for entrepreneurship and self-management, as well as the dynamic and changing nature of jobs in the private sector. The tensions this generated led to a system of adaptability for HEIs that sought to strike a balance between the requirements of the public and private sectors and the ultra-flexibility of entrepreneurship; the result is a hybrid that pleases almost no one.

Furthermore, despite the trend toward managerialist training in universities that we saw in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in the last two decades , data management , generative artificial intelligence , and open management models have brought about a substantial shift in the classic notion of management, something that universities seem to have failed to take due note of.

What we see today, expressed in Google’s Pittsburgh initiative, appears to be a growing movement, clearly ushering in a new, escalating phase of vocational training within companies themselves. If only a group of confused corporate CEOs were driving this movement, perhaps we wouldn’t have so much to worry about. But this discourse has permeated institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), as evidenced in the interview Juan David Olmos conducted with Mercedes Mateo, an education specialist at that organization (2019), which begins with the phrase » the college diploma is becoming obsolete .» Mateo points out that unlike in the past, when job stability was part of the work culture, today a university graduate can have an average of “ 15 different jobs in their life… that means that every three or four years, more or less, they must reinvent themselves, update their skills and adapt to the demands of a changing world ” (Revista Semana, July 4, 2019). He adds that soft skills are required and that training in this regard is precarious, citing the Manpower Group Report of that year, which indicated that 50% of companies cannot find the personnel they need, despite having professionals who should possess them.

Mateo’s ideas suggest several things. First, the willingness of large companies to assume the design and costs of training in competencies and skills that universities do not teach, which fosters the temptation for businesses to take charge of the vocational and qualified training they require. Second, the demand for competencies and skills is changing, which implies the redesign of continuing education and the implementation of degree validation processes every three to six years; this update has been attempted to be promoted in HEIs through the Bibliometrics format, but as we discussed in the previous article, this has not been achieved. Third, in the transition from the current professional model managed by the university sector to one self-managed by companies, micro-accreditation and micro-credentials appear as the interface that can not only pivot the problem but also shift the location of training delivery to employment. Fourth, the political and social impact of this is tremendous, necessitating the emergence of new political actors to set it in motion—that is, a neoconservative, illiberal wave that dissipates any trace of the social DNA associated with the Keynesian Welfare State. This is embodied in the rise of the far right, with governments like those of Milei and Trump dissolving and reconfiguring the Ministry of Education and the Department of Education, breaking with more than 100 years since they began to form and expand in the region as an expression—to varying degrees and with uneven development—of the human right to education. Milei and Trump’s attacks on universities are not personal outrages but part of a structural policy of dismantling school and university systems as a place for the expression of vocational training. Fifth, the role of the university is being transformed from a place for teaching, research, and university teaching to a place for the validation of micro-learning obtained outside its sphere; Accrediting something that has been part of the training is not the same as granting micro-credentials for processes that are not even carried out at universities. Although the percentage of micro-credits is low today, there is a risk of widening the gap. Sixth, all of this requires outsourcing the micro-credentialing validation mechanisms, making them appear university-based, when in reality they are located outside their scope.

This logic, which is presented as a sectoral requirement, tends to transform university ontology and epistemology, paving the way for new paradigms of professional training that can radically change what we know today as a university.

Renewal of organizational development and new know-how for employability

In 1961, teachers’ social recognition was higher than it is today, although salaries have always been low for the worthy work they perform. Over the past six decades, subjects have been added, eliminated, or merged, moving from blackboards for working with chalk, to acrylic with markers, to dynamic projections, and now to artificial intelligence applications. The school bell still rings with the same tone, and school uniforms haven’t changed much. The timetables are not much different from those of the past, and inexplicably, the discipline committee still exists. I started primary education in 1967, and the institutional organizational chart hanging in the principal’s office remains the same, although several principals have died after taking office since then. Subjects are organized and taught by discipline. The solar system chart didn’t even mention the period when Pluto was demoted to a planetoid. Textbooks mention little about phytoplankton, leaving the entire task of preserving oxygen to plants.

In the 1980s, I entered a teacher training university, where the disciplinary paradigm had escalated to the point of fragmenting pedagogy. Didactics was taught separately from the curriculum, and assessment, classroom management, and planning were normative. Innovation was approached as instructional resources, and the curricularization of training left little room for integration and creation, despite the fashionable correlation of objectives, transversality, and comprehensiveness. The impact of business management models on teaching was not taught, although later in the master’s degree in management we studied Goleman, Peter Senge, and total quality management. In the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs, thinking about alternative school and university systems seemed absurd, but everyone did strive to be an informed teacher.

From this routine, a massive escape from the disciplinary matrix only began to occur with the COVID-19 pandemic, although the role of department coordinators supervising compliance (both compliance and denial) with schedules through screens was pathetic, as if in-person and virtual classes shared the same rhythms and working methods. Of course, the pandemic shook universities, but as often happens after an earthquake, it’s about damage control, rebuilding to return to what’s familiar.

Unfortunately, it was the business sector, development banks, large technology corporations, and organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF) that began to talk about a new pedagogical performance, a new teaching know-how. Once again, the demands for transformation implied a transfer of the political-economic to the educational .

An integration of the most requested characteristics of teaching know-how are integrated and critical digital skills (in a pedagogical sense), with sufficient handling of platforms, generative artificial intelligence, big data, augmented reality, algorithmic biases, educational cyberactivism; systemic and heuristic thinking , to transcend the disciplinary paradigm and achieve an open and complex understanding of reality; lifelong learning , where continuous training is truly daily and teaching knowledge is open to new ones, without concluded statements, making creative management of uncertainty; capacity for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration , face-to-face, virtual or hybrid; pedagogical use of data (data literacy) for the analysis of school performance patterns and anticipation of difficulties, personalization of learning and situated decision-making; continuous didactic innovation that allows the creation of pedagogical sequences, alternative evaluation (gamification, digital portfolios), microlearning and adequate error management in experimentation; Knowledge management and collective creation to overcome the logic of consuming ideas, knowledge, and paradigms; multichannel and multimodal communication skills to diversify interactions with students, among others.

When I work on recovering expectations of labor know-how, I clearly realize that these exceed the institutional capacities of average universities, for reasons ranging from government disinvestment to routines as an expression of what it means to do. Of course, in the logic of capital, social commitment doesn’t appear, nor does the university’s fight for social justice, ecology, and gender equality. It’s as if HEIs were simple extensions of the factory, company, or office of tech CEOs. But capital knows that as the dynamics of neoliberal evaluative culture advance (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, academic mobility model, and degree recognition), it will be much easier to suppress anti-system critical thinking. The problem is that down this road we could end up deleting the face-to-face university itself.

6. Conclusion

The university would like to «pass by» in this situation, like the student who didn’t study and tries to make himself invisible so that he won’t be questioned during the interrogation and suffer a negative impact on his grade, or the child who plays hide-and-seek by covering his face with his small hand thinking that his entire body is hidden, or worse still, like the new age mentalists who think that if the subject isn’t discussed… it won’t happen.

Of course, it’s possible to transform it, but it requires a creative balance between will and knowledge. Paradoxically, the university seems to contain more will than expertise regarding how to disrupt the logic of disciplinary production and reproduction.

Precisely, for various reasons—from a business perspective, but also from a popular and class perspective—disciplinarity is something that had to be overcome, just as the expansion of the transdisciplinary paradigm is now necessary to make way for heuristic convergence. The problem is that to move forward, we have to think about the university «upside down,» leaving behind the comfort of the familiar. Do we dare?

List of references

Berardi, F. (2022) The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Digital Age. Caja Negra Editores. Argentina

Durand, C. (2025) Technofeudalism: A Critique of the Digital Economy. La Cabra Publishing House. Argentina.

Faure et al. (1971) Learning to be: the world of education today. UNESCO Publishing. Paris, France.

Gramsci, A. (2011) A selection of writings. Porrua Editions. Mexico.

Kondratieff, N. (1984). The Long Wave Cycle. Richardson & Snyder Publishing. NY. United States.

Mandel, E. (2023) Late Capitalism. Sylone Editions. Spain

Mateo, M. (2019) The university diploma is becoming obsolete. Interview for Semana magazine, July 4, 2019.

Morin, E. (1990) Introduction to Complex Thinking. UNESCO Publishing. France

Morozov, E. (2025) «Is digital technology taking us back to the Middle Ages?» Other Voices in Education. Venezuela

Novack, G (1965) Uneven and Combined Development in History. Pioneer Publisher. USA

Pérez, C (2003) Technological revolutions and financial: the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages. Elgar. London

Sadin, E. (2020) Artificial intelligence or the challenge of the century: anatomy of a radical anti-humanism. Argentine Black Box

Schmidt, E. & Rosenberg, J. (2015). How Google Works. Aguilar Publishing. Spain.

Wingard, J. (2022) The College devaluation crisis. Market disruption, diminishing role, and an alternative future of learning. Stanford Business Book. USA

Wingard, J. (2025) Google Building The Workforce Hogher ed Promised – But Never Delivered. Forbes digital edition of July 17, 2025.

[1] Visiting professor at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS) in Brazil. Research Director of the International Research Center Other Voices in Education. Member of the World Congress Movement against Educational Neoliberalism.

[2] Techniques that simulate the process of natural selection, based on a scale of possible solutions whose use evolves from the different generations of digital selection, crossing and mutation events.

[3] It is an interactive order technique, which begins with a solution, trying to improve it by comparing it with other similar solutions, with short-term memory that does not allow (taboo) approaching already explored solutions.

[4] Simulation that allows accepting the worst solutions on a temporary basis, escaping the entropy of the optimal decision not achieved.

[5] [5] This is not only a productive problem, but basically a geopolitical one of power, because the impact of factories 4.0 on the flow of money and its impact on the financialization of the economy must first be resolved. These processes are expressed today in the trade tensions between the US-China, the US-European Union, Europe-Russia, the US-BRICs, among others. My working hypothesis is that these tensions tend towards agreement, not resolution through a new war on a global scale, which does not rule out local wars as part of these tensions.

[6] Signed by the education ministers of France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, it raises the urgent need to harmonize the architecture of higher education systems, the promotion of student and professional mobility, the recognition of qualifications and credits, the strengthening of European competitiveness, cooperation and the promotion of educational quality, a European identity in higher education. From our perspective, the Sorbonne Declaration is a response by European countries with hegemonic ambitions to the Latin Americanist course that had been taking place in the previous debates and deliberations of the World Conference on Higher Education, especially on issues such as autonomy and academic freedom, public financing of higher education, education as a human right, among others. It is a reading of assembly with neoliberal globalization, not of resistance.

[7] The Erasmus Programme, acronym for the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, began on June 15, 1987, with an emphasis on the academic mobility model of the evaluative culture in the neoliberal era. In 2014, it evolved into Erasmus+, operating in multi-annual cycles (currently 2021-2027). It seeks to promote competitiveness by promoting educational mobility (teachers, students, administrative staff), improve educational quality and indicators of evaluative culture in higher education (quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency), increase the employability of graduates, promote the internationalization of higher education, and support lifelong learning through the micro-credential model. Erasmus funds linked projects such as MICROBOL, CertDigital and DC4EU, from which it proposed a Common European Framework for Micro-credentials. The Erasmus+ Innovation Partnerships program develops and implements a strategy with private companies to develop micro-credentials of interest to the goods and services sector. Erasmus promotes the Europass with blockchain technology. Micro-credentials will be a topic of special attention at the next EHEA Ministerial Conference (2027).

[8] For example, a subject or course with 6 ECTS credits can be made up of 30 hours of classroom work, 60 hours of individual study, 30 hours of practice and 30 hours of study for tests, for a total of 150 creditable hours.

[9] The most recent version we have had access to is that of 2015

[10] Subject catalogue, which contains the programs, subjects, learning outcomes and ECTS credits per institution.

[11] It is the learning agreement or contract between the student, the home institution, and the host institution, which specifies the courses to be taken and their value in terms of recognized credits. Inter-institutional master’s and doctoral programs have popularized and strengthened this model.

[12] Supplement to the degree detailing the acquired skills and ECTS credits, to enable the comparison of qualifications.

[13] Official record of grades, as well as the credits obtained by each student. During the World Conference on Higher Education (2022) in Barcelona, organized by UNESCO, the debate focused on registration mechanisms, with the micro-accreditation course being accepted practically without major resistance. For example, the Germans showed resistance regarding the use of Blockchain for these purposes, while some Asian and Latin American countries viewed it with sympathy.

[14] Quality of Microaccreditation in the European Higher Education Area

[15] Project of Spanish universities together with European universities for the promotion of the digitalization of credentials, their interoperability, integration with ECTS, the portability of micro credentials in systems such as the European Digital Identify Wallet (EUDIW), the quality associated with the ESG, based on the Recommendations of the Council of the European Union on Micro credentials (2022).

[16] The Digital Credentials for Europe (DC4EU) is a 24-month project (2023-2025) involving 80 organizations from the European University Area and more (Ukraine, Norway, among others), focused on implementing the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW). Its purpose is to advance solid and reliable infrastructure for the implementation of micro credentials, the interoperability and scaling of the system, the strengthening of the student and academic mobility model, the achievement of privacy and trust standards, and the standardization of processes. The DC4EU uses as a reference the ECTS micro credential of 1 credit equivalent to 25-30 hours of work.

[17] The Crue-RUEPEP Group is not a formally established entity, but rather the expression of a convergence effort for the normalization and standardization of micro-accreditation oriented towards employability.

[18] Group of Spanish universities

[19] University Network for Postgraduate Studies and Continuing Education. It meets annually, with the most recent meeting being held on March 26, 2025, at the University of Oviedo. It usually works with the Spanish accreditation agency ANECA and European university spaces.

Luis Bonilla-Molina

Investigador de las Ciencias Sociales, docente y luchador social. Internacionalista por una educación pública, gratuita y de calidad.

Disciplinary paradigm: an unhealed gap in university epistemology

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