UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONALIZATION IN THE UNSUBMISSIVE HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

Luis Bonilla-Molina

Allisson Goes

Luz Palomino

Izabela Cristina Gomes da Silva

Bruno Menezes Santos

CHAPTER 1: ENTERING THE DEBATE ON UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONALIZATION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CRITICAL THEORY IN EDUCATION

Luis Bonilla-Molina

Isabella Gomes

It is customary to approach university dynamics as endogenous processes of academia, when in reality they have been determined by the power relations present in each society. The history of the university is that of the use of knowledge, knowledge, science and technology for the control or subversion of order, as correlations of forces between and between social classes are constituted.

In this dispute of meanings, orientations and directionality, the concept and institutional practice of university autonomy (university governance, academic freedom, internal democracy, protection of dissident thought) emerged, a conquest that has always – and now as never before – been besieged and attacked by different local, national and international interests.

Over time, hegemonic university internationalization has been one of these processes, in which external interests have stressed the vision, mission, objectives and goals of higher education. As in all university life, this has generated responses, resistances and adaptations.

Within the framework of the capitalist mode of production and reproduction, the university has not only expanded as in no other historical moment, but has also suffered the overwhelming wave of demands on the orientation of its purposes and ends. In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, this acquires special significance because the history of the university has been colonial and capitalist, on the periphery of the world system.

The globalist vocation of capitalism for higher education

The metabolism of capitalism is that of an economic, political, social, cultural and technological system that needs cultural globalization and economic internationalization. Marx and Engels (1848) warned in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that the need for constantly expanding markets for their products […] as a characteristic […] that drives the bourgeoisie all over the globe. It has to nest everywhere, establish itself everywhere, create conditions everywhere (p.18).

Rosa Luxemburg (1913) would expand on this diagnosis of the capitalist genome, pointing out that capitalism needs non-capitalist spheres for its existence, not only as a field of expansion, but also as a source of labor power, of means of production and of effective demand (1913, p.398), to which we would add for the construction of hegemony through symbolic reproduction. In this sphere the university is found within the logic of the market.

The construction of the planetary hegemony of capitalism has meant an uneven and combined development (Trotsky, 1932) of universities in contexts of societies with different forms of insertion into capitalism – late capitalism (Mandel, 1962) – which has implied that countries that are not at the center of capitalist development – the periphery, backward countries or low- and middle-income countries as they are usually mentioned in different literatures – have the tendency to reproduce in a compressed form the entire historical path traveled by advanced countries (p.27).

Philip Altbach (1977) warns that, in this sense, university internationalization reflects neocolonial relations of dependency and structure, dominated by the academic power of the global north (p.5). For his part, Martín Carnoy (1974) denounces that this does not occur in a frontal way, but is done through [diffuse] mechanisms by which global educational policies reinforce the ideological dominance of capital in peripheral countries (p.92). This is reaffirmed by Immanuel Wallerstein (1997) when he specifies that higher education has been transformed by the pressures of the capitalist world-system, in which the production of academic knowledge is profoundly hierarchical and geopolitically unequal (p.3). This does not hide or limit the incessant emergence of resistance, alternatives that do not end up consolidating, paths not expected by global capitalism, which nevertheless continue to be besieged and stressed by the gravitational pull of the market.

A university that studies itself less and less

This occurs in the midst of a growing decline in critical and systemic studies on the university. The tendency towards managerialism and narratives of theoretical updating have tried – and in many cases have succeeded – to make structural studies of education and its relations with power seem like something of the past, like a «fad that has passed».

This operation of concealment – which is ideological and functional to power – seeks to obstruct the understanding of academic work and university internationalization within the framework of the evolution of capitalism, the mode of production and the technological innovation that is immanent in it. For this reason, in this book we will not only analyse the relationship of university education and the internationalisation of higher education with the economy and politics, but also with scientific and technological innovation, with industrial revolutions and the models of social governance they generate.

There is no possibility of understanding, resisting and generating alternatives to the hegemonic current of university internationalization, analyzing the phenomenon only «from within» and with frameworks for improving management.

The understanding of what is happening with university internationalization implies a paradigmatic and epistemological break, which allows us to understand the productivist chaos of the present, in which academia is immersed. An understanding that we propose not only for the enjoyment of criticism, but fundamentally to contribute to the search for solutions, solutions and the construction of another meaning to the one imposed on us by neoliberal globalization.

Globalization

It is one thing for capitalism to have the vocation of global expansion, the need to penetrate all territories and their economies, and another is the dynamic in which this intention is materialized. At the beginning of the 20th century, Lenin saw this ongoing reconfiguration, which took the form of imperialism, preceding globalization , without diluting in the latter case the imperial forms of controlling the strings of power; this happened with its own inter-bourgeois contradictions and class struggle. Lenin said, imperialism is capitalism in that phase of development in which the domination of monopolies and finance capital has taken shape, the export of capital has acquired great importance, the division of the world among international trusts has begun and the division of all land among the most important capitalist countries has ended (p.89).

The two world wars, the Bretton Woods Treaty, the emergence of multilateralism and a new phase of internationalization of the capitalist mode of production and its social relations, occurred after the two world wars, events that expressed the tensions generated in the description formulated by Lenin.

But the arrival of the third industrial revolution – Mandel (1962) considers that it began in 1954[1] while Bonilla-Molina (2021) considers that it began in 1961 [2]– imprints a new dynamic on the market economy, based on the acceleration of innovation. In 1974 Immanuel Wallerstein described the process that gave shape to what would become neoliberal globalization, indicating that the development of the modern world-system has been from the beginning a matter of uneven development … What we are describing is a single capitalist world-economy, but organized through a hierarchy of central, semi-peripheral and peripheral zones (p.15).

However, Robert Went (2000) contradicts the idea that globalization is a completely new phenomenon, because he ratifies that capitalism’s vocation is towards a system of relations of production and social reproduction of a global nature – which is our perspective on university internationalization – specifying that, consequently, globalization is the result of a continuous historical construction. For Went, what happens is that globalization is driven and energized by neoliberal policies that prioritize free trade and financial (speculative) liberalization, exacerbating inequalities between the global north and south, consequently becoming more evident.

In fact, neoliberal globalization erupts by raising the need to reduce the size of national states (crisis of efficiency and legitimacy), to make the processes of integration of international and local capital more flexible, the financialization of the economy and the dismantling of the Keynesian Welfare State. In education, this is made possible by proposals for educational reforms focused on decentralization and deconcentration (Stigliz, 2002), as a mechanism to dilute the responsibilities of central governments with public education, which are expressed in demands for quality (effectiveness) and relevance (legitimacy). Although the system sought a comprehensive restructuring of the school and university systems, which implied a radical change in the way of managing the way of constructing and assuring knowledge, this was interpreted as a simple request to update content, which is why a wave of curricular reforms he has toured the region in the neoliberal era, limiting the university transformation to the introduction of elements of the third industrial revolution in the form of innovation.

In the case of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), neoliberal globalization also puts pressure on the diversification of sources of financing, to such an extent that the World Trade Organization would propose in the nineties that education is a tradable commodity in the market. For this opening of private investment, which entails new forms of privatization, university internationalization has to become competitive, standardized, with a high value of classifications and with an emphasis on the promotion of productivism. As we will analyze in this book, globalization demands a radical change in the schemes and proposals of university internationalization.

This systemic relationship is found in the work of the United Nations Institute for Social Development Research (UNRISD, 1997), especially in Economic Globalization, institutional change and human Security, a document prepared by Dharam Ghai, in which the conceptual and interpretative keys are constructed, from which multilateralism would assume its work in the framework of globalization.

In the contemporary world, governed by the globalized world order, multiple strategies of coordination and international cooperation are proposed so that Latin American territories can advance in the process of capitalist development. In this context, this is the socioeconomic model legitimized by universal Western global projects, which all societies must implement

Internationalization, Regionalization and Transnationalization of Education

The internationalization of policies is the format assumed by neoliberal globalization to promote competitiveness and classification, as well as to homogenize and standardize institutional processes in all territories. In the case of education, school systems and universities, this poses two levels. The first, the definition of the evaluative culture as an operation that concretizes educational internationalization, which schools and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) must assume to achieve the purposes posed by neoliberal globalization. The second, the transfer of economic policies as an international educational transfer, is made possible by externalizing the place of enunciation, application and monitoring of most policies suggested by internationalization (standardized tests and rankings, accreditation for educational quality assurance, bibliometrics, academic mobility, degree recognition policies). In this second aspect, it is a matter of ensuring that «from the outside» it is guaranteed that the university change that aligns universities with the third industrial revolution occurs, while at the same time consolidating an educational market with each of the transformation operations, which when these in turn become spheres of profit, open the way to the paradigm of education as a commodity.

On this path, it builds international, regional and national intervention floors. At the international level, the educational tasks of globalization are assumed by multilateralism (especially UNESCO), Development Banks, entrepreneurs for education and educational philanthropy. At the national level, governments together with the so-called civil society – including entrepreneurs for education – and at the regional level, a growing combination of instances and mechanisms of intergovernmental and corporate coordination.

This makes it necessary to address regionalization as a process that converges in globalized internationalization. In other words, regionalization driven by multilateralism is a form of convergence with the interests of the world system, based on local specificities, which makes it more sustainable in terms of domination. For the capitalist world-system, it is not a matter of promoting resistance from regionalization, but of seeking the adaptation and construction of viability to globalization in certain territories.

Reflecting on the economic panorama of the internationalization of capital and human mobility, Sachs and Warner (1995) argue that these processes begin to shape the societies that receive these flows, based on agreements established between economic blocs. This is the case of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), where the free circulation of goods, services and productive factors also corresponds to the circulation of the population and technical-scientific knowledge.

Given that the process of internationalization of education seeks to provide solutions to specific needs, based on the exchange of strategic knowledge for the advancement of capitalist development in developing territories, globalization and its policies of hegemonic internationalization imply a cultural and economic dispossession for native peoples, Afro-descendant communities, gender diversity and subordinate classes to whom an attempt is made to reposition an agenda that it leads them towards the overall processes of globalization.

Cross-border education – another variant of integration now serving the purposes of globalization – can be defined as the set of activities, programmes, services or educational institutions in which students, teachers, educational programmes (teaching, research, extension) cross national borders to facilitate or receive training. Cross-border education implies a displacement of university dynamics from their place of origin to other territories, cultures and identities, but also to unequal economic developments.

The term cross-border education, popularized since the beginning of the twenty-first century by UNESCO and the OECD, is distinguished from international education because it emphasizes border crossing as a central fact, as well as from academic mobility, because it involves at least two countries. The cross-border promoted a new framework of skilled and student migration, in accordance with the evaluative culture, to the extent that its realization contributed to bibliometrics, rankings, and accreditation, through schemes and protocols for the recognition of degrees and accreditation of faculty and student stays. Micro-accreditation, micro-credentials and micro-learning would later be expressions of this dynamic.

Cross-border education is presented as depoliticized and disconnected processes in the framework of neoliberal globalization, of collaboration between countries to promote the creation of teaching and learning opportunities that transcend physical and immaterial borders, allowing the establishment of educational programs beyond the limits of nation states, while in reality it generates processes of cultural uniformity and can be inscribed in what has been so-called attempts at cultural globalization.

As if that were not enough, cross-border education speaks of the formation of citizenship in a globalized world, expressed in the university world through student mobility policies and protocols, programs, institutional actions, in face-to-face, virtual and hybrid formats.

Kammer and Ferrari (2022) point out that international alliances and agreements play an essential role in the promotion of cross-border education and have been so in the history of HEIs. Some historical antecedents of cross-border university education can be traced back to the medieval universities – Bologna, Paris, Salamanca and Oxford – which received students from different kingdoms; the Enlightenment and colonial expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – universities in India, Latin America and Africa – as an export of the British, French, Spanish or Portuguese models; the post-war period and the aegis of multilateralism with the creation of UNESCO (1945) and the expansion of international scholarship programmes such as Fulbright, DAAD, British Council for the training of technical and scientific elites; the globalisation of the educational market from 1980 onwards, which gained special vigour with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS); finally, the digital era and global networks, which formalises the term cross-border in university education, especially through programmes of e-learning platforms, MOOCs and hybrid degrees, educational quality policies, accreditation and recognition of degrees, as well as the creation of spaces such as the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the Latin American and Caribbean Higher Education Area (ENLACES).

In this context, cultural globalization contains and describes the cultural practices, values, products and symbols that circulate and are disseminated on a global scale in an attempt to homogenize cultural identities. Cultural globalization is part of the need of the capitalist metabolism to standardize. However, Armand Mattelart, Octavio Ianni, Néstor García Canclini and Jesús Martín-Barbero differentiate it from the simplism that limits it to «cultural globalization», highlighting the need to emphasize the unequal political and historical dimensions that shape its impact.

In line with what Aboites (2010) proposes, we see that the problem of education cannot be understood outside the political-economic and sociocultural context of a country. Therefore, education could only be «reformed» according to the socio-economic interests of a given nation-state and its position as an agent in the world system.

Beck (2008) argues that the market requires a politically established order for international socio-economic relations, as well as interactions at the national level. Therefore, he argues that this should happen with socio-economic and cultural responsibility in this globalized world order, with national sovereignty at the heart of the agreements.

In addition, there has been talk of the transnationalization of university education processes and the need for global curricula, but from the perspective of globalization, Latin America is perceived as a semi-periphery and a periphery, which must adapt its education to the demands of the capitalist center. However, Aboites (2010) postulates that eliminating or minimizing creative thinking in scientific knowledge reinforces the route that leads Latin Americans to assume themselves as countries that produce raw materials or receive maquiladora industries (which assemble products and services developed elsewhere). This epistemological deviation ends up presenting students as agents of investment and external technology, rather than builders of the knowledge and professions necessary for the political, economic, and sociocultural improvements of Latin American nations in the twenty-first century.

For Ianni (1996), regionalism in the global era implies the formation of economic systems that redesign and integrate national economies, preparing them for the impacts, demands, changes, and dynamism of globalization. This process of restructuring redefines borders, economic policies, productive forces, promotes new economic activities, creates new modalities of organization of work and production, reforms the State, modifies the meaning of society and citizenship, and alters the conditions of sovereignty and hegemony.

Finally, we emphasize that academic training should focus on socio-spatial and cultural diversity as a basis for mitigating inequalities in Latin America. We emphasize people’s own experiences as a starting point for guidance, reflection, and action, connecting the learning process and knowledge production with experimentation/experience.

Therefore, we intend in this book to critically connect the issue of globalization with the strengthening/fragmentation of nation-states and the advance of the hegemonic model of university internationalization. We consider this condition to be extremely relevant for the expanded reproduction of capitalist development. Consequently, it would be impossible to articulate a process of internationalization of education/university without a consolidated geopolitical structure based on the flow of goods/people and material/immaterial exchanges between countries and continental blocs.

According to Santos (2012), globalization is the culmination of the process of internationalization of the capitalist world. In its current phase, the use of technologies is facilitating qualitative and quantitative changes in favour of capital, since hegemonic technical systems are present in all countries thanks to the unifying function of information technologies.

Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the national state as a geopolitical condition in order to strengthen its dimension as an active agent for resistance to the globalized capitalist logic. And from this premise, generate political, socio-economic and international cooperation articulations, both material (infrastructure, common currency, flows) and immaterial (language, culture, technical-scientific knowledge). But university internationalization contradicts this sense of the national and points towards global homogenization.

The characteristics that globalization is taking on in higher education

The globalizing and standardizing nature of capital, expressed in the world system, has a special chapter in education, school systems and institutions of higher education. Cristian Palloix (1978, p. 80) warned that capitalism tends to see the world as the economic space in which the reproduction of social capital as a whole takes place. For the author, capitalism not only tends incessantly to the geographical expansion of the market – as evidenced by the space race to incorporate other planets into the production chains – but also produces the transnational reorganization of production and in that sense it needs to adjust HEIs to these dynamics.

Globalization and university internationalization guided by neoliberalism assume strategies of relocation and delocalization of the national, so that the global prevails. Consequently, neoliberal globalization has acquired specific features in the last five decades, which impose directionality on university internationalization.

Internationalization has as dominant patterns standardization, the rise of market logic and competition (rankings, classifications), education as a commodity (bibliometrics and academic productivism), the culture of measurement (evaluative) as a mechanism to classify and lead to the semantic constructions of internationalization (quality, relevance, impact, innovation and efficiency). the homogenization of university activity (accreditation, curricular convergence), innovation as the axis of educational reforms, and academic and student mobility as the hegemony of a model (micro-accreditation)

The perspective that makes it possible to give shape and meaning to the debate we propose is possible from the methodological perspective of international comparative studies, based on the definitions of Bray (2010), Ball (1994) and Yang Lui (2010) on public policies, with special emphasis on similarities, differences and emerging knowledge. To this end, the analysis is based on the perspectives of comparison of spaces (Manzon, 2010), systems (Jian Kai, 2010), times (Sweeting, 2010), cultures (Mason, 2010) and values (Wing-On, 2010), the dynamic structure of the theoretical cube (Bonilla-Molina, 2014), with its six dimensions, the tension between quantitative and qualitative (Fairbrother, 2010) of which integration will be sought (Howe, 2003; Taylor, 2004; Bryman, 1988), because public policies in the educational area are expressed in a construction that integrates objective and subjective factors. The case study (Stake, 1986) will appear as a lever to deepen the analysis.

In this book we will address university internationalization from critical pedagogies (Giroux, 1992; McLaren, 2025; Bonilla-Molina, 2020), consequently, we understand this issue in its multiple economic, political, social, cultural, and technological relationships. To do so, we have to understand the present as a historical time (Braudel, 1968), which contains capitalism as the dominant system, and expresses the synthesis of the oppression-liberation dichotomy today.

References:

Aboites, H. (2010). Latin American Higher Education and the Bologna Process: From Commercialization to the Skills Tuning Project. Culture and Social Representations, Education in Latin America, 5(9), 122–144.

Altbach, P. (1977). Servitude of the mind? Education, dependency, and neocolonialism. Teachers College Press.

Beck, U. (2008). What is globalization? Fallacies of globalism, responses to globalization. Ediciones Paidós Ibéricas.

Bonilla-Molina, L. (2020) Notes for the reconstruction of the history of critical pedagogies. South Wind. Spain

Bonilla-Molina, L, et al (2021) Fourth Industrial Revolution and Education in Latin America. Editorial Laboratory. Colombia

Braduel, F. (1968) History and the Social Sciences. Alliance. Spain

Carnoy, M. (1974). Education and cultural imperialism. Longman.

Ghai, D. (1997) Economic Globalization, institutional change and human Security. UNRISD. Suiza.

Giroux, H. (1992) Theory and Resistance in Education. Siglo XXI Editores. Mexico

Ianni, O. (1996). The era of globalism. Brazilian Civilization.

Kammer, A., & Ferrari, M. (2022). The growth of cross-border mobility between Pato Bragado and Nueva Esperanza on the Brazil-Paraguay border: an analysis from the formation of the reservoir of the Itaipu Hydroelectric Power Plant (1982). In V Seminario Internacional de los Espacios de Frontera (V Geofronteras): Territorialidades y Sujetos Transfronterizos (n. 2, pp. 415–422).

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Luxembourg, R. (1913). The accumulation of capital. Akal.

McLaren, P. (2025). Interview on critical pedagogy. OVE Editions.

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Marx, C., & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Siglo XXI Editores.

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Sachs, J., & Warner, A. (1995). Economic reform and the process of global integration. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1995(1), 1–118.

Santos, M. (2012). For another globalization: from single thought to universal consciousness (22nd ed.). Record.

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CHAPTER 2: THE HEGEMONIC CYCLES OF UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONALIZATION IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

Luis Bonilla-Molina

The need for a critical theory on university internationalization

The «consensus» installed in academia is that university internationalization is a process that began with neoliberal globalization, which has been making its way since the late seventies and early eighties of the twentieth century. This entails at least four major theoretical problems that must be solved in order to understand this dynamic in depth and with perspective.

The first, since the university is an institution whose foundational models in the region are «imported» from the colonialist countries of the fifteenth century, the precariousness of university historical studies in their relationship with the different moments of capitalism in our continent, from the conquest to the present, affects the understanding of the present as historical continuity. The efforts made by Carlos Tunermann (1991), Carmen García Guadilla (2013), among others, open paths to overcome this limitation, but it is necessary to go beyond them, because unfortunately they do not situate university internationalization in this logic of late capitalism (Mandel, 2023), with the operational differences that the center imposes on the faculty, on the periphery of the world system (Wallerstein, 1985) in each historical moment[1] (Braduel, 1970), from 1492 to the present.

The second, the growing depoliticization in university studies[2] and the place of enunciation of educational policies for the sector. With the discourse of adaptation to social demands, structural analyses of the complexity of their relationships with the other economic, political and technological dimensions are usually omitted or they tend to be simplified with the one-dimensional concept of employability, as a transversal paradigm that guides the operational trilogy[3].

Third, by accepting as adequate for university life the neoliberal evaluative culture, which is expressed in competition, hierarchization and commodification, the academy has been aligning most of its efforts to the accreditation that allows it to hold a place in rankings, placing the ones in dispute with the rest to enjoy the prestige that allows them to obtain more funds. university rankings that model university activity through standardized indicators and goals, bibliometrics focused on publishing in peer-reviewed, indexed journals that pay tribute to institutions and proprietary standards whose publication rules privilege knowledge limited to the «concrete», research pragmatism based on studying problems in a timely manner and in an increasingly particular way with minimal or non-existent relationships with the structural factors that produce them, which are also the privileged ones for obtaining external financing funds (public and private), the systems of promotion in the ranks and remunerations that focus on productivism linked to the aspects described and, academic and student mobility that privileges taxation of these dynamics with specific protocols for the recognition of studies and degrees.

Thinking about university internationalization in the opposite direction, from another place of enunciation, implies not only an effort to unveil what is happening in the conjuncture in this regard, but also an epistemic and cultural break that entails an effort of political mobilization, of a systemic relationship between theory and practice that must be built.

Fourth, the fashion of the technology necessary for the improvement of the capitalist mode of production as the hegemonic idea of innovation in the university, which turns university internationalization itself into a social technology to adapt the university to the requirements of production chains and the international division of labor.

Assuming university internationalization with the set of social relations, economies, politics, institutional cultures, and prevailing technologies, whose intensity is shaped by the requirements of the capitalist system, does not mean adopting an economistic view of it. Since universities are social institutions, with the possibility of building autonomous alternatives, a fact that involves claiming their capacities to break with the economistic gaze[4], we consider that the broad understanding of university internationalization is part of an effort to recover the essence of the academic that dialogues with the economy, but is not subordinated to it. In fact, in the book we will see how over time anti-system, alternative and counter-hegemonic experiences have emerged, which regardless of their duration and scope express a permanent presence of rebellions in university toponymy.

The theory of university internationalization cycles

The theory of university internationalization cycles is based on the contributions of studies on late capitalism (Mandel, 2023) and the role of universities in this dynamic, uneven and combined development (Novack, 1957), the world system (Wallerstein, 1984), university management models (Bonilla, 2000), the debate around the Regional Conferences on Higher Education (1996, 2008, 2018, 2024-CRES+5), the World Conferences on Higher Education (1998, 2009, 2022) and the comprehensive interpretation of what the notion of educational crisis means (Bonilla, 2024)

In these periods, resistance, alternative projects, disputes from the local level to this hegemonic tendency have arisen, which constitute the foundation of another possible internationalization. Capitalism does not manage to pass its recipes with absolute impunity, creating cracks that prefigure over time the counter-hegemonic view of university internationalization.

In this work, we have organized the cycles of university internationalization into eight moments. The first, the colonial university internationalization (1492 – 1804) that goes from the «importation» of European university models, to the beginning of the processes of national independence or the emergence of the Republics. In this sense, 1804, the moment of Haiti’s independence, is a reference date that is adapted to each particular case.

The second, the republican university internationalization (1804-1918), which is a long period in which, in the perspective of Mariátegui (1928), the school systems and new republican universities are mostly constituted the framework of their complementarity with the industrial capitalist mode of production, not from an anti-capitalist logic or alien to what happens in the dominant center. This does not deny or hide national experiences that point to ruptures and singularities – as we will see later – which nevertheless do not manage to change the orientation of the whole, although they are part of the historical memory of the resistances that must be rescued. Therefore, the closing point of this cycle is the crisis of the university model itself in the region, which has a tradition inherited from the colony, in which the alternative fails to build counter-hegemony, making the prevailing form of academia «leak» due to the increasingly growing needs to contribute to the so-called national development. democracy and the idea of citizenship required by late capitalism in the Latin American and Caribbean periphery.

The third, the university internationalization of the Córdoba paradigm (1918 – 1945), which responds to the demands of educational liberalism, progress, democratic deepening and the social impact of the university as part of the emerging demands of factors that contradict the neocolonial vision of academia; these contradictions reflect disputes and minimal consensus of a new structure of social classes in the region. The reform of Córdoba must be seen in the context of the emergence and development – as the case may be – of the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat as social classes in the region, only in this way can we have a correct assessment of its significance.

The fourth, the university internationalization of the post-war World Order (1945 – 1962), from which the United States emerges as a triumphant imperialist power, the old colonial Europe is diminished in its economic influence and the Soviet Union consolidates its role through the defeat of German Nazism. The Bretton Woods Treaty generated the emergence of modern multilateralism, which has the United Nations as its center and in education has its particularities in the constitution of UNESCO. In this period, capitalism rethinks the role of the university within the framework of the Alliance for Progress (PA) and constructs multilateral «authoritativeness» as a reference in the construction of consensus of the order on the orientation of the university. A distinctive feature of this period is the impact of ECLAC’s developmentalism – the university linked to national development projects – the impulse of national science organizations that took away the university’s research autonomy and the construction of the institutional culture of the international as a place for the enunciation of foresight. ECLAC incentive, expressions of university autonomy that facilitated the capture of resources, via commodification of higher education through research contracts, collection of mensalidade and alliance with the capitalist productive set).

The fifth, the university internationalization of multilateralism (1962-1972) as a benchmark for the university world, which has a turning point in the World Bank’s educational memorandum (1962), which under the premises of education as a commodity, promotes a whole process of commodification, privatization and standardization of university public policies, which uses credit and foreign debt as conditioning factors for the alignment of institutions of Higher Education (IES[5]). The university internationalization cycles of the post-war world order and multilateralism promote university massification as a tool for the consolidation of markets, production and capitalist governance; It is significant to assess the growth of universities, public and private, in these two periods, as well as their academic offerings, graduation profiles and employability policies.

The sixth, the university internationalization of the third industrial revolution[6] (1961/1972 – 1998). In this cycle, the university model that emerged in the first two industrial revolutions enters into crisis (disciplinary paradigm, adjustment in the curricula of long waves of innovation, urban university in large capitals that expands to smaller cities and rural areas, public financing model, among other elements). The third industrial revolution entails renewed educational demands for universities, including an evaluative culture, to ensure that training accompanies the increasingly short periods of technological innovation, a transdisciplinary paradigm – which would also be presented, with some variants, as complex thinking – openness to mixed financing models, the rise of privately managed education, the decline of the humanities due to training in the so-called sciences and technologies, among others.

The seventh, the university internationalization of educational quality and the indicators of achievement of educational neoliberalism (1998-2025), in which, as we have mentioned, the central activity of universities begins to gravitate around the categories that build indicators of the evaluative culture: quality, relevance, relevance, impact, efficiency and innovation. This cycle, which began timidly at the end of the seventies and the first part of the eighties of the twentieth century, acquired global relevance in the debates of the World Conference on Higher Education (1998) in which the work for the polysemic terms of educational quality and relevance was established as a global consensus, around which the set of categories that guide university policies and are specified in the rankings begin to gravitate. Bibliometrics, accreditation, academic and student mobility, as well as productivity.

In this cycle, an attempt is made to specify achievements and goals not achieved in the previous stage through the evaluative culture, adding other new operations of educational policies, generating internal cycles such as the so-called Digital Transformation of Education (TDE), the fourth industrial revolution, the Global Pedagogical Blackout[7] (APG), UNESCO’s neoliberal drift (1994-2024) and the alignment of supranational goals for HEIs, multilateralism, Development Banks and corporate philanthropy.

The eighth, the university internationalization of the predictive regime (2024 – ). As Byung Chul Han (2019; 2022) has worked on, the Biopolitics regime described by Foucault (1974), the Psychopolitics regime (Han, 2022) and the empire of data have been overcome, which has opened a new stage in university education that still appears diffuse: the predictive regime (Bonilla-Molina, 2024). In this cycle, artificial intelligence, facial biometric recognition, data blocks and the so-called data science, begin to push for a new model of university education focused on heuristic convergence, the exponential reduction of degrees[8], the open and flexible curriculum, among other aspects that we will work on in the next chapters.

A specific mention that will be necessary to make is with respect to the so-called era of singularity[3] that promotes transhumanism[4] and that has its own university and internationalization project: Singularity University created in 2008.

The continuity and complementarity of the cycles of university internationalization

From our perspective, university internationalization is a continuum in time, in the history of the Latin American and Caribbean university, with national particularities, which do not always fit the same period because they overlap in some cases or arrive later in others, according to the role and tasks they fulfill in the world system at each historical moment. Therefore, periodization is not mechanical in each national case, but assumes trends at the international level and in that sense must be studied in each specific case.

We do not intend that all national or regional cases fit into dates, but rather into processes that we do clearly identify. What we do want to emphasize is that any attempt to present internationalization as a process limited to neoliberal globalization and capitalist cultural globalization does not allow us to understand its origins, current development, much less any prospective effort.

References

World Bank (1962). Memorandum on Education. WB digital archives.

Bonilla-Molina, L. (2000) Management, research and university. IESALC UNESCO Editions.

Bonilla-Molina, L. (2024) The gap epistémica_ an obstacle to understanding the «educational crisis». OVE Editions.

Braduel, F. (1970). History and the Social Sciences [chapter «History and Durations»]. Alianza Editorial.

Guadilla. C. (2013). University, development and cooperation in the perspective of Latin America. Universia Magazine, Volume 4, Number 9, pp. 21-33.

Han, Ch. (2019) Technocracy. Herder Editores. Spain

Han, Ch. (2022) Psychopolitics. Herder Editores. Spain

Mandel, E. (2023). Late capitalism. Ediciones Viento Sur & Sylone.

Mariátegui, J. (1928). Seven Essays on the Interpretation of Peruvian Reality. Editorial Minerva.

Novack, G. (1957). The law of uneven and combined development in society. Ediciones Era.

Tünnermann, C (1991). History of the University in Latin America: From the Colonial Era to the Córdoba Reform. Classroom Collection. Central American University Press.

UNESCO – IESALC (2018). Regional Conference on Higher Education. Seven working papers. Available on the IESALC – UNESCO website.

UNESCO – IESALC (2022). World Conference on Higher Education: discussion papers. Available on the IESALC UNESCO website

UNESCO – IESALC (2024). Twelve working documents of the CRES+5 held in Brasilia. Digital version available on the IESALC – UNESCO website

UNESCO (1998). Working papers of the First World Conference on Higher Education. Available in the UNESCO digital bookstore.

UNESCO (2008). World Conference on Higher Education Final Declaration. Available in the UNESCO digital bookstore.

UNESCO-IESALC (2008). Final Declaration of the Regional Conference on Higher Education. Cartagena, Colombia. Available on the IESALC UNESCO website.

Wallerstein, I. (1985). The modern world system. Four volumes. Ediciones siglo XXI.

[1] For Braudel there are three levels in the study of historical time: a) long duration (for the authors, at this level the stability of the structures is very solid; in the case of the university this means a hegemonic way of understanding university forms and performance, academic architecture, b) the conjuncture (from our point of view, this level corresponds to what has been happening in the last sixty years, especially since the arrival of the third industrial revolution, which Mandel locates in 1954 and Bonilla-Molina in 1961), c) the event (the notion of educational crisis, crisis of the university model, as a mist that tries to blur that what we are talking about is a pressure from the capitalist mode of production for the emergence of another university for its purposes; in this sense A paradox arises that consists in the fact that from the field of the alternative, of resistance, the need for a structural change in the university is also raised, but with a radically differentiated strategic orientation)

[2] The university that proposes to study reality does so in a very marginal way with its own internal dynamics, management and formulation of public policies with respect to the rest of the institutions of the State. In many of these cases, the dichotomy domination-liberation is usually uncomfortable for the maintenance of the university status quo. The increasingly guiding logics of neoliberal governments – and also progressive and leftist – on the definitions for budget allocations, have installed a «common sense» of institutional prudence, which not only affects university autonomy, but also the institutional capacity to generate critical anti-system theory and study its organizational behaviors.

[3] The adoption of the three faces of university policy: teaching, research and extension, which are undoubtedly useful, relevant and necessary, have nevertheless served as a backdrop for the instrumentalisation of the sector’s management. What are called university public policies have become an adaptation of this operational trilogy to the models of national development imposed by the center-periphery dynamics of late capitalism, to which is added, in the last five decades, the hegemonic adoption of the categories of the neoliberal evaluative culture: quality, relevance, impact, efficiency and innovation. Consequently, university policies are being shaped by bibliometrics, rankings, accreditation processes for classification, and the employability education paradigm in changing work environments, increasingly stripping it of its ability to present viable alternatives to dominant models. At the recent World Conference on Higher Education (WHEC, 2022), organized by UNESCO, IDB, SEGIB, OIE and Santander Universities in which governments of the countries of the region participated, held in Barcelona, Spain, the right to education was even achieved by mentioning it in the documents as a «human right to education for employability». closing the circle of attempts to instrumentalize university public policies.

[4] This does not imply denying the current hegemony of the economy over the university social sector, but rather vindicating its potential capacity for rupture that turns the university into what has always been said, the space to shape society. This rupture implies a repoliticization of the understanding of its dynamics and relations with the economic, political and technological dimensions.

[5] In this process, the outputs of the fourth educational level are diversified. Therefore, in addition to universities, higher technological institutions, federal institutes, polytechnic universities and other forms and denominations are incorporated.

[6] Authors such as Mandel (1962) place the beginning of the third industrial revolution in 1954 with the introduction of electronic data-processing machines in the private sector of the economy, while Bonilla-Molina (2024) prefers to place it in 1961, when the massive use of robotics, programming and electronic use of data began to be used in the automotive industry through the Unimate robot. In this work, the work of Bonilla-Molina is more useful

[7] Bonilla-Molina’s (2016) name for the process of building mass literacy in the digital-virtual and use of algorithm-based technology, which has a special chapter in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the APG, the constant transition from face-to-face education to virtual and hybrid forms of teaching is privileged, having as a paradigmatic horizon the metaversian models of teaching that are part of what this author calls the risk of the bursting of the global educational bubble.

[8] Entities such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) or the Davos Forum speak of a maximum of 30 university professions from 2030.

CHAPTER 3: INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE COLONIAL UNIVERSITY (1492 – 1804)

Allisson Goes

The starting point for thinking about the internationalization of universities in the colonial period is the administrative model implemented by the Spaniards during the colonization process. The Spaniards adopted a more centralized logic of command in relation to their colonies on the principle of royal patronage and the direct sovereignty of the King over the Indies. In the case of the British colonial model, it favored the decentralized model of Royal Charters to private companies, the Portuguese had a moderate centralization, especially after the failure of the hereditary captaincies and the implementation of the general governorship since 1548, while the Dutch promoted corporate decentralization through private companies with a charter of sovereignty. This meant that, in Spanish-dominated colonial America, a scheme of political, economic, and social control operated based on locally administered viceroyalties, but linked to the Spanish Crown (Tünermann, 1991).

The Spanish model of governance can be analyzed as a decentralized centralization, whose basic idea was not to concentrate all the responsibilities of management of the colonies in the metropolis, as the Portuguese homonym did since 1548, but to use subdivision into territories commanded by administrators sent from Spain. Over time, another elite emerged, the criolla, made up of children of Spaniards, Portuguese, English, Dutch and French born in American lands, but who did not have the same privileges as the Spanish colonists. It was from the opposition to this colonial administrative scheme that the independence movements in the continent emerged. This administrative model directly influenced the very significant emergence of universities in the colonial period.

From the founding of the University of Santo Domingo in 1538 until the beginning of the Latin American independence processes, there was an interest of the local elites in the installation of these educational institutions, even in the context of numerous conflicts, both in America and in Europe. The formation of the local novitiate and the instruction of the children of Europeans and the Creole elite were presented as imperatives for the creation of more than three dozen universities in the period from 1538 to 1812, the year in which the University of León was created in Nicaragua (Tünnermann, 1991).

The two university models that laid the foundations for the creation of Spanish colonial universities were the University of Salamanca and the University of Alcalá de Henares, both peninsular and Spanish. It is true that it is possible to transfer institutional models from one place to another, but this does not happen ipsis litteris, precisely because it is necessary to consider the local contexts, the correlation of forces and the agents present in the different fields involved in the process of creating universities (Peset, 1985; Rodríguez et al., 2008).

While we understand Darcy Ribeiro’s (1973) position on the idea that colonial universities functioned as a replica of the Spanish model of higher education, we question to what extent the viceregal universities exactly reproduced those of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares, without this taking into account the correlation of powers between the crown, the Crown and the Crown of the Empire. the church and native patronage. Surely, in each case we will find common elements of the colonial brand, but also singularities.

The process of model transfer itself already signalled a first embryo of internationalisation, since it was possible to speak of an initiative of sharing, even in an environment of colonial domination. No power structure, no matter how vertical, is exempt from having mechanisms of transgression and insurgency, which leads us to affirm that, in the context of colonized America, local articulations resisted to a greater or lesser degree the impositions of the crown and/or the church, hybridizing the universities with their own logics of organization and functioning.

Here we start from the hypothesis that, in the process of transposition of university models, human resources (professors/chairs, students, etc.) and materials, as well as ideas, were always in transit, between the Iberian Peninsula and colonized America, and between the Spanish viceroyalties spread throughout the American territory.

Although we cannot speak of independent nations in the whole of the relations between the metropolis and other colonized territories, the circulation of these elements was part of the principles of an internationalization movement, marked by the extraterritorial extension of the colonial metropolis.

Let’s take as an example the election of the position of rector of a university. In the Salamanca model, the position was occupied by a student elected by the university community. The position was not the main one within the university, but it was suggested that its selection granted a degree of autonomy and counteracted civil and religious powers. In addition to the rector, a council of eight councilors (also students) was then elected (Peset, 1985).

When the model was transposed to create the viceregal universities, there was a variation of this configuration. However, the position of rector seemed to be of interest and control to the viceroy, under the justification that there were not enough people who could opt for the position, so there was an implicit logic of control. Now, the rector appeared with an administrative position superior to all the others, as happened in Venezuela (Rojas, 2005).

Given this scenario, it is possible to understand that we are talking about a configuration in which colonial internationalization was also polycentric, because in the game of implementation and consolidation, the disputes and tensions in the political field that shaped the colonization process also appeared in the university environment.

Something that cannot be overlooked is related to the multiple needs of the actors within the aforementioned university field, such as the training of cadres who would serve the evangelization of the conquered peoples from the various European religious orders that accompanied the military campaigns (Acosta Silva, 2019). Local civil, intellectual, and political training were also in the genesis of universities and the interoceanic transit that formatted institutions, whether religious or civil, into internationalized spaces of knowledge (Acosta Silva, 2019).

While the Spanish colonial enterprise in relation to universities differed from other colonial models, such as the Portuguese, French, and Dutch, the diffusion of these educational institutions took place at a time when European university paradigms entered a more localized, i.e., closed, phase in terms of circulation, for example, university professors (García Guadilla, 2008). In the colonial scenario, this same author affirms that there was no internationalization taking into account that the countries in which universities were created were, in reality, mere imperial colonies (Idem, p. 5).

The above debate is not an isolated position. This body of thought is attributed with the idea that American history (proper) begins to be told from the independence of the colonized territories and the constitution of Republics. It is, therefore, a conservative epistemological and historiographical position. According to this point of view, in reality, it could not be considered that there was university internationalization in the colonial period because there were no independent countries or even more or less autonomous territories. What to do with the history prior to colonization or the establishment of republics? It is a question that must be considered, even if in this case it is limited to the university before the birth of the Republics.

Without romanticizing the relations of power and domination within the Amerindian empires, we can bring the example of the Inca empire that developed a complex administrative, religious, economic, educational logic, etc., to manage its territory. Parallel to a natural and practical education, an institutional education was developed that, for example, trained the political elite of the empire in educational centers. Some authors claim that these centers can be called universities (Callejas, 2001).

In the case of the Incas, there was already an institutional framework regarding the educational process. In addition, we can speak of fairly organized territories that, if they were not called countries, were undoubtedly places where structures already existed in operation, even in the educational field (Callejas, 2001). On the other hand, if we consider the hypothesis that there were no universities, those that were implemented did so in the form of a colonial internationalization that would last even after the independence processes.

Another point to note is that there is no doubt that internationalization, when it comes to exchanges and circulation, can be associated with Latin American colonial universities, from the oldest to the most recent, from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Table 01). In addition, many of these institutions underwent reforms during this period, adding, along with the basic answers (God, the salvation of human beings and theological knowledge), new models of management and organization that took into account their metropolitan origin (such as the figure of the rector) and their indigenous demands (self-government never achieved) (Peset 1985; Tünnerman, 1991).

Table 01 – Universities created during the colonial period (1492-1804)

University	Year Founded	Current Country
Santo Domingo	1538	Dominican Republic
Five	1551	Peru
Mexico	1551	Mexico
La Plata or Charcas	1552	Bolivia
Santiago de La Paz	1558	Dominican Republic
Thomist of Santafé	1580	Colombia
San Fulgencio de Quito	1586	Ecuador
Our Lady of the Rosary	1619	Chile
Javeriana de Santafé	1621	Colombia
Córdoba	1621	Argentina
San Francisco Xavier de La Plata or Charcas	1621	Bolivia
San Miguel de Santiago	1621	Chile
St. Gregory the Great	1621	Ecuador
San Ignacio de Loyola	1621	Peru
Merida	1676	Mexico
San Carlos	1676	Guatemala
San Cristóval de Huamanga	1680	Peru
Santo Tomás de Quito	1681	Ecuador
San Antonio de Cuzco	1692	Peru
San Nicolás de Santafé	1694	Colombia
San Jerónimo de La Habana	1721	Cuba
Caracas	1721	Venezuela
San Felipe	1738	Chile
Buenos Aires	1749	Argentina
St. Francis Xavier of Panama	1749	Panama
Conception	1749	Chile
Assumption	1779	Paraguay
Guadalajara	1791	Mexico

Source: Prepared by the author based on Tünnermann, 1991.

Other inferences can be made. In the first two centuries of colonization, 2/3 of the total number of universities were created for that entire period, with emphasis on the sixteenth century. This demonstrates an accelerated and intense movement of expansion of colonial rule that also circulated ideas and people for the purposes already explained in previous lines: catechization and training of local elites. The second observation is that, despite being colonial institutions, they maintained differences among themselves, due to their foundational origin or organizational model.

We will now address the issue of internationalization based on some cases, especially Mexico, Peru and Chile, as a process already present in Spanish colonization. The data are not abundant, as in other topics, but perhaps they shed light on the problems that are woven into this book. The selection of these cases is justified by their proximity to the first colonial models.

Mexico

The University of Mexico was founded in 1551, being the third institution created by the Spanish crown. The Salamanca model was the one that guided the university organization, however, -with all the reservations already mentioned- these refer to universities created under European models, specifically peninsular, but which are essentially Creole from the beginning (Marsiske, 2006), evidencing the tensions between internationalization and local identity.

Despite having been created by the crown (which granted it relative autonomy) to form the administrative elite, it had authorities linked to the church through a chancellor who, among other functions, supervised the training of candidates for the clergy. Officially, it was not until 1595 that Pope Clement VIII confirmed the university as a space for religious education. At the end of the eighteenth century, the titles of Royal and Pontifical were added to the name of the university, confirming the division of the attributions of secular and religious power in the institution.

Studies were offered in four faculties. The Arts degree lasted three years and qualified students for other faculties. The others were Civil Law, Canon Law, Theology and Medicine, the latter being the lowest in terms of hierarchy (Marsiske, 2006).

The Spanish monarch administered his university almost freely because, among many reasons, the power of the Church was not so strong in principle. In fact, the colonial Church was in the process of being organized, so the crown reserved the right to appoint its officials, subsidize and supervise the university. This point is very important to address colonial internationalization. The university received the king’s delegates, who participated freely in the discussion on university education, and the viceroy and his council were completely free to intervene.

Although the king was actively interested in the university organization and always sent its representatives, it is possible to speak of an internationalization that sought to implement the alma mater model in the young Mexican university, through the movement of people between colonized America and the Iberian Peninsula; except for adaptations, such as the one referring to the autonomy enjoyed by the Spanish universities of Salamanca and Alcalá de Galicia. Henares, much more dependent on the Church in Rome. There were, for example, magistrates trained in Spanish universities who were allowed to join Mexican universities, while performing the functions of ombudsmen, mayors and inspectors (Peset, 1985).

The students of the University of Mexico were not exclusively originally from Mexican territory either. It was a university where theology dominated and many religious came from Spain or from other colonized territories to obtain their degrees (Peset, p. 74).

In terms of student and academic mobility, as part of university internationalization, we can say that the reception of foreign students was on the radar of the Mexican colonial university, expanding the diversity of members both in classes and in its organizational structure, whose changes occurred over time, although not with the speed required by the modern university. which was already positioning itself in Europe in the following centuries.

Peru

The first university established in the territory of present-day Peru was that of San Marcos in 1551, the same year in which the University of Mexico was created. As in Mexico, the founding of the University of San Marcos was part of the plans of the Spanish conquistadors and their plan to structure the colonial administration, as well as the evangelization plans led by the Church. One of the main characters of this articulation was Fray Tomás de San Martín, who convinced the crown and those who were on his side in the administration, to implement an institution that would serve the reasons explained above. This is how the University of General Studies or the City of the Kings of Peru was born, named in 1574 as the University of San Marcos (Ortíz, 2006).

The model followed by the new university was that of Salamanca. It is important to note that the training of doctors and theologians was in charge of the Dominicans and functioned in conventual spaces (Bernales, 1981). The Peruvian university is a unique and emblematic case for two reasons: first, it was created in a territory that only had a few schools that taught children to read and write; then, since its creation as Estudios Generales, it received in a short period of time (twenty years) double operating authorization, that is, the crown and the church established partnership and common interests in the institution (Ortíz, 2006).

A first note on university internationalization in the Peruvian case is the recognition of degrees throughout Christendom (Ortíz, 2006). This means that training in theology, law, philosophy, and medicine had their degrees automatically recognized in all the territories in which the Church operated. We imagine that this was also valid for the Spanish territories. Drawing a parallel, we have a kind of automatic recognition/revalidation, since the curricular organization, teaching methods and materials were aligned with the peninsular universities.

Despite the many conflicts between the Dominicans, the secular clergy and the civil power – because the former claimed autonomy in relation to the other actors – the university continued to function. These conflicts, added to the lack of continuous funding, slowed down its expansion, but did not prevent the objective of educating and training the children of the conquerors and neighbors (Monsalve, 1998).

The above data are important for our subject and seem to us the most explicit so far regarding the circulation of students and teachers from other territories. The demand for a university space that would serve the auspices of the crown and the Church also implied educating the maximum number of students born in the colony and children of the conquistadors, including those scattered in territories other than Peru.

We cannot fail to mention that there were not many opportunities for the criollos, so university education was a way to calm the revolts and allow some social mobility, in addition to those promoted by the religious life offered by the church.

Among the many confrontations between religious and civil authorities, there was a recognition that the Dominicans were useful because they mastered Quechua and, therefore, had to be present through a chair of the indigenous language (Ortíz, 2006; Monsalve, 1998). Despite the evangelizing purposes, we observe that Quechua was present together with Latin as university languages, which reminds us of the need for integration and exchange of knowledge from a foreign language.

Chile

The choice to use Chile as a reference is due to several reasons. The first of them is so that we can have a general idea of how the university and the issue of internationalization appeared in another viceroyalty, in this case that of La Plata. Secondly, because its first universities were founded less than eighty years after those of Mexico and Peru, not far away if we consider that the independence processes took place mainly before 1821.

In the general context, if we take the example of the University of St. Thomas Aquinas, founded in 1621, we can see at that time conventual institutions linked mainly to the Dominicans and the Jesuits. It is interesting to note that the elevation of the convents to universities took place through an Apostolic Brief of 1619 ^[1] that granted the degrees of bachelor, licentiate, master and doctor to all students who studied in convents that were at least two hundred miles from the universities of Lima and Mexico (Lira, 1992). Not only did several universities emerge, but also the idea of reusing studies carried out in educational centers seen as of minor importance, as was the case of the University of Santo Tomás.

This dynamic marks an interesting process of internationalization. Despite all the contextual differences between the old universities and the current context, it is possible to affirm that the recognition of degrees (and elevation to the category of university) obtained in Chile occurred because there were also similar organizational processes, as is the case of the nearest university, in Lima, founded by Dominicans.

From the place where it functioned to what it taught, the University of Santo Tomás was one more institution of religious corporations that, among many other characteristics, reproduced the cultural arrangements of the Spanish metropolis, in addition to legitimizing the mechanisms of domination through different discourses (Lara-Conrado, Ochoa-Arias, 2024). Last but not least, it was umbilically linked to other universities and conventual colleges for the same purpose, although it had already been founded and organized by Chileans, or rather, children of Spaniards born in the colony.

As in Mexico and Peru, the Chilean university reproduces part of what would be the internationalization scheme in the colonial period, with exchanges of methodologies and standards of action aimed at maintaining the economic, social and political privileges of the Spanish crown and the Church. Here, the religious orders were true educational corporations, to use a more current terminology.

Brief closing note

We have seen that university internationalization in Latin America occurred through a series of processes, such as the importation of models of metropolitan universities based on the University of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares. Student and academic mobility, the process of recognition/revalidation of degrees, and the circulation of ideas and publications also make up the set of processes that indicate that there was university internationalization in the colonial period.

It should also be noted that, until the first independence processes, Spain was in charge of creating all the universities, leaving out Portugal, France, Holland and England. Some inferences can be made. The Spanish colonial project, and that of the Spanish Church itself, was aligned with an administrative model that required the training of local cadres and metropolitan cultural inculcation. Finally, the extraction and export of natural resources per se set the tone for French, Dutch, and English colonization in Latin America and the Caribbean, dispensing with the founding of universities (Elias; Martins; Moreira, 2017).

References

Acosta Silva, A. (2019). University power in Latin America. Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 81(1), 117-144.

Bernales, E. (1981). Origin and evolution of the university in Peru. Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 43(1), 455-506.

Callejas, G. V. (2001). Memories of the Andes. Notes on education in the Inca culture. Sarmiento Anuario Galego de Historia da Educación, 5: 45-64.

Elías, S. S. R., Martins, D. R., & Moreira, I. de C. (2017). ‘No’ to the creation of a university in Brazil: analysis of a document from the seventeenth century. Brazilian Journal of the History of Science, 10(2), 201-210.

García Guadilla, C. (2008). University professors and their history. In The Intimacies of the Academy. A quantitative-qualitative study on the dynamics of the academic profession. University Texts Collection, University of Zulia, Editions of the Academic Vice Rectorate.

Lira, B. B. (1992). The University in the History of Chile (1622-1992). Pehuén Editores.

Lara-Coronado, J., & Ochoa-Arias, A. (2024). Historical-Organizational Study of the Establishment of the Dominican University in Chile During the Colony. Social and Education History, 1-19.

Marsiske, R. (2006). The University of Mexico: History and Development. Journal of the History of Latin American Education, 8, 11-34.

Monsalve, M. M. (1998). From the study of the rosary to the Royal and Pontifical University of San Marcos. Histórica, 22(1), 53-78.

Ortíz R. E. (2006). Origin of the oldest universities in Peru. Journal of the History of Latin American Education, 8, 35-48.

Peset, M. (1985). Powers and University of Mexico during the Colonial Era.

Pola, M. G. (1969). The University of Santo Tomas in Manila: Historical Sketch. Bulletin of the Spanish Association of Orientalists, (5), 21-30.

Ribeiro, D. (1973). The New University: A Project. Editorial Ciencia Nueva.

Rodríguez, J. L. P., San Pedro, B., & Rodríguez, L. (Eds.). (2008). The University of Salamanca and its American Confluences. University of Salamanca Editions.

Rojas, R. (2005). History of the University in Venezuela. Journal of the History of Latin American Education, 7, 75-100.

Tünermann, C. (1991). History of the University in Latin America. From the colonial era to the reform of Córdoba. Editorial Centroamericana.

^[1] The Apostolic Brief Charissimi in Christode of 11 March 1619 was renewed several times every ten years and reached all the colonized territories and their universities, such as that of Manila in the Philippines. Cf. POLA, 1969.

CHAPTER 4: INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE REPUBLICAN UNIVERSITY (1804 – 1918)

Allisson Goes

The construction of the bases for peripheral and semi-peripheral capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean in the period of 1804-1918.

In this period, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) transitioned from the status of colonial territories to independent Republics, which did not mean the immediate formation of Nation States as we understand them today (public powers, national army, Central Bank, national identity) and, in the case of Brazil, gave way to a monarchical system of government (until 1889).

The wars of independence covered a wide period (1804^[5] – 1825) leaving their mark on the economy of the republics, which faced multiple challenges in trying to form and stabilize national states:

Political instability: In the new republican states, civil wars, coups d’état, and conflicts between elites (especially liberals versus conservatives) were commonplace. Added to this was the lack of consensus regarding the State model (centralism versus federalism), which facilitated fragmentation and the existence of local caudillos;
Inherited colonial dependence: the republican elites, for the most part, replaced the colonial authorities by maintaining the colonial economic structures (latifundia, inequality for indigenous people, Afro-descendants and mestizos);
Unstable borders and territorial conflicts: the territories had not finished finalizing their national borders and, in some cases, such as Panama, U.S. interest stimulated the fragmentation of the territory. Conflicts developed over the dispute over territories such as the War of the Triple Alliance (1854-1870; Paraguay versus Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay^[6]) and the War of the Pacific (1879-1884; Chile versus Bolivia and Peru). Gran Colombia (1819-1831, made up of the current territories of Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and Ecuador) was dissolved by redefining borders;
Difficulties in the new ruling elites to understand their insertion in the capitalist economy and the world division of labor: the rupture of colonialism was due to several factors, including the inter-bourgeois disputes between the former colonial metropolises in the framework of industrial capitalism and the possibilities of assimilating the industrial revolution. In this context, the new elites went through a stage in which they considered that it was now simply a matter of administering the old inherited economic structure by other hands, when in reality the Republics arise in a period of reorganization of all the relations of production and marketing on a planetary scale;
Economic dependence: in the international division of labor and production chains, the new Republics specialized in monocultures, mining or livestock activity. This is the case of coffee in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela, sugar in Cuba, copper in Chile or tin in Bolivia. The commercialization of products in markets controlled by Europeans first, and then by the United States, made their economies vulnerable to price fluctuations;
Precarious infrastructure associated with modernization: Foreign investment, especially British and American, in the construction of ports, railroads, canals (Panama), telegraphs, was made with the purpose of privileging the benefit of the ruling elites in the new Republics;
Social inequality: the model of land concentration, dispossession of wealth and assault on territories historically inhabited by native peoples was reinforced;
Lack of national integration: the ruling elites of the new Republics, despite owning mostly large tracts of rural land, had difficulties connecting with the poor, peasants and indigenous sectors, making the construction of national identity complex;
Social exclusion: large sectors of the population, especially indigenous communities, Afro-descendants, peasants, poor migrants, were left out of the citizen rights that were being legislated, as well as the economic benefit of the role of the State as an organizer of wealth;
Institutional weakness: the precarious or non-existent democratic development, the lack of independence of powers and the construction of critical citizenship, fostered corruption and nepotism, being an obstacle to the construction and consolidation of the State;

The university and school systems were part of this situation. In seven essays on the Peruvian reality (1928), especially in the process of public education, Mariátegui explains that «the republican state preserved the colonial molds in the organization of education. Public education was not adapted to the new regime, the Republic did not transform it; he simply administered it» (1928, p.231). To which he adds, «education is organized on the basis of a semi-feudal social structure. It cannot, therefore, be democratic, or scientific, or modern» (p.236). He specifies that «university intelligence has been educated in indifference to social problems. It has been trained to serve power, not to transform it» (Mariátegui, El Amauta, No 2, p.15).

Thinking about republican internationalization

The debate on university internationalisation in the republican period takes into account two processes. The first refers to the independence of Latin American countries that began with the Haitian Revolution in 1804 and spread throughout the region throughout the nineteenth century. The second is the insertion of Latin America into late industrial capitalism, which, of course, will have a direct impact on the format of the republican universities.

From Mexico to Uruguay, new republican universities were created, in contrast to the old pontifical colonial universities, whose model was based on the maintenance of Spanish colonial power materialized in the State and the Church. Some of these old universities were closed because they were far from the objectives of the new republican ruling class (Tünermann, 1991).

Among the various objectives of the republican elites that led to the marginalization of the colonial universities were the structuring of national states for which the training of their leaders was indispensable, the need to produce science in the face of the domination of the Church and the dictates of industrial capitalism, as well as modernization desired by local elites in certain sectors. This does not mean that a wide-ranging rupture had been generated, because university spaces continued to promote the privileges of local elites.

The above table positions our reflection on one of the main topics dealt with in this chapter, the university models adopted in Latin America in the republican period, the French or Napoleonic model and/or the Humboldtian model, which we will address later. This discussion introduces us to the debate on university internationalisation because, once again, it is about the implementation of university plans originating from the European continent and, why not say it, from other countries, to promote vocational training on this side of the Atlantic.

The independence of the various American colonial territories in the nineteenth century brought with it a stronger idea of modernization based on the Enlightenment and liberalism, which proved to be in contradiction with most of the organizational assumptions of colonial universities. The need of the new times – republicans – was to form the new country and its citizens based on an educational model that considered science and technology as engines of that other way of building knowledge and practices (López-Ocón, 2010).

Let us remember that it was not a question of a university internationalization based on evolutionary schemes, as if everything left behind by Latin American independences no longer existed. Although the Creole elites had already adopted some enlightened and liberal ideals within a developmentalist and modernizing vision of the region, the now republican lords of power continued to affirm these ideas, but kept intact some schemes of colonial domination, such as slavery and vertical models of government (Grosfoguel, 2018).

To achieve their objectives, whether it was modernization and developmentalism or even the formation of the classes that would command the new states – and even a sense of homeland, for some sectors – the local republican elites adopted Europeanizing models of universities. These models are considered internationalization experiences because they also provide teaching methods, teaching, organizational schemes, etc. for existing universities and those that were founded in this period.

We cannot fail to point out that these were experiences of Eurocentric internationalization, focused on the needs of providing the modernizing bases of the young Latin American nations. On another front, it is important to say that both models – the French and the German – were also created as responses to the experiences of political and economic repositioning in the nineteenth century.

TheNapoleonic model is named after Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) who ruled France as emperor between 1804 and 1814. This model appears more clearly in 1808 with the creation of the French Imperial University and had as its main premises: professional and utilitarian education; state control over curricula; hierarchical administrative model; transmission of knowledge by teachers; and the latter assumed the role of specialized trainers.

The Humboldtian model is named after Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), a Prussian intellectual and government official. In this case, priority was given to the integration between teaching and research, in which professors and students worked together to produce scientific knowledge. In addition, he considered university autonomy and a structure for the production of knowledge that combined several disciplines to be essential.

Knowing these models, we can draw attention to another important aspect, the insertion of Latin America in the context of dependent and late capitalism of the nineteenth century, the broadest time frame of our analysis. It is undeniable that the development of capitalism in Latin America maintains structural differences with that which is built on the European continent – uneven and combined development (Frank, 1980) – in that period.

Mandel (1962) called competitive capitalism and monopoly or imperialist capitalism, two of the phases present in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While industrialization was consolidating in Europe and the formation of monopolies and the growing prominence of the market appeared as characteristics, Latin America maintained very flagrant pre-capitalist structures.

The foundations of capitalism in Latin America were, on the one hand, an agrarian and export economy based on slave regimes, incipient industrialization and a highly concentrated land structure. On the other hand, there was the presence of liberal ideas that converged to form Nation States, which needed to advance in capitalist development. Of course, depending on what the national elites deemed necessary. That said, education, including university education, was on the radar of these elites to support economic development, the consolidation of a national identity and scientific production.

In this context, we will focus our gaze on the phenomenon of university internationalization in the republican period, based on four examples: Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina. Such examples will allow a better understanding of the debate we propose, considering the historical and social contexts, even when they refer to periods considered distant from the history of universities and their internationalization processes.

Colombia

Colombia is part of what we call Andean America. Supporters of independence, such as Simón Bolívar, pointed out from the beginning the need for changes in how and what should be taught in the new republics. The first Colombian republican constitution highlighted the importance of public education for the promotion of the economy and scientific and technological development and support for the creation of universities and secular education centers (Gutiérrez, 2010).

In 1826, the Central University of the Republic was created, changing its colonial configurations to expand student access and serve the auspices of the new ruling class based on scientific and technical knowledge (Bernal de Rojas, 2010). The basis of the new Colombian university was the Humboldt model, which indicated the circulation of knowledge and skills between Europe and Latin America. To this end, a new curriculum was implemented, considering important characteristics of this model, such as the autonomy of the chair and the university, in addition to the implementation of university councils and scholarships for students who went abroad, notably those linked to the elites (Jaramillo apud Bernal de Rojas, 2010, p. 42):

Modern pedagogical conquests, universal concept of general studies, university councils, scholarships abroad for the clearest children of the university, professors and substitutes, monitors and academies of emulation; libraries, laboratories and botanical gardens; the university’s own printing press; specialization seminars; honorary professors, retirements and solemn academic acts, autonomy regulated by the State, professorships obtained by competitive examination, museums and public libraries linked to the university; in a word, what today constitutes the statute of ours and of the advanced European and American schools, was conceived in this Colombian homeland by the illustrious men Francisco de Paula Santander and José Manuel Restrepo, Secretary of the Interior, who authorized with their names the memorable Plan of Studies of October 3, 1826, the most intelligent and happy concretion of the aforementioned law of March.

It is noted that the first rulers were concerned with educational reforms that promoted science and technology as fundamental in the new country, as was the case of Francisco de Paula Santander between 1832 and 1936.

Frank Safford, cited by Gutiérrez (2010), pointed out that there was a concern about the formation of a technical elite in the new republics, including Colombia. There was a pressing need to develop the physical infrastructure, knowledge, and technical skills, as well as the inclusion of the region in the first industrial revolution through the dominance of steam. To this end, one of the internationalizing processes was used, academic mobility, in which young students were sent to the United States and Europe, and scientists and technicians who contributed to the training of the university staff of the young republic also arrived in Colombia (New Granada).

While many European researchers arrived in Colombia, such as the members of the Chorographic Commission led by the Italian Agustín Codazzi, the knowledge produced in the new universities was disseminated in the form of books in Europe (López-Ocón, 2010), characterizing one of the mechanisms of internationalization in the republican period.

Venezuela

The emergence of the republican university in Venezuela was parallel to the processes that occurred in Colombia. As a result of the modernization of the region under the command of Simón Bolívar, the universities were distancing themselves from colonial models based on ecclesiastical needs to give way to important statutory reforms, although the foundations of the new university in terms of philosophical knowledge were already laid before independence.

In 1827, the Central University of Venezuela, formerly the Royal and Pontifical University of Caracas, was created after statutory reforms and a reinterpretation of the role of the university in the context of the new republic. As an example, we see that Bolívar appointed the doctor José María Vargas as rector of the new Central University of Venezuela between 1827-1830, inserting the institution into a dynamic that prioritized the teaching of science and letters (Rojas, 2005).

In the discussion on university autonomy during the nineteenth century, the need to import the entire logistical apparatus for its operation was raised, as in the cases of Mérida and Caracas. It was necessary to bring machines, instruments, and books so that educational institutions could be at the level of other foreign universities (Rodríguez, 2007). One interpretation of this has to do with what we would call processes of standardization of university functioning based on experiences observed abroad.

Argentina

Also in Argentina, the university maintained colonial legacies until the first half of the nineteenth century. These legacies were passed down through the curriculum linked to theology and natural law, and the Church still had a relative strength in its organization. There was a movement based on the need for curricular reforms led by the new ideas of local elites who criticized the dogmatic nature of universities until then (Vera de Flachs, 2023).

The new university projects, in Córdoba and the new university in the capital Buenos Aires, were inspired by the liberal ideas driven by the European modernizing winds in the American continent in the second half of the nineteenth century. New political configurations resulted in a new curriculum for the University of Cordoba.

President Domingo Sarmiento (1811-1888) himself visited Europe and the United States and became familiar with the dynamics of universities and scientific production. This visit gave rise to what we would now call a cooperation agreement between the University of Córdoba and the University of Göttingen, in Germany, through the collaboration of the botanist August Grisebach (1814-1879) (Ortiz, 2013).

A few years later, organizational and curricular changes were implemented following the hiring of German scientist Hermann Burmeister in the late 1860s (Buchbinder, 2005). In addition, President Domingo Sarmiento authorized the hiring of seven German professors to work at the University, teaching physics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, and astronomy (Buchbinder, 2005).

In the case of the University of Buenos Aires, created in 1821, five years after Argentine independence, we see that throughout the nineteenth century several changes took place, but even at the end of the nineteenth century the Napoleonic model predominated. This was manifested in the prioritization of the training of professionals to the detriment of scientific research and humanistic careers. Positivist and liberal ideas set the tone for the debates. These were elements that represented the influence of knowledge and ways of doing what predominated in Europe and that were incorporated by the university organization of the new republic, a process based on the flow of ideas and people.

The effort to hire professors from the old continent, to translate publications into Spanish, the organization of chairs and faculties supported by concepts from abroad, were internationalization mechanisms present in Argentine republican universities, such as Córdoba and Buenos Aires, in the nineteenth century. As in other countries, we see the movement of teachers and students between Latin America and Europe as one of the main characteristics of this internationalization process.

Temporary closure

What this chapter brought was the possibility of seeing the processes of internationalization during the republican period, considering the independence movements of the former colonies and the insertion of Latin America into late industrial capitalism.

The period preceding the Cordoba Reform (1918) is one of reaffirmation of the capitalist character of the nations in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), of difficulty in building the state and of attempts to open the way to bourgeois modernization, as well as of consolidation of the peripheral role of the region in the world market economy. which was expressed in the orientation and purposes of higher education institutions (HEIs) and school systems.

In addition, the number of universities had not increased significantly in the new Republics. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) grew at the pace of government requirements in terms of professionalization. The case of Argentina was unique, as it was the country that had created the most universities since 1821 (University of Buenos Aires, National University of the Litoral, National University of La Plata, National University of San Juan), it showed the vocation of the southern bourgeoisie to use HEIs within an enlightened bourgeois national project. Mexico was the other country in which the elite seemed to follow the same orientation, since it had endorsed the National University of Mexico (UNM) as secular in 1910[7], founded the Michoacan University of San Nicolás de Hidalgo (UMSNH)[8] created in 1917 that would be the first autonomous in Latin America, and the University of Sinaloa in 1918. The case of Brazil was very particular, with a precarious development of university studies, due to the fact that the ruling elites privileged the model of professional training in Europe, especially in the Portuguese colonialist nation.

Finally, the issue of republican internationalization involved the restructuring of the old colonial universities, the hiring of foreign professors and the sending of students (academic mobility), as well as the circulation of ideas and the importation of materials, instruments and books. Like other issues, internationalization occurred in an overlapping manner with other processes, such as the influence of the Church on educational institutions and the changes in political visions that directly impacted the conception of education and the university until the Córdoba Reform in 1918.

References

Bernal de Rojas, A. E. (2010). The Colombian University. Historical development. Paideia Surcolombiana, 1(15), 39–56. https://doi.org/10.25054/01240307.1089

Buchbinder, P. (2005). History of Argentine Universities. Editorial Sudamericana.

Carmona Rodríguez, M. (2007). University autonomy in Venezuela: nineteenth century. Historical Processes, 12, 91–113.

Frank, A. G. (1980). Dependent accumulation and underdevelopment: rethinking dependency theory. Editora Brasiliense.

Grosfoguel, R. (2018). Developmentalism, modernity and dependency theory in Latin America. Epistemologies of the South, 2(1), 10–43.

Gutiérrez, J. M. (2019). The Republican, Secular and Liberal University in Colombia: A Response to Political Power Allied with the Catholic Church. @mbienteeducação Review, 12(3), 270–282.

López-Ocón, L. (2010). The first steps of an emancipatory republican science in Andean America. History of Education, 29, 57–75.

Mandel, E. (1962). Late capitalism. Sylone Editions.

Mariátegui, J. C. (1928). Seven Essays on the Interpretation of Peruvian Reality. Editorial Minerva.

Ortiz, E. L. (2013). The scientific relations between the universities of Córdoba and Göttingen (1860–1870): Wappäus, Cáceres and the Six of Córdoba. At the National University of Córdoba. Four Hundred Years of History (pp. 283–324). National University of Córdoba.

Rojas, R. (2005). History of the university in Venezuela. Journal of the History of Latin American Education, 7, 75–100.

Tünermann, C. (1991). History of the University in Latin America: From the Colonial Era to the Córdoba Reform. Editorial Centroamericana.

Vera de Flachs, M. C. (2024). The passage from the Jesuit to the republican university in Argentina. Journal of the History of Latin American Education, 26(43), 57–78.

CHAPTER 5: THE UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE CORDOBA REFORM (1918-1945)^{^[9]}

Luis Bonilla-Molina

The Córdoba Reform was the culmination of a continental process of questioning the lags of the oligarchic and positivist university model[10], the institutional decontextualization with respect to the social, economic and political transformations that were taking place[11], new political and cultural ideas[12], the still limited transfer of technology and innovation typical of the first two industrial revolutions in the region. facts that consequently demanded a university transformation.

In the mid-nineteenth century, but especially from 1870 onwards, a wave of attempts at bourgeois modernization had been taking place in LAC – in the midst of uneven developments – that sought to promote liberal state reforms (liberal constitutions, civil bureaucracy and modern judicial systems, consolidation of state centralism) to consolidate the agro-mining export bourgeoisie as the ruling class.

In education, this movement was expressed in the promotion of secular, scientific, free and compulsory education, the expansion of primary education in urban areas, and the demand for universities to have a greater professional, technical and oriented approach to the training of the elite that would promote modern capitalist development. Modernization within the framework of the formation of national states and its impact on HEIs has been a trend of university internationalization that has been little worked on.

The demand for democracy and the construction of citizenship appeared as an expectation that subverted the authoritarian status quo that governed most countries; that is, the aspiration to promote democracy in society and institutions, occurred within the very framework of the capitalist character of economies. This evidenced the crisis of the liberal-oligarchic model, therefore, the aspiration for democratic development sought to achieve the European model of economy and political system. Let’s look at some of the milestones that preceded the Córdoba Reform.

1905: Moderate reform at the University of La Plata

In 1890 the Provincial University of La Plata was founded, which would fully deploy its activities in 1897, with scarce resources, low enrollment and precarious conditions. In 1905, Minister Joaquín Víctor González would lead the transformation into the National University of La Plata, a process that would promote the nationalization of observatories, museums, faculties and provincial institutes, and would be formalized by decree of President Quintana.

In 1906, the now Rector González, modernized the university under the positivist paradigm, focused on research, experimental education, links with the outside world and the opening to an emerging model of extension. In 1908 the statute of 1896 was reformed, replacing the life academies with elective councils, made up of professors with the right to vote. This wave of reform, although limited and conservative, would begin to shake the clerical authoritarianism of universities such as the one in Cordoba.

1906: creation of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile (FECh)

On October 21, 1906, the FECh was born, an initiative that sought to get out of the political marginalization in which Chilean youth found themselves and defend student and social rights, receiving recognition from the rector of the time, Valentín Letelier. During his first decade he embraced liberal and anti-oligarchic ideals, expressed in publications such as El Pito (1911-1951).[13]

From its beginnings, the FECh maintained relations with workers’ organizations, supporting training processes, initially from an enlightenment approach, which would evolve with the creation of the Lastarria Popular University (1918), a project in which the anarchists would participate[14]. The creation of the FECh would imply a special encouragement for the organization of the student sectors belonging to the middle class – to a lesser extent popular – sponsoring democracy and the right to vote, social justice and the agenda of radical liberalism, especially secular education, freedom of thought, anticlericalism and republican humanism. Its echoes swept across the continent.

1908: First International Congress of American Students (Uruguay)

Between January 26 and February 2, 1908, convened by the Montevideo Student Association, the First International Congress of American Students was held, an event that was attended by 113 delegates from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Although it seems that its orientation was liberal and reformist, it meant a qualitative leap in the internationalization of the student agenda, with its proposal for a relationship between state and private public universities, free studies and mandatory regulation, unification of academic programs and equivalence of degrees, specialization (according to the disciplinary paradigm) as opposed to generalization of studies. convergent regulation of the academic regime, cultural and educational exchange, especially in terms of publications and events. In addition, the creation of the League of American Students was promoted, as a space for exchange at that time, not for struggle.

This Congress approved promoting the participation of students in university governance, something that would be institutionalized in the Organic Law of the University of the Republic, endorsed in 1909. Some figures of this congress were Héctor Miranda, Clotilde Luisi, Santín Carlos Rossi, Alfredo Capurro and Baltasar Brum.

1909: The Cuzco Revolt

Cusco, in Peru, was the historical scene of anti-colonial resistance and the epicenter of the construction of a latifundist elite. In 1780 this territory witnessed the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II (in Tinta, near Cusco), which sought the elimination of abuses against the natives. Túpac Amaru II was captured and executed in Cusco in 1781, but his uprising left its mark on Andean society.

In 1908, a university center was formed at the University of San Marcos in Lima. One of its leaders, Pedro Dulanto, was its president when the III American Congress of Students was held in Lima, of which he was appointed its vice president.

With this background, the most important university student revolt in the regional republican history of the early twentieth century emerged: the university revolt of Cusco (1909), aimed at promoting reforms in the National University of San Antonio Abad. The central purpose of the student struggle was to modernize education, linking what university does to the solution of the problems that Cusco society was experiencing. This occurred in a context of criticism of the authoritarian model with which the university was managed, which claimed to promote liberal ideals; that is, the contradiction between what was said and what was done was evident.

The central demands of the student movement were

democratic model, less hierarchical and authoritarian, of university management,
modernization and updating of educational programs and content, and
greater relationship of the university with the development of the region.

In fact, the revolt in Cusco took place in a small university, with barely 111 students, which evidenced the elitist nature of its own enrollment. It was about the full irruption of liberal ideals in academia and perhaps – there is no evidence – their combination with the first echoes of socialist ideas^[15].

The students achieved their goal, to replace the authoritarian rector Araujo. Albert Giesecke, who replaced him, worked to improve the link between the university and the community, the updating of the library and the creation of a university magazine for the expression of academic thought, opening a cycle of university reforms in Peru.

The Córdoba Reform would be part of the cycle that began the revolt in Cusco. However, the racialization of university history usually omits this important antecedent and link with the Liminar Manifesto.

1910: Mexico – student mobilizations

In 1906, the Society of Students at the National Preparatory School (ENP) was created, led by Alfonso Reyes, a fact that meant an important advance in Mexican student organization. The educational reform of 1907 promoted by Porfirio Díaz, which proposed secular and free education in high school, generated new expectations and tensions. In this context, the ENP student strike took place, which proposed a more democratic education – especially in terms of openness to various currents of thought – as well as academic autonomy and participation in the election of teachers.

On July 18, 1909 in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, groups of students supported the opposition candidate José Ferrel, which further stressed the situation in the country, escalating with the student celebrations in Culiacán for the death of Governor Francisco Cedeño.

On October 28, 1909, Alonso Reyes, Antonio Caso, Pedro Henríquez Ureña and José Vasconcelos founded the Ateneo de la Juventud, which promoted a renewal of the university spirit, criticism of positivism, academic freedom, humanist culture and intellectual independence.

In this environment, the Student Association of the School of Medicine convened the National Congress of Students, which took place between September 6 and 18, 1910, facilitating the organization of the demonstration that took place in front of the presidential residence on September 13.

But an unprecedented event occurred on November 20, 1910 when several student groups joined Francisco Madero’s call for the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. This fact promoted the radicalization of young people and university students throughout the continent.

The Mexican Revolution

On November 20, 1910, Francisco I. Madero called for an armed uprising against the re-election of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911), against social inequality and the concentration of land in the hands of a few landowners and foreigners, modernization within the framework of peripheral capitalism, political repression and electoral fraud. The main actors would be the anti-reelectionist Francisco I. Madero (president in 1911), Emiliano Zapata (peasant leader of the South), Francisco Villa (leader of the peasants and ranchers of the north), Venustiano Carranza (constitutionalist, president after the fall of Huerta), Álvaro Obregón (rebel general, who would later become president), intellectuals and students who orbited around the Ateneo de la Juventud.

In the midst of the armed struggle, both Zapata and Pancho Villa promoted forms of peasant education and literacy days in the liberated territories.

The Political Constitution of the Mexican States – known as the Constitution of Querétaro – approved on February 5, 1917, would be a pioneer in introducing social rights, even before the Bolshevik revolution. Its elaboration was the result of the call made by Venustiano Carranza to the Constituent Congress of 1916, to overcome the current constitution of 1857. Article 3 establishes secular, free and compulsory education, education as a social function of the State, with a democratic sense – a liberal demand – and a national one; She is considered a precursor of the universal public school and Mexican socialist education (1934).[16] This Magna Carta enshrines the need for literacy and civic education in a framework of formation and consolidation of new social classes, especially the bourgeoisie and the working class. The Constitution of 1917 would be part of the torrent of liberal ideas that would converge in the Córdoba Reform of 1918, especially its idea of promoting education as social emancipation.

The Constitution of 1917, a product of the Mexican Revolution, goes beyond the paradigm of instruction contained in the Constitution of 1857 with that of education, which expresses the demand of expanding capitalism to expand the purposes of training to the construction of democratic consciousness, social transformation according to the logic of the market, consumption and governability. However, it is necessary to underline that these were also demands of the radical sectors and a large part of the left, especially with regard to the democratization of access, the massification of scientific and secular education, as well as the construction of consciousness based on greater access to knowledge. While the Porfiristas proposed education as an instrument for order and progress, based on the positivism of Gabino Barreda and Justo Sierra, radicals such as Francisco J. Múgica postulated secular, integral education, linked to the justice project of the revolution[17] as a central part of its social function.

1910: Gran Colombia Student Congress

In July 1910, the International Student Congress of Gran Colombia was held in Bogotá, in which the so-called Centennial Generation had a very active participation, among them Agustín Nieto Caballero, Tomás Rueda Vargas, Pablo Vila, Eduardo Santos, Luis Cano and Miguel Hornaguera, with the participation of Luis López de Mesa in charge of presenting a motion on university autonomy.

The central demands of this Congress were the representation of students on the Board of Directors, the appointment to chairs by public competition, the irremovability of professors who adequately fulfill their duties and university autonomy; the economic independence of universities, with the creation of special funds administered by the academy itself; access to libraries, scholarships for studies and internships abroad, publication of theses by the national printing press, provision of public jobs for recent graduates, policies for the exchange of books and international journals.

It was to confront the conservative hegemony of the Catholic Church and the conservative party, opening spaces to liberal ideas and their conception of the world, the economy, society and rights. Although the participation of Venezuelan and Ecuadorian students was mentioned, the prominent role was played by young Colombians.

1910: Second International Congress of American Students

The second Congress was held from July 9 to 15, 1910, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The event was convened by the University Federation of Buenos Aires (FUBA), [18]in accordance with the resolutions of the first congress of 1908.

The work agenda of this Congress included the creation of the International American University Office based in Montevideo and the Planning of the Third Meeting. Many analysts agree that this forum was more organizational than confrontation of agendas, but it laid the foundations for the promotion of university internationalism committed to democratizing transformation. Its development marked an important milestone in the promotion of liberal ideas, which linked with the aspirations of radical sectors of anarchism, communism and socialism, as well as with the agendas of capitalist developmentalism in the periphery. It is a period in which the consensus orbited around the expansion of democratic rights. The second Congress consolidated the American Student League movement.

Chile: Movement for Academic Freedom and Scientific Renewal (1910 – 1914)

The creation in 1889 of the Pedagogical Institute, promoted by Valentín Letelier, with its postulates of scientific teacher training, entailed an important contradiction between the humanist and the positivist approaches to education. The creation of the FECh would exacerbate these contradictions. Anarchist, socialist, Marxist and radical liberal ideas began to expand, confronting the existing conservatism, even in the University of Chile.

The creation of the Lastarria Popular University (UPL), with the purpose of consolidating initiatives to bring science and culture to the working class, would imply the beginning of a very important cycle of academic and university renewal. The experience acquired by progressive university students and professors would serve to promote democratizing demands, especially the conception of the university as a space for free thought in the face of dogmatism. Their ideas and experiences would spread throughout the continent through the networks of left-wing and liberal organizations, as well as through the growing workers’ movement.

The central demands of the university renewal movement that took place in Chile in this period were academic freedom, the constant scientific renewal of contents, university extension, democratization and the social connection of the university, opening up to the demands and struggles of the popular sectors.

1912: III Congress of the League of American Students (Lima)

From July 21 to 28, 1912, the Third Meeting of American Students was held in Lima, Peru. The discussions focused on the need to build a common framework for regional education (Americanism), the promotion of faculties of political and administrative sciences, the strengthening of the link between universities and the press, the development of agricultural education, the establishment of chairs of American and national literature, the formalization of congress agreements, the strengthening of the International American University Office (OIUA), the development of periodic national student congresses, the approval of the official regulations of the OIUA and the designation of Chile as the venue for the next congress.

Some prominent figures in this congress were Pedro Dulanto, Luis Alberto Arguedas, Alejandro Busselleau, Carlos Morales Macedo, Jorge Morrison, Pedro Rosa y Boloña (Peru), as well as Leonidas Porto (Brazil), Hugo Lee Plaza (Chile), among others.

However, the fourth congress planned to be held in Chile could not be held due to the outbreak of the First World War, but the Córdoba movement can be considered heir to his work.

The University of Michoacana

This university arose in the framework of the Mexican Revolution, a process that promoted educational reforms that ended up breaking with colonial and ecclesiastical legacies, promoting secularism and the popular character of higher education institutions.

The Universidad Michoacana assumed innovative principles that would later be adopted by the Córdoba reform (1918) such as university autonomy to strengthen national development and social mobility. Key actors in its creation were the Governor of Michoacán (1917-1918) Pascual Ortiz Rubio[19], who sought a structural break with the Porfiriato; Agustín Aragón (constitutionalist, linked to liberal and revolutionary ideas), and indirectly Venustiano Carranza, promoter of the Constitution of 1917. This would make it possible for a democratic, rebellious and critical student generation to emerge rapidly in the 1920s.

The novelties of this university would be university autonomy from its origins, educational centralization by converging in it, secondary, preparatory and professional schools, as part of the paradigm of integral education, as well as the conception of secular and popular education, which would guide the social function of the incorporation of innovations and scientific advances that occurred within the framework of the first two industrial revolutions.

Its objectives were to modernize education (developmentalism from radical liberalism and development of the productive forces from Marxism), training professionals committed to national needs and expansion of university enrollment as a revolutionary tool.

However, the road to Córdoba was marked by the uneven and combined development of capitalism, between the center and the periphery of its economy and political-military power, which is why, in addition to the triggering events of a national nature that converged in Córdoba, there was also a restructuring in the logic of capital management on a global scale. Let’s look at some of these complementary aspects.

Changes in the training management model: From Empiricism in educational management to Taylorism and Fayolism, the need for educational restructuring in Latin America

What was happening in Latin America was not entirely disconnected from what was happening in the world capitalist system. Industrial capitalism, driven by the first industrial revolutions (1760/1870), had developed an empiricist method in factory management, which nevertheless guaranteed the extraction of surplus value from labor and allowed an unprecedented accumulation of wealth.

The basic metabolism of labor exploitation and the reproduction of a system that flooded the whole of society acquires much more rational and scientific characteristics in the management of production, starting with the development of the ideas of Fayol (administration) and Taylor (factory organization and know-how of the work of production and marketing of goods).

The contributions of Henri Fayol (1841-1925) to the scientific rationalization of production were expressed in:

Hierarchical administrative model (unity of command, chain of authority, disciplinary criteria),
Separation of technical-productive functions from commercial, accounting, general administrative and industrial safety functions,
Installation of the fourteen principles of administration (specialization of work, authority based on orders issued with responsibility, respect for the rules and obedience to those responsible for their execution-supervision, unity of command, unity of direction, individual interest subordinate to the general, fair and sufficient remuneration, balanced centralization, chain of command, orderly sequence of functions, stability of competent personnel, building team spirit),
Professionalization of the manager’s role.

This generated an impact on education in aspects such as:

Adoption of school administrative models that highlighted the importance of planning, supervision, control and efficiency of investment,
Hierarchical chain of command of the educational activity that replicated the factory structure (high authorities, supervisors, principal, deputy principal, teacher, student),
Promotion of curricular standardization and introduction of emphasis on the measurement of performance and productivity,
Requirement of training of management staff and technical qualification of teachers. It is the period in which a new boom in the initial and continuous training of education workers is redesigned, promoted and opened the way.
The vision of educational institutions as units of production is deepened.

The efficiency required of educational management implied a renewed model of internal management and other ways of relating to the context, to the academic externality.

For his part, the contributions of Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), who is credited with the foundation of the scientific organization of work , were:

Horizontal division of labor (each to his own),
Separation between planning (manager) and execution of tasks (workers),
Seeks the optimal mode of production, through the development of time and movement studies.
Establishment of wage incentive policies for productivity,

This was reflected in education in:

Movement for standardization, by country and locality, of didactics, school times and contents,
Progressive reduction of teacher autonomy, whose activities were now oriented towards the implementation of curricula designed by specialists,
Promotion of comparative studies of student achievement,
Creation of systems for the management, supervision and control of teaching performance,
Growing fragmentation of knowledge.

Capitalism had entered its Taylorist phase (1910-1930).^[20] This generated a wave of unprecedented clarifications for change, renovation and university modernization , of a functional nature to the development of capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, a movement that preceded the Córdoba Reform.

1917: The world turns. Between revolutionary exaltation and alarms in the capitalist periphery

The Bolshevik revolution (1917), communist and anti-capitalist, is a dynamizer of the defensive changes promoted by the bourgeoisie in all territories to reduce its impact and expansion around the planet. It also meant a revitalization of socialist thought (anarchists and communists).

After the defeat of the Paris Commune (1871), an unprecedented repression was unleashed against the First International, an organization in which anarchists and communists were militants. Many of the persecuted emigrate to Argentina with their ideas of social transformation.

In 1879, anarchists constituted the Center for Socialist Propaganda in Buenos Aires; in 1891 the newspaper La Protesta Humana was founded , the central organ of Argentine anarchism, and in 1896 the Argentine Workers’ Federation (FOA) emerged, which would become the FORA in 1901 and which in its Congress of 1905 would openly define itself as anarchist. Anarchism brings with it ideas of democratization (including the university) and the social commitment of educational institutions, something that is being developed by the so-called rationalist schools, popular libraries, workers’ newspapers and proletarian theater.

Something similar happens with communist ideas (which are beginning to be known as Marxist). The Argentine socialist press emerged in 1894 with the newspaper La Vanguardia, which preceded the organization of the Marxists. In 1896 Juan B. Justo, José Ingenieros and others founded the first Socialist Party (PS) in Latin America and the Caribbean, located in the reformist line of the Second International, distanced from anarchism. Its Founder Juan Justo had just translated Marx’s Capital into Spanish. The socialist party stimulates and participates in the creation of moderate unions and workers’ mutuals. The promotion of popular universities by the PS would help to ferment the renovating proposals of 1918.

The Bolshevik revolution would have a first political impact on the Socialist Party, to such an extent that it would suffer a split in 1918, giving rise in 1921 to the creation of the Argentine Communist Party.

For the Argentine bourgeoisie this meant that the Russian revolution had a phalanx in its own territory, which is why it was ready to promote reforms that would contain social discontent while launching a repressive offensive against left-wing thought, as it would show in the so-called tragic week of 1919.

In 1918, there were more than 350 labor disputes in Argentina over the cost of living and demands for better working conditions. This facilitated the rise of bourgeois liberal ideas, as a narrative and proposal of containment in the face of the advances of the socialist camp.

Between 1848 and 1917, Argentina had experienced a process of capitalist modernization, marked by the expansion of the agro-export model, European immigration (which brought new political ideas), the impulse to urbanization and the route for the consolidation of the liberal-bourgeois State, but it had also entered the maelstrom of exploitation typical of capitalism.

The Argentine oligarchy and its intellectual elites were especially sensitive to the ideas of capitalist renewal, expressed in Fayolism and Taylorism; the latter understood and promoted in an increasingly open way the ideals of democracy, citizenship and liberal social commitment, which were not always well seen by those who exercised government functions. In fact, the government of Hipólito Yrigoyen elected in 1916, only two years before the events in Córdoba, was part of a liberal spring in Argentine society.

As Yrigoyen was the first president elected through secret and compulsory suffrage – although only male, because women could vote only in 1951 – this expressed winds of renewal in Argentine society and a boost to liberal-bourgeois ideas in that country. This would be manifested in the university events of Cordoba.

The Argentine bourgeoisie had confronted anarchism and was especially afraid of the impact of communism in Latin America. For this reason, they took advantage of the democratic spring to promote changes that would serve to contain the spread of the Bolshevik revolution in South America. The liberal-bourgeois democratic opening flooded all spaces and the university was no stranger to this phenomenon.

The Liminar Manifesto and the Cordoba Reform in the Development of Capitalism of the Periphery and Semi-Periphery

The Argentine situation, prior to the events in Córdoba, was one of general aspirations for democratization and social justice that hybridized ideas of radical liberalism, anticlericalism and anti-oligarchism, but not openly anti-capitalist. Rector Antonio Nores belonged to a traditional conservative family, closely linked to the Catholic Church, so his own management symbolized the model of an oligarchic, exclusive university, linked to clerical ideas and was the antithesis of liberal ideas (even more so of anarchist, socialist and communist ideas).

The heads of the chairs and academic council of the University of Córdoba were mostly closed to academic renewal and greatly influenced by the Jesuit community, which became an obstacle to modernization and capitalist development.

Although the University of Córdoba had been a national university since 1854, it was still a closed corporation, with limited autonomy and in whose decision-making processes neither students nor teachers participated. This was contrary to the spirit of the democratic spring that had been inaugurated with the democratic election of Yrigoyen. The development of capitalism in Argentina needed another type of university.

The main student protagonists of the Córdoba Reform were not Marxists, socialists or anarchists. In fact, Deodoro Roca (1890-1942) was a radical liberal influenced by progressive humanism; Arturo Orgaz (1881-1952) a liberal republican, moderate and supporter of secular humanism; Arturo Capdevilla (1889-1967) was a literary nationalist who moved between romanticism and conservative moral proposals, among others.

The Liminar Manifesto (known as the Córdoba Manifesto), written by Deodoro Roca, was published by the University Federation of Córdoba on June 21, 1918. The main demands of the student movement of Córdoba were university autonomy, university co-governance (participation of students, teachers and graduates in decision-making), free teaching and merit-based competition, university extension (link of the university with social problems and needs), academic freedom and pedagogical renewal (overcoming dogmatism, clericalism and rote teaching models), reform of curricula (incorporating the sciences and knowledge that would contribute to modernization and national development) and broad access (criticism of the elitist character of the university that did not allow social ascent, a key promise of liberalism in education).

Some of its most important achievements were the advance in forms of university autonomy (in permanent dispute to this day), the promotion of different forms of co-government (with advanced particularities that are maintained today, as would be the case of the University of Panama founded later, which would occur due to the link between university tasks and the decolonial aspirations of that country). competitive examinations and the beginning of reforms in the curricula, the incorporation of university extension as a substantive part of what university does (a fundamental part of the liberal demands to promote national modernization and development), the construction of the student body as a political subject of university change.

The unmet demands were in the field of mass access to the university (although it was expanded in the following decades), partial democratization of the governing bodies, structural transformation of the social name of the university (it failed to become the epicenter of a society of justice and equity), full autonomy (clerical dependence was replaced in many cases by governmental dependence, especially because of funding).

The events of Córdoba (1918) inaugurated a new model of university internationalization (which was promoted especially between 1918-1945) for the renovation and reform of higher education institutions.

The revolution stopped. The agenda of the reform of Córdoba in the perspective of modernization and Latin American developmentalism

The Student Reform of Córdoba and its Liminar Manifesto are undoubtedly one of the most important milestones in the construction of the Latin American public university. With this event, the Latin American university showed its capacity for adaptation and, above all, for anticipation of reform cycles by higher education in the region.

However, in academic and political literature, its purposes and scope are often overestimated. The reform of Córdoba was not anti-systemic or anti-capitalist, but it was profoundly transformative for the purposes of the liberal project.

This precision was hidden for a long time by the pro-Soviet left (especially in the stage of Stalinist control of the Third International), because it was part of its policy of promoting an alliance between the popular sectors and the working class with the national bourgeoisies, for the promotion of the productive forces, a political line in which the Cordoba Reform proved to be an ideal synthesis example; The bourgeois, progressive and communist sectors ended up defending the same proposal for change, which has had an impressive impact on the institutionality.

The discourse of the development of the productive forces was absolutely functional to the need of the local elites to consolidate and modernize the republican (or decolonized) states and develop capitalism on the periphery of the world system.

1918 – 1945: The Latin American University in Two Waters. The long wave of an unfinished university internationalization project

The Córdoba Reform opened a period of internationalization of the university model, based on what was achieved in 1918. In this sense, it is perhaps the only opportunity in which the changes for the sector, which are usually contemplated in university internationalization, had Latin America itself as a place of enunciation.

However, the most combative and critical sectors, especially students and teachers, were never satisfied with the results of the Córdoba Reform and, for decades, they have argued that emancipatory and national-popular projects require a much more radical transformation of the university sector.

This requires an effort of critical analysis of university policies, their management model and relationship with society as a whole. In that sense, what was achieved in Córdoba is part of the path, never the final aspiration.

Let us now look at some regional milestones in the university internationalization of the precepts of the Córdoba Reform. In Argentina, the epicenter of the events of 1918, this made possible structural changes in the statutes of the University of Cordoba, especially in 1921, by explicitly including issues of university autonomy, co-government, and academic freedom. This phenomenon was extended to other universities such as Buenos Aires (1919-1920) and Rosario (1919) where student autonomy and participation were expanded, La Plata and Tucumán (1920s) with demands for curricular changes. Between 1918 and 1945 there was evidence of a transformation of the Argentine university paradigm, in accordance with the principles of Córdoba.

While in Bolivia a student movement was brewing that opened the way to university autonomy (1931) and curricular reforms in the context of the post-war Chaco (1932-1935), in Brazil the impact was more gradual and late due to the precarious university development for the time, since it was only until 1920 when the first university in that country was formalized. fostering an environment of mobilization aligned with the changes of the 1930 process; autonomy would be assumed more clearly from the 1934 Constitution.

In Chile, the Córdoba reform movement arrived in 1920 in the form of student strikes demanding university autonomy and greater academic freedom, which promoted co-government and university extension to popular sectors, while curricular reforms would arrive in the thirties of the twentieth century. In Colombia, in 1924 there was a broad student movement at the National University that led to changes aimed at curricular flexibility, academic freedom, university autonomy, but it would be in the thirties, when the demands of Córdoba made their way more generalized in the form of university modernization, during the government of Alfonso López Pumarejo.

The University of Costa Rica, founded in 1940, which was granted full autonomy in 1949, received the impact of the Córdoba Reform in its conception and design. In Cuba, the creation in 1922 of the University Student Federation (FEU) with the outstanding leadership of José Antonio Mella, linked the principles of Córdoba with anti-imperialism and social commitment. The protests against the regime of Gerardo Machado (1925-1933) facilitated partial reforms at the University of Havana inspired by the Córdoba feat, which included forms of[21] university autonomy and student co-government. The radicalization of the student and faculty movement for reforms in the 1930s would contribute to the revolution of 1933 and the new Constitution of 1940 – Article 52 and related – which enshrined university autonomy.

In Ecuador, on October 6, 1925, the pentavirate that led the Julian revolution issued the General Education Law, in which article 2 recognizes university autonomy with regard to administrative and technical autonomy, preserving for the State to endorse appointments of professors, sanction statutes of universities, maintain a representative within the University Council and the possibility of closing universities. but the process encountered many pitfalls until in 1934 Velasco Ibarra eliminated the Julian rule. However, in 1945, when the New Constitution was promulgated, the recognition of university autonomy was expanded. Modern university autonomy was a conquest of revolution called La Gloriosa – where communist and socialist parties were decisive and ended up handing power to Velasco Ibarra – and the student mobilizations of 1945, which had been preceded by protests in the 30s and early 40s.

For its part, in Guatemala, the ideals of Córdoba made their way fully into the revolution of 1944, achieving autonomy for the University of San Carlos in 1945, especially with regard to the election of authorities.

In Mexico, the Law of Autonomy of the University of Mexico (1929) consolidated the paradigm of Córdoba (1918) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), managing to strengthen its applicability from 1933 with the revolutionary ideals of Cardenismo, contemplating in this law, the possibility of defining its academic structure, administering its resources and academic freedom. independent of the federal government, although in practice its strategic orientation depended on the correlation of social forces – and their ideas – in society and the university.

In Peru, the principles of Córdoba were promoted under the leadership of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torres in 1929, at the University of San Marcos, extending in 1920 to that of Cuzco. In Venezuela, autonomy would experience a stage of opening in 1946 with the democratic exercise of the Governing Junta of which Rómulo Gallegos was a member, but it would be until Decree Law Number 458 of 1958, in which autonomy would be granted to the universities of that country.

In summary, the process of implementation of the Córdoba internationalization paradigm was uneven and combined in the countries of the region, depending on the tensions between conservative and liberal ideas, but essentially on the dynamics of modernization of national states to comply with the international division of labor in the periphery of capitalism typical of the first two industrial revolutions.

In this period, capitalist developmentalism was hybridized with the call to develop the productive forces of Soviet Marxism, which is why it is difficult to obtain studies on university internationalization in that period, elaborated under a non-developmentalist anti-capitalist perspective.

The process of implementing the principles of the Cordoba reform, which we claim as progressive, must be understood within the framework of the development of capitalism and the class struggle in the region, with its lights and shadows. Consequently, the internationalization of the Córdoba paradigm, typical of radical liberalism, sought to situate universities in the logic of the construction of capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, although this process was traversed by resistance and attempts to transcend these limits.

References

Bayer, O. (2003). The anarchist expropriators and other essays. Booket / Planeta. (Original works published in the 1970s–1980s).

Bilbao, L. (1973). The Socialist Party: Its History and Role in Argentina. Latin American Publishing Center (CEAL).

Horowitz, J. (2004). Argentina in the Twentieth Century: Politics, Economy, Society. Editorial Sudamericana.

Lobato, M. Z. (2004). Life in the Factories: Work, Protest, and Politics in a Working-Class Community: Berisso (1904–1970). Prometheus / Edhasa.

Mariátegui, J. C. (1926). The reform of intelligence. Amauta, 2, 15. Lima: Editorial Amauta.

Suriano, J. (2000). The Social Question: Argentina 1870–1943. Siglo XXI Editores.

Zimmermann, E. (1995). The Reformist Liberals: The Social Question in Argentina, 1890–1916. Editorial Sudamericana.

CHAPTER 6: UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONALIZATION AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1945-1961)

Bruno Menezes Santos

Luis Bonilla-Molina

This chapter examines the development of university internationalization since the end of World War II in 1945, highlighting the influence of the United States and the Soviet Union on higher education. In the period from 1945 to 1961, the processes of internationalization are analyzed, considering political, economic and social factors that drove this movement in universities on a global scale.

From critical theory, the first two world wars were the result of the new dynamics of capital concentration, the formation of monopolies and the competition of the most important economic powers for markets and sources of raw materials. The first two industrial revolutions had made it possible to significantly increase production in the capitalist world, which meant the exacerbation of contradictions in the search for markets to place the overproduction of commodities, without which the advanced economies ran the risk of entering into crisis. The Great Depression of 1929 unleashed a wave of mass unemployment, facilitating the rise of fascist regimes as the workers’ movement’s responses to socialism. The end of the Second World War divided the world into the capitalist bloc and Soviet socialism, generating the so-called «cold war» in the following decades.

The most significant features of the post-World War II associated with university internationalization were the institutionalization of multilateralism (UN, UNESCO), the circulation of knowledge and knowledge under bipolar hegemony, the perspective of reconstruction and technical cooperation as the axis of hegemonic consolidation, the contradiction between scientific universalism versus ideological blocs and the promotion of international university networks.

Since its creation, the UN (1945), but especially UNESCO (1945), have been responsible for promoting a common global framework for university internationalization, based on policies for the reconstruction of universities destroyed by war, academic exchange and the links between the work of higher education institutions (HEIs) and peace.

The United States emerged as an academic power, with an evident orientation of becoming a pole of attraction for scientific talent and the expansion of applied science as the epicenter of university activity. The Fulbright scholarships emerged in 1946 – oriented to the cultural-academic – and the Manhattan Project – oriented to the scientific-technological and military area – invigorating the research associated with the military industrial complex.

The Manhattan Project formally began in 1942 for the construction of the first atomic bomb, managing to mobilize hundreds of thousands of academics, absorbing universities (Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Iowa State College, to name just a few), laboratories (Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Hanford Site in Washington, Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, among others) and internationally renowned scientists (Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Lawrence from the USA, Enrico Fermi from Italy, Niels Bohr from Denmark, Albert Einstein and Hans Bethe from Germany, Leo Szilárd, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller from Hungary, among so many).

The Manhattan Project continued to be influential in the postwar model of university internationalization. This is because it showed that university science could be transnational and applied to geopolitics, it was possible to mobilize academic talent globally for the purposes of powerful countries, and it turned the university into a strategic resource at the service of the State. After 1945, the scientists of the Manhattan Project led the creation of international research networks such as Atoms for Peace [22] (1953) – the basis for the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (1957) – promoted by Eisenhower, introducing the idea that there is a strategic science associated with the nuclear, aerospace and computer areas. The Manhattan Project would be expressed in the third industrial revolution in initiatives such as STEM that we will analyze later. Atoms for Peace meant for the United States the experience in the supervised creation of university networks, which would allow monitoring in real time, for purposes of U.S. national security, the scientific and technological advances that occurred in academia.

The Marshall Plan (1948) also contributed to the model of university internationalization that was promoted in this period, including in its application transnational research institutes, as was the case of CERN – Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, today the European Organization for Nuclear Research – in 1954. UNESCO’s initiative, promoted between 1949-1950 to create an international laboratory of high-energy physics in Europe, contributed to the construction of hegemony for the implementation of CERN in Switzerland, with the participation of 12 European countries (today there are more than 20). CERN assumes university internationalization in line with North American objectives, promoting the training of new generations of European scientists in multinational environments, offering a pole of attraction for human talent and reinforcing European unity (today subject to new converging geopolitical tensions between the US, Russia and China). The CERN model was the first major supranational academic scientific organization, which would later serve as inspiration for programs such as Erasmus, which we will analyze in detail in the following chapters.

Scientific and cultural cooperation for Latin America and the Caribbean has been channeled since 1948, largely through the Organization of American States (OAS). The policy of university internationalization promoted by the OAS was influenced, from its beginnings, by the Truman Doctrine and the policies of containment of communism in the region. In the educational field, he sought to align the universities of the region with the North American academic, scientific and political model. To this end, since 1951 the OAS promoted the Inter-American Scholarship Program for study at universities in the United States or in the region that were under its academic influence, the creation of the Inter-American Technical Cooperation Program (PCTI, 1949), the institutionalization of inter-American networks, through the idea of an integrated inter-American university system that would have Washington as its epicenter and the promotion of the values of liberal democracy.

This generated an asymmetrical academic mobility that operated as cultural neo-colonization, the modernization of Latin American universities with schemes of technological dependence on the United States, the imposition of the North-South cooperation model and policies of marginalization of anti-system critical thinking, especially as a firewall to communism.

The slogans of the hegemonic university internationalization in that period were education without borders and education for peace, imposing a model of university internationalization of a geopolitical nature. To this end, UNESCO sponsored the creation in 1950 of the International Association of Universities (IAU), to which was added the expansion of academic cooperation programs in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.

The Soviet Union also promoted its model, through scholarships for students from allied countries and university education focused on science, technology and socialist ideological training. In this case, the motto was socialist cultural and scientific diplomacy, which had as a priority the formation of the intelligentsia in the national liberation movements. Its main instruments were scholarships for foreign students to study at Soviet universities, enrolment in specialized institutes to train in the idea of development of the national productive forces (engineering, basic sciences, medicine, agriculture), the coordination of scientific networks aligned with the principles of proletarian internationalism, academic mobility focused on Eastern European countries. The key universities, institutes and research centers in this strategy were the Moscow State University, Leningrad State University, technical universities (such as the Moscow Energy Institute), the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, the Unified Institute for Nuclear Research, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECOM, etc.). 1949), the International Union of Students (IPA) founded in 1946 in Prague, the World Federation of Democratic Youth (1945) and the creation of the Patricio Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University (1961). The characteristics of the Soviet university internationalization model in this period were state centralization, the ideological and scientific in dialectical unity, concentric cooperation from the regional (Eastern Europe) to the global (Third World) and the institutionalization of academic and student networks.

Let us now look at a couple of emblematic cases of these modalities of university internationalization that disputed hegemony, mainly because after the Second World War, Europe faced a scenario of complete misery and devastation (Judt, 2007). On the other hand, the United States of America (USA) preserved its infrastructure and territories, since the conflict took place far from its borders and its casualties were lower, due to its late entry into the war, after its outbreak in Europe.

In this context, the U.S. found itself in a privileged position to promote international aid actions, integrating initiatives in the areas of education, economics, and diplomacy (Otto, 2021; Hogan, 1987). By 1945, American planners had extremely ambitious and elaborate conceptions of the global order, and many of these visions became reality, reflecting this shift in power in the cultural sphere and in universities (Chomsky, 1996). In this scenario, the European powers were relegated to a secondary position.

According to Altbach and De Wit (2015), higher education, along with cultural and intellectual life, emerged from ideological battles fought. This dynamic reflected not only the strategic importance attached to education and culture, but also the deep interconnectedness between intellectual and political domains during a period of intense ideological polarization. Thus, from the perspective in focus, the educational/international, we affirm that academic internationalization initiatives are implemented with the aim of establishing alliances and influences among allied nations.

In this logic, the educational policies of the United States began to be articulated with the aim of promoting programs that not only offered technical assistance – aimed at the reconstruction and reindustrialization of the countries affected by the Second World War – but also provided training and training of human resources for developing countries located in Europe and other parts of the world (Almeida, 2017).

The United States internationalizes its university model from the national

From this privileged position of the United States, the Fulbright Program is presented as a pioneering process of university internationalization after the Second World War. Created in 1946 at the initiative of Senator J. William Fulbright (Fulbright Brazil, 2021), the program was configured as an action of a national and supranational nature; national for the offer of academic scholarships to encourage travel and maintenance of North Americans; and supranational, distributing scholarships to foreign students and academics, allowing them to travel to the United States (Johnson, 2016).

The objectives of the Fulbright Program were the promotion of academic cooperation aligned with the purposes of the United States on the international stage, the promotion of cultural exchange and mutual learning as a way to build ideological-economic hegemony, the formation of a foreign intellectual elite that could influence their countries while maintaining affinity with the values of the capitalist world, in addition to strengthening the U.S. international projection in the context of the Cold War.

The program aimed to use the internationalization of higher education to sustain cooperation between partner countries through connections and mutual understanding between allied nations through the exchange of scholarships for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) (Otto, 2021; Bettie, 2015; Fulbright Brazil, 2021).

One of the main problems faced by the Fulbright Program was to cover the costs related to management in the United States, especially with regard to the recruitment of American scholars and the reception of foreign scholars. In fact, since the creation of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 (U.S. Education and Information Exchange Act), additional funds, in U.S. dollars, have been provided to cover these costs of managing the Fulbright program in different countries (Table 1).

This process of internationalization after World War II established an exchange agreement with 27 countries, aligned with the geopolitical interests of the United States, covering, between 1947 and 1953, the American, European, African, Oceanic and Asian continents.

TABLE 1 – COUNTRIES THAT SIGNED FULBRIGHT AGREEMENTS WITH THE UNITED STATES BETWEEN 1947-1953 AND 1955-1960

Fulbright Continents (1947 and 1953)	Main countries
Africa	Egypt South Africa
Asia	Burma (now Myanmar) Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) China India Iran Japan Korea Pakistan Philippines Thailand
Europe	Austria Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Italy Netherlands (Netherlands) Norway Sweden Turkey United Kingdom
Oceania	Australia New Zealand
Fulbright Continents (1955-1960)	Main countries
South America	Argentina Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Paraguay Peru Uruguay
Asia	Iraq Israel
Europe	Iceland Ireland Portugal Spain
Africa	United Arab Republic [1]

Source: Prepared by the authors based on Johnson (2021).

Between 1947 and 1953, the Fulbright program pushed for agreements, not only with great powers such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan, but also with smaller nations of strategic importance. During this period, 48.15% of the scholarships went to European countries, 37.04% to Asian countries and 7.41% to Africa and Oceania each. The focus on Europe and Asia reflected the U.S. strategy of expanding its educational and cultural influence in the regions most affected by the war, bolstering its global leadership and promoting international reconstruction.

Between 1955 and 1960, the show’s popularity led to the creation of 15 new commissions, eight of which were in Latin America. In this context, the program expanded globally, allocating 53.33% of the scholarships to Latin America, 26.67% to Europe, 13.33% to Asia, and 6.67% to Africa (Johnson, 2021).

According to Fulbright Brazil (2021), it is estimated that between 1949 and 2016, 389,416 scholarships were awarded worldwide, with 3,694 scholarships for Americans between 1957 and 2023 and 5,237 scholarships for Brazilians between 1957 and 2023.

Although the presence of foreign students was not only linked to the Fulbright program, it is important to note that it was one of the main mechanisms to promote regional student mobility and the internationalization of higher education.

According to Contel and Lima (2008), the North American higher education system has become attractive both for scholarship holders and for those who have chosen to finance their studies with their own resources [2] . There has been an evolution in the attractiveness of this system over time. In the 1954/55 academic year, there were 34,232 foreign students enrolled, out of a total of 2,499,800 enrolled, which represents 1.4% of the total number of students. In 1959/60, the number of foreign students increased to 48,486, while the total enrolment reached 3,402,300, maintaining the same proportion of 1.4%. The average annual change in the number of foreign students during this period was 2.6%. Thus, although there was growth in absolute numbers, the proportional participation of foreign students remained stable.

The impact of the program in the promotion of the model of university internationalization aligned with U.S. interests was expressed in the thousands of students, researchers, and students who mobilized to the U.S. for postgraduate training and the consolidation of the [23] U.S. soft power model, reinforcing the dichotomy that was useful to global governance between capitalism and socialism.

The Soviet Union promoted another model of university internationalization

In the context in which we analyze the processes of university internationalization after the Second World War, we find that there is recognition by the Soviet Union of the importance of intellectuals, students and university institutions as part of efforts to enter the cultural dispute and expand the ranges of support (Altbach and De Wit, 2015).

The Soviet Union directed its efforts to attract students from countries potentially allied with socialism. Student mobility grants were one of the forms of internationalization in the bipolar context of the Cold War. The USSR, although it already offered ideological training to foreign sympathizers before World War II, was one of the last to enter the educational competition.

This internationalized education offer led to international mobility for intellectual training and the return of these immigrants to their countries of origin to occupy positions, some of leadership and others for the development of revolutionary movements (Altbach, Wit, 2015).

Thiam, Murila and Wondji (2010) visualized the internationalization policies in education that were developed from the USSR, ranging from the cooperative and bilateral perspective, which concerned teaching and research, staff training, research centers, as initiatives that aspired to combat the West and colonialism [4] .

In other words, from this perspective, Altbach and De Wit (2015) state that for the USSR, academic collaboration with the Western world was not among its priorities and, in fact, was discouraged. And although there were some contacts at the national level for scientific and cultural agreements, as well as interactions at the institutional level through the academies of sciences, all these initiatives were subject to strict control by the Soviet government.

University internationalization with a focus on skilled migration

Academic scholarships played a central role in the academic internationalization process of the period, promoting the presence of international students from different parts of the world. However, academic mobility was not limited to students. After the war, the United States became the main destination for attracting skilled labor, by deregulating the entry of some categories of skilled workers (Bildirici et al., 2005).

Between 1949 and 1961, 43,000 scientists and engineers, mostly from least developed countries (LDCs), emigrated to the United States. From the 1960s onwards, this flow intensified. In 1950, the participation of technical professionals in the migrant labor force was 16.2%, an increase that reached 17.9% in 1960 (Bildirici et al., 2005).

The influx of teachers did not only come from less developed countries. According to the 1947 report of the Committee for the Study of Recent Immigration from Europe, it was estimated that among the refugees who settled in the United States in the period 1933 and 1945, between 5,322 and 5,469 were classified as «professors and teachers» or «scientists and men of letters» (Verhaegh, 2025).

The processes of university internationalization in this period in the world occur in different ways, as a summary we present the main highlights:

Development of educational programs;
Mobility of foreign students;
Departure of qualified professionals (teachers);
Creation of a university for international cooperation
Academic Scholarship Offer

Between 1945 and 1961, the processes of university internationalization were marked by the development of educational programs aimed at the mobility of foreign students, the departure of qualified professionals —such as teachers and professors— abroad, and the creation of universities focused on international cooperation. This movement was also driven by the wide range of academic scholarships, with a strong North American influence, reflecting strategic interests in educational and cultural expansion in the post-World War II global scenario. It was the time of the rise of the so-called American soft power.

On this basis, we affirm that post-war internationalization is linked to the rise of two great world powers: the United States and the USSR. It is initially given by way of developmentalism, filling the vacuum left by Europe in a situation of economic crisis, but also under influences between the capitalist and socialist blocs. The indirect conflict with the USSR put to the test the policies, organizations and programs pioneered in the university internationalization of capitalism as a world system.

This period can be understood as part of the transition process towards a qualification-oriented education in the market and the industrial sector (Bonilla-Mollina, 2020). It was with the advent of the Third Industrial Revolution (1961) that the appreciation of science acquired vigorous cultural and economic importance for school systems and universities. It appears not only as a practice offered by governments, but also by private companies and organizations in developed and semi-developed countries (Singer, 2001).

According to Singer (2001), the intense multilateral commitment in the field of higher education has driven the proliferation of laboratories and research centers, both in the public and private sectors. Historically, most technological innovations were developed in workshops led by inventors with an internationalized work and funding perspective. However, this process evolved and began to depend on discoveries made by experts linked to universities and large corporations.

From 1960 onwards, a process understood as the massification of university education took place, which reached developing countries. It is during this same period, with the rise of the United States to superpower status, that a transformation in its institutions takes place. As Singer (2001) points out, North American universities become models to imitate due to the massification of higher education and the approach to the market.

The Cuban Revolution: A Milestone That Breaks the Bipolarity of the University Internationalization Model

The Cuban revolution (1959) carried out by the 26th of July Movement, led by Fidel Castro Ruz, Ernesto «Che» Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and others, had a large university student component. The students of the University of Havana and the Revolutionary Directorate—with figures such as José Antonio Echeverría—were a key component in the insurrection against the regime of Fulgencio Batista (1953-1959). That made the university transformation agenda at the epicenter of the Cuban political regime change.

The Cuban revolution implied the first historical break with the hegemonic model of internationalization promoted by the United States in the region. Before the Cuban revolution, most of the academic mobility programs that took place on the island were aligned with the United States through the Fulbrigth Scholarships, OAS programs and bilateral initiatives between Cuba and the United States. The revolution questioned the dependent, colonial and elitist character of the current model of internationalization, breaking with it, producing a turn towards Latin Americanism and Soviet cooperation.

The revolution was building an alternative model fundamentally with respect to the mechanisms of admission, access and permanence in universities, facilitating universal access and the adoption of a perspective associated with the world of work that sought to break with the difference between material and intellectual work. However, the Cuban revolution was not able to break with the positivist tradition of education or with the inherited school system model, despite the fact that some changes took place in this regard.

The guiding principles of the alternative model of the Cuban university were its popular character committed to egalitarian social transformation, the organic link between university-society-revolutionary state, the overcoming of the elitist and professionalizing university and internationalism of solidarity, especially with the third world. To this end, important reforms were initiated in the period 1959-1961, such as the democratization of the University of Havana (1959), the Literacy Campaign (1961), massive and free access and the promotion of an alternative model of university internationalization.

This other form of inter-academic encounter and cooperation gave a special impetus to university anti-imperialism, inspiring the student federations of the continent to confront pro-U.S. educational policies, giving rise to criticisms of dependent development – theories of dependency – that turned the Cuban academy into a pole of attraction against hegemony in that period. The struggles of students, teachers, community and all education workers in the following years would be influenced by the university internationalization promoted by the Cuban revolution, showing that no model goes unnoticed by the peoples, nor without resistance from the university world.

Closing Note

Finally, it is important to know the impact framework of university internationalization in this period, based on the number of existing universities. If we start from what Elsi Jiménez stated in the magazine 141 of ANUIES, we find that in 1945 there were only 75 universities in Latin America and the Caribbean, while by 1961 the number reached 200, that is, a dynamic occurred that tripled the number of HEIs, which shows the importance that the capitalist system gave to it in economic restructuring. political and social in the region.

References

Almeida, A. A. de. (2017). Intersubjectivity in the internationalization of higher education: Perspectives for a humanizing process [Doctoral Thesis, University of Campinas]. Unicamp Repository. https://repositorio.unicamp.br/acervo/detalhe/991826

Altbach, P. G., & de Wit, H. (2015). Internationalization and global tension: Lessons from history. International Higher Education. https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ihe/article/view/8726

Bettie, M. (2015). Ambassadors unaware: The Fulbright Program and American public diplomacy. Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 13, 358–372.

Bildirici, M., et al. (2005). Determinants of human capital theory, growth and brain drain: An econometric analysis for 77 countries. Applied Econometrics and International Development, 5(2).

Chomsky, N. (1997). The Cold War and the university. The New Press.

Contel, F. B., & Lima, M. C. (2008). The internationalization of higher education in the USA: Main characteristics. Internext – Electronic Journal of International Business, 3(2), 162–180.

Djagalov, R. (2005). .edu migrations: Historical mobility in the world educational system. Work & Culture.

Fulbright (Brazil). (2021, April 19). Fulbright in the U.S., Brazil and the World: Who Are We? https://fulbright.org.br/quem-somos/

Hogan, M. J. (1987). The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, L. R. (2016, 23 de março). The Fulbright Program in brief: Structure, history, and funding. https://www.fulbright.fi/serve/fulbright-program-brief-structure-history-and-funding

Judt, T. (2007). Post-war: A history of Europe since 1945 (p. 1109). Objective.

Manoel, J., & Landi, G. (Orgs.). (2019). African Revolution. [S. n.].

Otto, J. M. (2021, 6 de dezembro). The impact of evolving transatlantic relations on international partnerships in higher education. Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education, 13, 164–176.

Singer, P. (2001). The university in the eye of the storm. Estudos Avançados, 15(42).

Thiam, I. D., Mulira, J., & Wondji, C. (2010). Africa and the socialist countries. In A. A. Mazrui (Ed.) & C. Wondji (Assistant Ed.), General History of Africa – VIII: Africa since 1935 (p. 000–000). Unesco Publishing House.

Verhaegh, S. (2025). American philosophy and the intellectual migration: Pragmatism, logical empiricism, phenomenology, critical theory. De Gruyter.

[1] It was a political union between Egypt (Africa) and Syria (Asia), from 1958 to 1961.
[2] To these, Contel and Lima (2008) add the term (student-client), because in addition to the resources generated by payments for the educational services provided, these students also needed to consume housing, food, leisure, transportation, research materials, etc.
[3] According to Djagalov’s (2005) secondary data collection, an estimated 47,000 undergraduate scholarships and 4,300 doctoral scholarships were offered to foreign students.
[4] According to Manoel and Landi (2020), the Soviet Union was a pioneer in the implementation of international policies and affirmative actions aimed at the decolonization of oppressed nationalities, especially in the area of education.

CHAPTER 7: UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONALIZATION AND MULTILATERALISM (1961-1971)

Bruno Menezes Santos

Luis Bonilla-Molina

The period between 1961-1971 was a turning point in the history of world higher education. In the context of the Cold War, university internationalization became a field for the hegemonic dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union, which is why multilateralism, development banks, large global financial institutions and philanthropic foundations emerged with an apparent technical character, as dynamic instances of standardizing educational policies.

In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, the role of international organizations became evident through UNESCO, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Organization of American States (OAS) and the intermediation of regional organizations such as the Union of Universities of Latin America and the Caribbean (UDUAL, 1949).

For their part, the large global financiers[24] – and what would later be called the Deep State – would act fundamentally through development banks and corporate philanthropy, making their impact explicit in this period only from 2015 onwards, promoting, however, their requirements through both the imperialist alliance led by the United States, the United States, the United States, the United States, the United States, the United States, the United States, the United States, the and the international credit banking system. Thus, financing for national development was increasingly conditioned by clauses that guided educational policies with the euphemism of education for employment. However, if we trace the funds of international university educational projects, we will surely find the large financial companies as strategic partners or investors.

Let’s look at the role of some of these instances in the period.

UNESCO

After World War II, in the face of the destruction and horrors of the conflict, education, culture, and communication began to be understood as paths to peace and democratic reconstruction, driven by the great ethical principles of humanity (Bonilla-Molina, 2022). In this scenario, the creation of UNESCO in 1945 represented an international effort to promote these pillars based on respect for diversity (Bonilla-Molina, 2022). Based on this, this text focuses on the organization’s efforts as a supranational institution with influence on international education, from literacy to higher education (Bendrath & Gomes, 2011), with emphasis on the period from 1961 to 1971, highlighting the first movements of university internationalization through multilateral channels.

The fight against illiteracy and functional literacy was one of the first internationalization initiatives implemented and supported by Member States. We cite as examples the following programmes: World Experimental Literacy Programme (1966) ^[1] and later the projects: The Largest Education Project in Latin America and the Caribbean and The Regional Programme for the Eradication of Illiteracy in Africa.

In 1961, UNESCO organized the Addis Ababa Conference, which inspired similar plans in Latin America and the Caribbean, legitimizing its capacity to intervene in higher education.

As part of the promotion of global education at the university level, UNESCO created in 1963 the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO), based on the planning of educational management in the member states of the organization and throughout the world. The first director of IIEP UNESCO would be the American Philip Hall Coombs, who had just been the first Undersecretary of State for Educational Affairs in the Kennedy Administration. In his position in the U.S. state, he had implemented the educational strategies of the Alliance for Progress (PA), cultural diplomacy (soft power) and the approach of education for economic development. In his books The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy: Educational and Cultural Affairs (1964) and Education and Foreign Aid: Ways to Improve United States Foreign Educational Aid (1965), Coombs stressed the importance of working on education and culture as components of American diplomacy, something that affirmed their link with the strategic purposes of the PA. The efforts of the senior official were aimed at modernizing school systems to meet the challenges of the relationship between production and employment and education. In both texts, as well as in his management at IIEP, international assistance appears as a way of shaping educational internationalization.

The founding of IIEP-UNESCO came at a time when countries were focusing their efforts on the development of advanced human resources, that is, regardless of whether they were developed or developing nations, they saw education after the Second World War as a possibility to invest in human capital from all categories of education. but mainly university education:

TABLE 01: Number of students enrolled in higher education and growth rate

Regions	1960	1965	1970
Total World	11 594 714	18 353 726	26 843 947
Africa	135.055	247.098	373.884
Latin America	569.151	914.078	1.614.790
North America	3.778.908	5.890.425	9.140.130
Asia	2.295.797	3.731.289	5.943.943
Europe	4.690.874	7.380.138	9.502.270
Oceania	124.929	190.698	268.930
Developed countries	9.399.190	14.677.813	20.778.381
Developing countries	2.195.524	3.675.913	6.065.566

Source: Prepared by the authors based on the UNESCO report (1975).

Between 1961 and 1971, higher education took off, both in developed and developing countries. However, unemployment among higher education graduates has become a problem in many of them.

Fernández Lamarra in Towards the Convergence of Higher Education Systems in Latin America (2004) specifies some figures that illustrate the growth of universities in the post-war period, as a reflection of the role assigned in the construction of late capitalism in the periphery. Lamarra estimates that in 1950 the approximate number of universities in Latin America and the Caribbean barely reached 75. In 1975 it reached 330, in 1985 it reached 450, then in 1995 it reached 812 (319 public, 493 private), while in 2000 it estimated them in 2000, with an accelerated growth of private companies. These data are consistent with those provided on financial support (loans, grants, non-reimbursable cooperation) by the World Bank, which reached 200 universities[25], mainly to expand enrollment in technical areas.

Philip H. Coombs was concerned about the unbridled growth of enrollment, as he pointed out in his book on the global crisis of education (1968). He highlighted the difficulties of educating a nation and maintaining an educational system updated with the demands of the world market (Coombs, 1968). That is, to address the problem from an economic perspective of cost-benefit, something that would later be assumed with centrality by the World Bank.

It is from the notion of the educational crisis as an international problem for capitalism – associated with the tensions between innovation and tradition and its impact on the mode of production – that UNESCO initiates systematic efforts, seeking to reduce its constituent elements, especially in poor or developing countries (Werthein, Cunha, 2005). During this period, IIEP promoted Educational Development Planning programmes ^[2]. IIEP’s work was regionalized, in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) with the creation of the Buenos Aires Sub-Headquarters (1998), initially directed by Juan Carlos Tedesco, which has been responsible for the training of those responsible for planning in ministries of education and specialized sectoral organizations, which includes multilateralism itself; the director of the Laboratory for the Evaluation of Educational Quality (2005) – attached to the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (OREALC), based in Chile – is a graduate of IIEP Buenos Aires.

The rapid quantitative growth of universities was valued by IIEP as the result of events not always associated with national development and the role of countries in the international division of labor. This chaotic process of growth was evaluated by multilateralism as one of the structural causes of the deterioration in the educational quality of universities. It was also used as a pretext for the first university internationalization plans aimed to align higher education institutions with the standards of the universities of the most advanced countries (UNESCO Press, 1974), in accordance with the logic of standardization and homogenization of capital in this period.

From there, global university planning began to emphasize systems of indexes, classifications, standards, as well as criteria for choosing objectives and evaluating results. In this sense, it included the following: (a) definition of goals and objectives with internal and external participation; (b) development of plans for each unit; (c) integration of these plans, promoting efficiency in the division of labor and resources; (d) creation of general plans, aligned with the educational development of the country and the flows of jobs typical of the production and consumption chains; (e) implementation and revision of existing plans, based on feedback; and (f) evaluation of implementation to measure performance and identify improvements (UNESCO Press, 1974).

The planning method was also exported to teaching-learning processes, enhanced by the psychological metric that would become popular in the early seventies, especially the taxonomy of Bloom et al. (1971). This would seek to assess the evolution of student work, teaching dynamics in faculties, research and extension work, as well as university admission policies and access to employment for graduates, all within the framework of sustained attempts to generate an update of university dynamics to the requirements of the third industrial revolution through the adoption of innovative management approaches. described as optimization efforts (UNESCO Press, 1974).

The guidelines and planning techniques from the multilateral centers of capital permeate universities, seeking the generation of efficient human resources, which are capable of adapting, promoting and contributing to the acceleration of scientific-technological innovation, especially that which positively impacts the production and consumption of goods. In other words, the educational planning of this period is a phase of extension of productivist Fordism to the academic field, in the face of which the dominant system evaluates as a precarious updating of HEIs to the radical change imposed by the third industrial revolution in terms of knowledge generation and management.

In this direction, in the face of systemic initiatives in higher education, Edgar Faure’s report, Learning to Be (1973), emerges as a continuation of Coombs’ approaches, legitimized as a global report, addressing implications for the future of humanity (Werthein, Cunha, 2005; Faure, 1973). The Faure Report, as we will expand on later, postulates the need for a structural reform of school systems (including universities).

In this area, university internationalization, promoted by UNESCO, escalates with the creation of the International Monitoring Commission (IC), to insist on the change and reform of an education that they value as anchored in traditional pedagogy, seeking its evolution towards educational systems compatible with their financial means. In addition, the analysis of the relationships between the number of graduates and the real possibilities of employability is openly proposed, taking care not to exceed the absorption capacity of material and symbolic production, due to the impact that this has on economies. From this functionalist perspective, occupational unemployment appears as a problem of lack of planning policies that generate imbalance in the social body (Faure, 1973). In reality, these were the first indications of post-Fordist policies, the dismantling of the Keynesian Welfare State and the arrival of neoliberal paradigms.

Faure (1973) proposes that the path to this reform passes through the adaptation of global education to the era of the Scientific and Technical Revolution, where the educational system needs to evolve to prepare individuals for the processes of change that surround them, making them capable of participating in the activities of a democratic and technologically advanced society. This implied a questioning of the university and school systems, regarding the validity of their role as epicenters of the democratization of knowledge, since innovation is now presented as delocalized, with a place of enunciation in the manufacturing world and R+D (research for development) centers. This «gap» is intended to be resolved with reform policies under the format of university internationalization.

From this perspective, education, regardless of its level or modality, seeks to be oriented towards continuous preparation for employment throughout life. In addition, the emergence of the transdisciplinary paradigm demands an education not limited to memorization techniques or disciplinary approaches, but a turn towards permanent revisions and updates with multi-situated perspectives and epistemic ruptures. (Faure, 1973).

There is a hybrid between Fordist models of planning and post-Fordist indicators. The demands for quality are evidence of this, exceeding the centrality of schooling, proposing a new model of international citizenship, which is making its way with discourses of multiculturalism and experiences of social reengineering such as the initiatives of Educational Cities, where education is not limited to school, but extends to all aspects of social and economic life. In the narrative of Learning to Be, it is necessary to go beyond formal educational systems (Faure, 1973).

The report also highlights the need to impose instruments of change that respond to the demand for quantitative education. Programmed teaching is considered necessary and indispensable for development, with computers, radio and television being post-mechanical intellectual tools. However, the Faure Report recognizes that as the organization thinks about democratizing access to knowledge through technologies, there is a risk of falling into an excessive generalization, which does not take into account socioeconomic inequalities that condition access, especially in less favored areas or in developing countries.

If social inequality exists, it is expressed in the possibilities of access to educational technologies and, even so, the economistic idea that human beings are in constant development is imposed. In fact, the new demands expressed in the Faure report challenge the traditional role of universities and, consequently, there is a risk of returning to forms of instruction that neutralize the critical pedagogical sense of higher education institutions. Learning to Be would be followed by attempts at updating such as Education Holds a Treasure (1996), Education as a Public Good (2014), The Futures of Education: Learning to Become (2019), but in 60 years it seems that UNESCO has not managed to align universities with the demands that contribute to improving the global rate of profit.

The World Bank

Concerns about the post-war period, global crises, and the new world order led to the creation of international organizations to regulate economic activities and offer technical and financial support. At the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) were founded (Bredrath; Gomes, 2011).

The actions of these institutions were instrumental in consolidating capitalism and resuming economic growth after World War II. The aid granted allowed investments in infrastructure and industrialization, forcing countries to review their social and educational policies due to the high demand for labor in urban centers (Bredrath; Gomes, 2011).

Among the actions of the World Bank, together with the need for countries to review their social and educational policies to develop technical and professional skills for the market, the influence of the institution on educational reforms from the perspective of capitalism stands out.

The World Bank has assumed an increasingly important role in the Higher Education agenda, in what many interpret as an aspiration to take away UNESCO’s monopoly on that function. Mainly because the World Bank introduced massive lending policies for education that began in 1962 (Bonilla-Molina, 2023).

Following Philip H. Coombs’ report, especially his text on the global education crisis in 1968, the World Bank began to adopt a series of measures for the educational development sector (World Bank, 1971).

Coombs (1968), in analyzing the global crisis of education, states that, after the Second World War, education in the world began a process of expansion unprecedented in the history of humanity. UNESCO estimates that in 1966-67 there were about 17 million teachers for 423 million students in primary, secondary and tertiary education (The UNESCO Courier, 1970). Since 1960, it has been observed that the average annual growth of teachers worldwide during that period was estimated at 3.9%. However, student enrolment increased faster than the number of teachers, resulting in uncontrolled increases in the student-teacher ratio, which was approximately 31 pupils per teacher at the primary level and 19 pupils per teacher at the secondary level (The UNESCO Courier, 1970), which ended up acting as an obstacle to the first reform attempts driven by multilateralism.

Coombs (1968) pointed out that after the strong growth of the population due to education, there were three processes that enhanced the crisis of efficiency of school systems: scarcity of resources, inertia of educational systems and inertia of society itself. The facilities, equipment and teaching materials were not enough to meet the requirements of the increase in students, much less their increasingly lagging updating dynamics. The continuous training of teachers seems to have been stuck in the archetypes of the first two industrial revolutions, which translated into lower qualifications and obsolescence of experiences to face the educational challenges of the present and immediate future. The biggest gap at that time, Coombs estimated, was the precarious management capacity to cope with expansion (Coombs, 1968; World Bank, 1971); however, the founder of IIEP seems to overestimate the capacity of planning for transformation, especially in institutional environments subject to the turbulence of the political and the contradictions inherent in local disputes over the accumulation of profits.

Although initially the effects of the definition of a global crisis in education were used to promote change, this generated a counter-movement of resistance that was expressed in evasion and repetition, that is, containment and dispute from tradition in the face of innovation. The result was a lack of control between quality and inclusion, as if they were exclusive of each other. The expansion without proper care for the quality generated was aggravated by the fact that capital policies encouraged the drastic decrease in investment in the social agenda, which impacted the equation between job training and the ability to educate in innovation.

The investments allocated for the expansion of education were affected by the crisis of accumulation that capital experienced in the late sixties and early seventies of the twentieth century. The production circuits, affected by the fall in consumption and overproduction, transferred the problem to the world of work, increasing unemployment, which in turn limited the absorption capacity of university graduates.

The arguments of capital to justify this slowdown in professional employability focused on the out-of-date nature of some of the university professional graduation profiles. This was intended to be presented as evidence of imbalances caused by the university world, as a self-centered system that «was not socially or economically profitable» (Coombs, 1968), when in reality what was happening was a change in the productive paradigm, which demanded the reconfiguration of the tradition of professional education, in such a peremptory period that it broke with the times and schemes of school reform implemented in the previous one hundred and fifty years.

School systems, formed for symbolic and material reproduction, had built repetitive inertia that had been effective, but now they were called upon to understand this dynamic as a problem. Assuming the scientific-technological innovation of the third industrial revolution as the centrality of its teaching work implied assuming constant change as its leitmotif, but this clashed with the entire institutional scaffolding and models of knowledge management, constituted in the long period of the first two industrial revolutions. Gatopardism as an institutional response seemed to be the mimetic form of response to the demands of transformation.

This is where development banks played a prominent role, through development-oriented external debt programs, which in reality sought to bring countries into line with their assigned roles in production chains. The World Bank imposed the practice of lending to countries, conditional on broad programmes that included vocational training, given its relationship to employment. This conditioning sought to operate as a dynamizer of the adjustments and changes required to overcome what the system called the global educational crisis, amply argued by Coombs. Consequently, the World Bank directed investment towards objectives based on corrections and combats against the manifestations of this educational crisis, but also to try to resolve the structural demand for a new university institutionality, the result of a 180-degree turn, which would be oriented to the demands of the third industrial revolution. Let us see in the following table some concrete manifestations of this orientation of the World Bank:

TABLE 01: World Bank solutions on the objectives of correcting imbalances vs. combating the educational crisis

CORRECTION OF IMBALANCES	Reorienting education and training systems	Emphasis on vocational training	Non-formal training for the agricultural and industrial sectors
FIGHTING THE CRISIS	Developing accessible forms of education for rural development	Improve internal efficiency and productivity	Helping governments plan and monitor school and university systems

Source: Prepared by the author based on the World Bank (1971).

The World Bank (1971) proposed to reorient education by focusing on vocational education and non-formal training in agriculture, the supply of raw materials, and the improvement of industry. The measures sought to develop accessible education for rural areas – to reduce the differences in consumption, scale of production and sociability between the countryside and the city – to improve efficiency – between costs and results, with a special chapter on education for employment and vocational – and productivity – adaptation to the post-Fordist management schemes that were making their way along with technological innovation. seeking to find new sources of financing – a sui generis privatization model based on private investment that imposed concrete directions for the work of higher education institutions – and to help governments plan and monitor what education systems did.

With the aim of making education less expensive through non-formal training – in the form of university extension – the World Bank prioritized the search for more accessible educational methods that did not follow the traditional path. In addition, it promoted efficiency in content – teaching what was useful for employability and productivity – through curricular reforms and the growing use of emerging educational technologies, which at that time were expressed in radio – which had had an evolution and growing coverage in recent decades – television, programmed learning – opening the way to computational thinking in educational planning, especially through the so-called logical framework [26]and teaching materials. This internationalization became more evident and direct in the first levels of education, but progressively impacted higher education through methodological schemes, didactic models, requirements for accreditation, institutional evaluations, remuneration systems and classifications.

The World Bank (1971), when proposing guidelines for granting loans aimed at the development of human resources to obtain efficient and balanced economic returns, was molding the styles, protocols and schemes of university planning. In addition, in the 1970s, by conditioning funding on educational changes that met the demands of the third industrial revolution, it promoted the rise of the so-called outsourced research agendas, especially through national science promotion agencies, ministries of education and local development corporations, making universities progressively align with the growth objectives of the world system dominant.

The World Bank began to guide global education with structured and ideological proposals, ranging from macro policies to the classroom (Torres et al, 1996). This perspective of «programmed correction» was evidenced in the growing policy of loans for development, which increasingly covered more territories:

TABLE 02: Educational loans by region (1971)

Region	Number of loans	Percentage of total
Africa (including North Africa)	27	44%
Latin America	15	22%
Asia	12	25%
Europe	3	9%
Total	57	100%

Source: Prepared by the authors based on the World Bank (1971).

It was under this logic that in 1971 the World Bank Group approved 57 educational loans in 42 countries, for a total of US$ 431 million. Africa, including North Africa, received 27 loans (44 per cent of the total); Latin America, 15 loans (22%); Asia, 12 loans (25%); and Europe, 3 loans (9%) (WB, 1971).

TABLE 03: Percentage of World Bank Financing by Category

Category	Percentage of Funding
Secondary education	72%
Colleges and Postsecondary Education	23%
Adult training	4%
Primary education	1%
Total	100%

Source: Prepared by the authors, based on the World Bank (1971).

About 72% of World Bank funding went to secondary education, while 23% went to universities and post-secondary education, 4% to adult training to meet the demands of a diversified labour market, and just over 1% went to primary education (World Bank, 1971). This was imposing a model of university internationalization patented by the World Bank. This makes sense, in the transitional perspective of trying to produce a paradigm shift in secondary education – where institutional autonomy is more limited – that would allow for further promotion of changes in HEIs due to the dynamic thrust of new enrollments. However, what happened was a systemic bottleneck, a product of the epistemic gap[27], showing that there was an overall problem in the school system. It can be said that the sum of the financing of secondary and tertiary education, together, intended to contribute to the model of university internationalization that capital required at that historical moment.

In fact, at the beginning of that decade, much of the world received an ideological «package» from the World Bank, whose policies and operations favored specific areas such as technical, agricultural, and teacher training, and the improvement of general secondary education (Torres et al, 1996; World Bank, 1971) that sought to modify teaching methods, curriculum, and graduation profiles. This was in line with the requirements, both for intermediate technical labor and for university professional labor.

For the World Bank, the university internationalization of this period, as we will see in the next chapters, aimed at standardization, homogenization and academic productivism, which is why the period of the sixties and seventies was also that of the creation of the transnational institutional infrastructure for the reorientation of the work of higher education institutions with the orientation, support and accompaniment of development banks.

Although global financial institutions operated in that period to a large extent – in educational matters – through the World Bank, this did not limit them from promoting the expansion of business philanthropy as another way of influencing the promotion of the university internationalization model. Let’s look at an example of this.

Rockefeller Foundation

The Rockefeller Foundation acted as an agent of international cooperation in the process of transferring material resources to developed and developing countries (Faria, Costa, 2016). Founded at the beginning of the twentieth century, in 1913, it was based on the model of action of the «great philanthropy», attracting resources for the areas of natural sciences, public health and higher education. Action in these fields was based on the assumptions of scientific, social and modern society development (Faria, Costa, 2016; Arnove, 1982).

Although before World War II, the institution allocated resources with greater emphasis to medicine, during the 1920s and 1930s, resources were directed to the control of infectious diseases; after that, -and of course, from the period in which we want to observe its greatest activity-, during the post-war period, the Rockefeller Institute undertook support for the development of secondary education, physical and biological sciences and agriculture (Cueto, 1994; Marinho, 2001, Apud Faria, Costa, 2016). From the sixties onwards his interest in university education was very important.

From 1961-1962, the Rockefller Foundation (RF) redefined its policies in the sector, moving from scholarships and individual support to a comprehensive university development program -University Development Program (UPD)- that would be the antecedent of its Education for Development (EFD). The shift consisted of investing to strengthen institutions as a whole, contributing to the construction of networks of regional centers of excellence. The 1962 Annual Report of the FR pointed out that the mass graduation of students without adequate updating with respect to the requirements of production and the market, had generated an «adverse educational result» that had to be overcome with the promotion of knowledge management for excellence (Rockefeller Foundation, 1962). The axes of the program were the training for strong and up-to-date university leadership, promotion of openness to change and the generation of experiences with regional projection, not only local, that is, working for capitalist development in its periphery.

Among the universities that received support were the University of Chile, the University of Valle (Colombia), the University College of Nigeria, the University College of East Africa (Uganda) and the University of the Philippines (Goss, 2010). The mechanisms of action were multi-year plans (in coordination with governments and rectorates), strengthening of libraries and laboratories, hiring through the modality of visiting staff (while local staff were qualified), incentives for curricular reforms that would be linked to the updating of innovation and the new learning paradigm) and support for the creation of interdisciplinary centers (RF, pp.110-118). In general, the RF was oriented to train «high-level Manpower» in local universities as a mechanism to contain the brain drain that obstructed the capitalist development of nations, strengthening local postgraduate systems, complemented by short stays abroad. (RF, 1962).

The Rockefeller Foundation opted for an inward university internationalization (Goss, 2010; RF, 1962), with local standards and strengthening university-nodes that would become centers of reference, fundamentally with the purpose of strengthening the context conditions for the growth of their investments in these territories.

The FR did not financially support UNESCO during this period, something that, as we will see later, the Ford Foundation did, especially for the development of the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP).

At the international level, the foundation has consolidated its large-scale philanthropy by underpinning the model of academic and student mobility that contributes to the neoliberal evaluation culture (university accreditation, rankings, bibliometrics, recognition of degrees) through university internationalization hegemonic, like an umbrella that contains it. According to Faria and Costa (2016), between 1917 and 1962, 1,800 scholarships were awarded to Latin American researchers, investing mainly in areas such as medical sciences and public health.

TABLE 04: Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships in Major Countries (1917 and 1962)

COUNTRY	NUMBER OF BAGS	PERCENTAGE
BRAZIL	443	31,49%
MEXICO	359	25,52%
COLOMBIA	264	18,76%
CHILE	214	15,21%
ARGENTINA	127	9.03%
TOTAL	1407	100%

Source: Authors’ elaboration based on Faria and Costa (2016).

As can be seen, the main countries granting scholarships for academic exchange were Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina. During this period, the 1,407 scholarships represent approximately 78.17% of the total of 1,800 scholarships awarded between 1917 and 1962.

Between the 1920s and 1960s, the Rockefeller Foundation worked on building networks of scientific institutions. In this way, a scientific model began to spread and consolidate in the process of institutionalizing science on a global scale and imprinting its pedagogical orientation on institutions (Faria, Costa, 2016).

However, the pedagogical orientation of the Foundation was, between 1950 and 1980, aligned with conservative agendas, promoting centers and programs of population control and planning, such as the Population Council.

The Population Council, founded in 1952 — sister to the Rockefeler Foundation — began operating on a larger scale in the 1960s and 1970s. Invest in international research on factors related to population growth, in biomedicine, public health, social sciences, and in the training of specialists in the area of reproduction (Faria, Costa, 2016; Spero, 2010).

The academic internationalization promoted by private foundations, although it contributed to the expansion of international cooperation in the field of science policy, did not occur in an impartial manner (Rocha, 2017).

These foundations acted in their own interests and for the benefit of the ruling class, which resulted in the promotion of liberal democracies and the implementation of a higher education plan aligned with a specific scientific ideology, with an impact on university internationalization policies.

This scenario highlights how academic internationalization was instrumentalized to perpetuate a specific ideological alignment, molding science in universities according to particular and hegemonic interests.

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation was created in 1936 in Michigan, Detroit, United States, by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, with the aim of supporting local causes of public health, social welfare, community projects and education (Nielsen, 1972; Arnove, 1980). After the deaths of Edsel Ford (1943) and Henry Ford (1947) it became the richest philanthropic organization in the world at the time, benefiting from a significant number of shares in the Ford Motor Company.

As suggested by the Gaither Report (1949) – prepared by H. Rowan for its reorganization – it ceased to be an organization for local works, to become an institution of national and international scope (Gaither, 1949; Parmar, 2012). Clearly, from the 1950s onwards, the Ford Foundation aligned itself with the objectives of the United States in the framework of the Cold War, especially in terms of support for the United Nations (development programs), financing of the social sciences (especially in economics, political science and sociology), communication programs (freedom of the press) and initiatives in education and health in the Third World (Arnove, 1980; Berman, 1983).

In 1956 he created the International Training and Research Program (ITRP) with the purpose of training professionals in the South, aligned with the principles of the West, which would allow him to work in coordination with the U.S. Department of State, the World Bank and the different UN agencies, starting in the 60s (Parmar, 2012; Nielsen, 1972). The main purposes of the ITRP were postgraduate training (young academics and professionals), support for applied research programs (education, social sciences, agriculture, health, and public administration), institutional strengthening of universities (international standards and links with North American academia), and the creation of transnational networks of academics (Nielsen, 1972; Gilman, 2007).

Between 1956 and 1971, the ITRP focused especially on actions such as the granting of scholarships and fellowships, return programs (the grants required the scholarship holders to return to their countries), financing for the creation of postgraduate courses and university research centers in the countries of the South, as well as on the convergence with UNESCO and the World Bank, especially for the training of the government bureaucracy in educational planning and the one in charge of development cooperation programmes in the multilateral system (Coombs, 1968; Jones, 1992). One of the initiatives carried out in partnership with UNESCO, in which significant funds were allocated, were comparative studies in higher education and university planning as a tool for modernization (Mundy, 2006), something that would build the institutional and supranational architecture that would open the doors to the entire neoliberal evaluative culture, a topic that we will address extensively in the following chapters.

In 1963, he financed, together with the World Bank and European governments, the creation of UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) (Jones, 1992; Cooms, 1968), as well as decades later – starting in 1999 – would finance the first cohorts of the Specialization Courses in Educational Policy Formulation, which would be developed by the IIEP Sub-headquarters in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to train those responsible for educational planning and the university sector in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The purpose of the Ford Foundation to train high-level university manpower would allow it to support between 1961-1971 the internationalization of universities aimed at producing the transformations of HEIs in accordance with the demands of the third industrial revolution, having a special chapter on the promotion of the faculties of social sciences as a factor of institutional modernization (Arnove, 1980; Gilman, 2007). In this orientation, the Ford Foundation contributed to the formation of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO)[28] and other initiatives for the modernization of higher education (Arnove, 1980; Gilman, 2007).

Kellogg Foundation

Created in 1930 in Beatle Creek, Michigan, USA, by Will Keith Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg company. Like the Ford Foundation, it initially worked on health, education, and child welfare programs in environments close to the company. In the 1940s and 1950s, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) expanded its work throughout the United States, Latin America, and other regions, with more focused approaches to education for rural development and public health (Curti, 1963; WKKF, 1991).

Since the 60s, the Kellogg Foundation developed a program to support universities in Latin America that were interested in creating higher institutes for agricultural education and rural extension, which had a presence in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Central America (Williams, 1968; Arnove, 1980).

The model of university internationalization promoted by Kellogg differed from the practices of Ford and Rockefeller – sending students abroad – because it prioritized the strengthening of local university programs through various schemes of international cooperation, promoting agricultural extension – taking the development model to the countryside – and the creation of hemispheric networks that had the development of late capitalism in rural areas as their axis. To this end, it financed local graduate programs that favored community leadership and extension as an engine of development (Williams, 1968; WKKF, 1991).

The Kellogg Foundation worked to turn the university into an agent of rural community development, through university-community integration programs, which implied promoting organizational structures of HEIs and models of flexible university management, oriented to action for change, focused on useful knowledge for their -capitalist- development. The aim was to promote the transfer of innovation and technology from the third industrial revolution to agricultural productivism and social reengineering, in the latter aspect in terms of progressive incorporation into the paradigms of liberal democracy, consumption and success.

Although it coincided with UNESCO in the community education and rural development programs of the period 1961-1971, the Kellogg Foundation favored bilateral alliances with universities and governments, although this did not limit the shared development of specific projects with the multilateral organization (Mundy, 2006).

This variant in the impulse of university internationalization did not differ from the axis promoted by the capitalist center, but implied an entry and emphasis determined by its own corporate interests. Kellogg’s strategy was complementary to that of Ford and Rockefeller, particularly in its strategic orientation, which sought to contribute to the transformation of productivity, marketing, consumption and governance schemes based on the scientific-technological and management innovation of the third industrial revolution.

Philanthropy as a global actor

The three cases developed – Rockefeller, Ford and Kellogg – were – and are – the tip of the iceberg of a wave of business intervention in university internationalization. This is shown by the policies of the Carnegie Corporation and Teagle Foundation (USA), Volkswagen Stiftung (Germany), Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal), Wellcome Trust, Nuffield Foundation and Leverhulme Trust (United Kingdom), to name only those that had the greatest funding for university internationalization during this period.

They had in common the subsidization of area studies, projects and networks, the creation of institutes -such as Calouste that contributed to the creation of the Gulbenkian Institute of Science in 1961-, the promotion of international chairs, support for schools and updating programs, as well as fieldwork for applied research.

Business philanthropy acted in that period, in the context of the Cold War, with a great ideological component, but also pragmatic, especially in the expansion of markets, optimization of investment, productivism and accumulation of profits. Confidence in the potential of knowledge in higher education for the continuous improvement of the mode of production was expressed in the standardizing emphasis that its approaches to university internationalization were beginning to have.

University policies at the international level

In addition to the multilateral influence and its alliance with corporate philanthropy in higher education, some university policies that influenced universities around the world at the international/bilateral level in that period are presented, especially creating the paradigmatic conditions for the promotion of university reforms, restructurings and mobility programs.

The first program worth noting is the Fulbright Program, although created in 1946, it significantly expanded its scope in the 1960s, with the aim of promoting educational and cultural exchanges between the United States and various countries.

Continuing on the theme of academic scholarships and the purpose of training elites capable of modernizing the African continent, we added the African Scholarship Program in American Universities (ASPAU), which allowed the mobility of almost 1,600 Africans for their academic training between 1961 and 1971 (Tarradelas, 2020).

The creation of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie in 1961 also aimed to provide development aid, through knowledge and understanding. It acted – and continues to do so – as a worldwide network (association) of higher education institutions that funds research in the French language, and its main mission is to think globally about scientific Francophonie. That is, it also operates as a mechanism of cultural neocolonization, a variant of North American soft power.

Another bilateral agreement that is worth highlighting is the one signed in the 1960s, based on the close relationship between the U.S. and Brazil, which in turn made possible agreements between the Ministry of Education (MEC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), recognized as the MEC-USAID Agreements. According to Vecchia and Ferreira (2020), MEC-USAID influenced the Brazilian University Reform approved by Law No. 5,540/1968, which established rules for the organization and operation of higher education. The result of these implementations showed tendencies to changes in importance, expressed today in the adoption of the departmental and credit regime in the disciplines.

Resistance

The period between 1961-1971 was prolific in terms of student and faculty resistance, of all education workers and communities for another possible university, which, although they did not openly raise it, clashed with the hegemonic course of university internationalization imposed by the capitalist center. The Cuban revolution, the movement of the new left, the work of intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse (critique of one-dimensional society) and Jean Paul Sartre (existentialism), the decolonial and national liberation movements, the Vietnam War and the expansion of enrollment in HEIs acted as dynamizers of this maelstrom of protests and alternative proposals.

In America, the Berkeley free speech movement (1964), in the United States, stands out, which questioned the signing of university services that favored corporate interests, which were promoted by the U.S. State Department; in Columbia (1968) racist occupation and research for military purposes generated a significant ethnic and representational studies movement, while in San Francisco demands for ethnic studies emerged that challenged traditional models of teaching. At Kent State (1970), strong denunciations arose about university complicity with the Vietnam War, while at Howard and City College black students demanded curricula based on African-American experiences.

In Mexico, students from the UNAM and the IPN demanded academic freedom and a greater commitment from the university to overcoming economic inequalities, highlighting the anti-imperialist role of the National Strike Council, facts that received a brutal government response expressed in the Tlateloco massacre. In Colombia, between 1968-1971, students staged multiple protests against the interference of foreign organizations such as the Ford Foundation, while the movement for the minimum program demanded innovative models of co-government, while in Brazil (1968) the protests against the military dictatorship linked demands for cheap food with aspirations for educational reforms. The Caribbean itself experienced multiple student protests, including the one in Jamaica against hegemonic ideologies at the University of the West Indies.

The student movement in Africa and Asia also had a notable belligerence in this period. In Japan (1968) the denunciations of the Vietnam War were accompanied by questioning hierarchical university structures, while in Pakistan (1968-1969) the student movement against the dictatorship of Ayub Khan demanded educational reforms, while in South Africa there were protests against the Bantu Law of 1953 that contemplated the unequal education of Apartheid.

In Europe, in May 1968 there was a broad and radical student movement that began in the universities of Paris, Nanterre and the Sorbonne, which were combined with factory occupations, a movement in which young people questioned the hegemonic model of learning and teaching, the university as a factory of knowledge on an international scale, demanding curricular changes, greater student participation in co-governance and against sexist segregation in residences. This was combined with protests in Italy (1967-1969) at the Politecnico di Milano and the Universities of Rome and Milan over the authoritarian and dogmatic examination system, denouncing the university as part of the capitalist system and its hierarchical institutional structures.

In West Germany (1965-1969) protests led by the German Socialist Student Union were frequent, especially at the Free University of Berlin that questioned the hierarchical decision-making structure, the subordination of the university to the interests of corporations and even Nazi lags in the style of academic management, demanding a model of critical knowledge. non-consumerist. In the United Kingdom (1967-1970) there were occupations, especially the one that occurred at the London School of Economics against parental control of students, racism, authoritarian management and the subordination of the institution to corporate interests, while complaints arose about the espionage of students in Warwick and Birmingham. In Spain (1968-1971), students in Madrid, despite the Franco dictatorship still in existence, protested against the rigid and outdated curriculum, and the politicization of the rectors with respect to the regime.

The wave of student protests reached Eastern Europe, especially in Czechoslovakia in the so-called Spring of 1968 that challenged the authoritarian post-Stalinist control of knowledge; in Yugoslavia (1969) demanding free expression and against inequalities in socialism itself; Poland (1968) was also the scene of protests against cultural censorship and for academic freedom.

In other words, university internationalization met with resistance everywhere. However, despite the radicalism of the student movement of the time, there was no clear perception that the problem was beyond the contents and styles of work, so the solution could not be subordinated to curricular reforms and inclusive openness in management, but a structural change in the conception and structure of the university was needed. with the epochal paradox that this was a necessity both for the capitalism of the third industrial revolution and for any anti-capitalist model.

To conclude

University internationalization between 1961 and 1971 began to consolidate through bilateral and multilateral policies that directly influenced the structure and objectives of higher education in several countries. Various programs, applied by the United States, UNESCO, philanthropy and bilateral in nature, stood out for promoting academic mobility and the training of intellectual elites, especially in developing countries, but also for their efforts to articulate scientific networks around linguistic and cultural identities that operated as practices of cultural-scientific neo-dependence and cultural-economic neocolonization.

In the Latin American context, the MEC-USAID Agreements show how strategic alliances shaped structural university reforms. These actions, aimed at both cooperation and ideological influence, demonstrate how university internationalization was simultaneously an instrument for capitalist development and for the consolidation of geopolitical hegemony.

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^[1]The average cost of a new literacy course was US$ 32. Of which US$10 was funded by the United Nations under the World Experimental Literacy Programme (UNDP/UNESCO).

^[2] The project collected data through a survey and case studies from international universities on how to plan for improving graduates’ access to university and employment, the teaching profession and research work, among other areas. Using data from the case studies, it offered practical insights on how to plan for the creation of new universities. See more at UNESCO (2023). Available in: < https://www.iiep.unesco.org/en/how-six-decades-solid-research-added-value-higher-education-policy-14698> ;.

CHAPTER 8: THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE NEOLIBERAL EVALUATIVE CULTURE (1972 – 1980)

Luis Bonilla-Molina

The dynamics of university internationalization, being a historical continuum, are intertwined and intertwined at different times; it is Latin America, a motley society (Zavaleta, 1986). In the case of neoliberal university internationalization, although its peak is from the seventies of the twentieth century, it is impossible to understand it without linking it to events and processes that preceded it, especially at the end of the fifties and in the whole of the sixties, as well as in its continuity during the neoliberal aegis since the eighties. Therefore, to what has been worked on in previous chapters we will add other elements and entries on the same topic, with the purpose of delving into the explanations of the subject.

At this time, it was insufficient to say that it was necessary to do the opposite of what capitalism proposed in the universities in order to have an alternative proposal, because in this period it was evident that an important part of the educational bureaucracy was unable to understand the central purpose of the demands of the capitalist center, applying half-hearted strategies. in a partial or distorted way, avoiding moving towards a paradigmatic rupture, because this implied turbulence in institutional power relations. The bureaucracy tried to generate changes without breaking the corporate frameworks built in the first two industrial revolutions, which truncated the strategic objectives that the capitalist center had set for the HEIs since the third industrial revolution. This created the paradox that what was transcendent for capital often circulated on the margins, seeming anti-system.

In addition, the semantic keys of the alternative were assaulted, which made the horizon of transformation more diffuse; critical thinking, educational revolution, learning by doing, contextualized education, formative relevance, community work, among other statements that gave identity to the resistances began to be defined in a different way. The market «invaded» the critical field and re-semantized it, using denominations that were previously anti-system for its own purposes, using the terms of radical transformation with another sense and directionality, making the distinction of strategic orientations more complex.

In the following lines we will show these problems and the courses of educational change that the capitalist mode of production opened up in this period for university internationalization, as systemic and interconnected relations, especially from the third industrial revolution onwards.

PART ONE: institutional evaluation culture, political operation for the new model of university internationalization

Third Industrial Revolution and University Internationalization

The third industrial revolution was part of the important changes that occurred in the routines of the capitalist mode of production in the last decades of the twentieth century. The accumulation crisis, the impact of the escalation of oil prices in the seventies, the decline of Fordism, the emergence of post-Fordist business management models (Total Quality Management, Benchmarking, Just in Time, among others), neoliberal globalization, the external debt crisis and financialization of the economy, the hegemonic cultural globalization, the beginning of a regressive cycle – which continues to the present – in labor and social security conquests as part of the process of dismantling the Keynesian Welfare State, are just some of the elements of the context that preceded the new phase of university internationalization.

The Nixon-Kissinger talks with Mao-Deng that opened the way for the return to capitalism in Communist China, were complemented by the bureaucratic degradation in the Soviet economy – and society as a whole – until its implosion years later. Education could not be left untouched by changes of this magnitude.

The school systems and universities that we know have been highly influenced by the requirements of capital, within the framework of the first two industrial revolutions. Although the university as an institution predates the rise of industrial capitalism, the capitalist mode of production shaped its institutionality, processes and dynamics, starting with the first industrial revolution.

This is evidenced by the axes of teaching and learning, based on the appropriation and dissemination of the scientific method in all areas, the transition from religious dogmatism to secularism, the knowledge organized for teaching in a scalar way from the simple to the complex, its curricular structure by specialties, the disciplinary approaches to learning, scientific innovation that interacted with the technological tradition expressed in long cycles of novelties, student graduation profiles as a common thread of vocational training, among other elements, which set the tone for higher education within the framework of the first two industrial revolutions.

In the interstice, the university was rebuked by capital so that it would have a much greater impact on the development of the productive forces, social order and governance, while from the popular sectors the demand was for a greater commitment to social justice, which led – for these different reasons – to incorporate extension to the teaching and research work carried out by the HEIs. As we tried to explain in the chapter dedicated to the Córdoba Reform, university extension became one of those demands for consensus, between the logic of capital – aimed at greater incorporation of HEIs into development – and citizen aspirations – a university committed to social justice – in the interstices of the contradictions between democracy and surplus value. accumulation and social justice, democracy and the State at the service of the bourgeoisie.

In this context of systemic mobility, the advent of the third industrial revolution occurs. Ernest Mandel (2023) clearly defines the distinctive features of the third industrial revolution, which must be valued in the long transition from manually made machines, to machines that make machines, passing through machines that produce raw materials and food, until reaching – in the present – machines that build ideas and intend to build themselves in a regime of truth about the human.

For Mandel, the third industrial revolution is characterized by:

tendency to displace living labor by dead labor;
progressive transfer of the workforce dedicated to the direct production of goods to tasks of management and supervision of increasingly automated production;
transfer of the costs of incorporating automated machinery into the final product, which generates a colossal growth in value and increased applicability of cybernetically controlled automatic machinery aggregates (p. 232);
change in the appropriate proportions of surplus value, generated in the same firm and in other firms involved in the production chain;
an increase in production costs in terms of the purchase of machinery and means of circulation, while investment in infrastructure construction declines;
reduction of periods of commodity production and stock circulation (post-Fordism);
a tendency to increase research for production and the beginning of a decline in research in other areas;
shorter periods of fixed capital, especially machinery, as well as the reduction of the paradigm of free competition to that of production scheduling;
an increase in constant capital in the average value of the commodity, which implies a greater organic composition of capital;
intensification of contradictions in the capitalist mode of production, especially between the growing socialization of labor and private appropriation, use value and exchange value, the accumulation of capital and its valuation, in the latter case opening the way to the financialization of the economy.

In education, from the logic of capital, this was expressed in:

demands for new professional and labor training, with more versatile graduate profiles;
incorporation into professional and labor training for the management of processes, entrepreneurship, self-management of life, emotional intelligence, resilience, empathy that would break with the tradition of conflict to settle relations between employers and workers. This process took place slowly and not simultaneously, in the six decades following the arrival of the third industrial revolution;
The development of classification and competence systems (school and university) that would allow HEIs to be reoriented towards the new objectives and purposes demanded by capitalism in this period;
The university as a company that sells services as a mechanism to attract private investment to public education, allowing the promotion of various forms of commodification and privatization of education;
The idea of education as a common good, a discourse that from capital seeks to transfer the costs of the changes underway to citizens;
The rise of the model of good school and university practices (educational benchmarking) that were opening the way to university internationalization in a homogeneous way, especially in the way of understanding the work of higher education institutions;
The conversion of the liberal paradigm of the human right to education throughout life into a right for employability;
The development of schemes for transferring the costs of vocational training to students and families (interest-bearing loans, educational co-management), as a way of expanding the logic of the market in education;
Promotion of research, teaching and extension schemes, focused on «utility» for the economy, governance and consumption. This implied reducing or eliminating in the curricula what was not directly linked to production, employment, purchase of goods, social peace and development centered on capitalist accumulation. This would end up crystallizing with the STEM paradigm;
need to overcome the disciplinary paradigm through transdisciplinarity and complex thinking. The production schemes of the era of computing, robotics and the virtual-digital demanded inter, multi and transdisciplinary ways of building knowledge, innovation, merchandise and profit;
systematic effort to overcome the rigid curricular of teaching that limited the possibilities of incorporating the new in real time and to open the stage of flexible and open curricularization: continuous curricular development as an adaptation and interface between innovation and reproduction of knowledge. This break with the tradition of school systems and universities, with respect to what happened in the first two industrial revolutions, has been understood in a very precarious way by the educational bureaucracies themselves ideologically related to the logic of capital, so that many reforms continue to focus on curricular reforms under the format of a prescribed and closed curriculum;
emergence of the STEM paradigm[29], which focuses teaching work on what must be done to couple teaching-learning to the increasingly short cycles of scientific-technological innovation linked to the needs of the capitalist mode of production;
overcoming the Taylorist and Fordist paradigms in university school management, promoting the post-Fordist paradigm of quality in education;
The imposition of the neoliberal evaluative culture as an operation of university internationalization to verify the advances in the «updating» of higher education with respect to what the capitalist mode of production demands. The trilogy quality of education, university internationalization and neoliberal institutional evaluative culture summarize the orientation of the period;
redefinition of professional exit profiles , now focusing on competencies;
an approved framework of school and university competences on a global scale to guide vocational training within the framework of university internationalisation;
standardization of educational change policies, through institutional operations and public policies that are elaborated from the statements of multilateralism, Development Banks, business philanthropy and think tanks,[30] aligning the strategy -neoliberal institutional evaluative culture- of university internationalization (standardization, serial, refereed and indexed systems of publications, university accreditation, academic rankings, micro-accreditation, degree recognition agreements, among others);
The promotion of regional, subregional and global agreements for the recognition of studies, degrees and training that make it possible to establish standards of knowledge, competence, skills and employability;
relaunch of policies of qualified student and academic mobility, for the «productive rationalization» of the «brain drain» – periphery to the capitalist center – and the more efficient flow of the new paradigms of knowledge and innovation, from the epicenters of generation to where they are needed in the international division of labor typical of the third industrial revolution;
In this strategy, the national research, science and technology bodies, with their appropriation of the national research agendas, by containing co-financing mechanisms, mark the orientation of the activity in the HEIs;
The adaptation of the processes of admission, permanence, academic promotion, retirement, and salary assignments in universities to the neoliberal evaluation culture – bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, mobility, and recognition of studies – play a central role in the attempts to adapt the institutional framework to the requirements of the third industrial revolution.

These demands, which seemed abstract, demanded an educational translation in the territories and institutions. The academy and intellectuals aligned with the system were summoned to generate «confirmatory» research, which would legitimize the change underway. The cultural industrial complex played a central role in the communicational strategy of implementation and consolidation, using the polysemic terms of educational crisis and quality as multipurpose wild cards.

Homogenization and standardization in the new stage of university internationalization

Standardization is the process by which criteria and parameters are established, which can be measured and comparable at a global level, of input, internal dynamics and output, for the processes of teaching and learning, research and innovation, extension and social change.

On the other hand, homogenization refers to the institutional dynamics and rituals, through which these standards are made to converge and interact. This seeks to achieve the purposes defined in the strategy aligned with the interests and demands of the capitalist center for HEIs. Homogenization is usually accompanied by transitional practices, which strengthen or build correlations of forces that guarantee the viability of change.

The central educational strategy for higher education institutions (HEIs) in the current period of capitalism (neoliberal globalization and cultural globalization) is university internationalization, which seeks to achieve total synchrony between the dynamics of teaching, research, university extension and intellectual production, with the requirements of the capitalist mode of production in the third industrial revolution (and which continues in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution).

The operation that makes the strategy viable is the neoliberal evaluative culture. Over the course of six decades, this has been taking shape with productivism in the area of publications (bibliometrics), standards and indicators for institutional accreditation, international classifications (rankings), the dynamics of academic and student mobility that contribute to the above markers and international agreements for the recognition of studies, degrees and training.

University autonomy

This occurs in the midst of emerging challenges for university autonomy. The paradigm of university autonomy was expressed in correlations of forces in academic life, from which change, in order to make its way, had not only to dialogue but also to build minimum consensuses that would allow achieving a political center, agreement or decision of the majorities within the HEIs. This implied the creation of forms and mechanisms of dialogue with society as a whole, especially with the political, economic, religious and communicational powers. This made it difficult to introduce «from the outside» operations of change that did not have the university itself (autonomy) as a place of enunciation. In higher education institutions (HEIs), a transformation of this meaning cannot be forced, at least in the short term, without generating chaos, conflict and exponentially raising resistance (narratives and with powers).

For this reason, the construction of viability implied – and continues to be – a long process of construction of false «common sense«, which attenuated the perception of externality in the strategy and made possible the process of establishment from the outside.

In this sense, a new model of university internationalization was promoted through the neoliberal evaluative culture, as an operation that concretized it, both clothed in the mantle of neutrality that educational quality and updating implied to appropriate scientific and technological innovation.

Thus, university internationalization is promoted as a willingness of the academy to meet good practices, when in reality its meaning and strategic orientation is determined by the capitalist center. It is the route chosen to circumvent university autonomy.

In this way, which became more acute from the seventies of the twentieth century, it was necessary to convince the university world of the need to evaluate and classify academic activity in a standardized and standardized way , based on standards, instruments and measurement mechanisms, with a place of enunciation -and often located- outside the academic campuses, appealing to objectivity and neutrality, based on the meritocratic paradigm. This process of implementation could not – and could not be – a short-term matter, on the contrary, it took decades for it not to become evident that in reality we were in the presence of a flagrant violation of university autonomy.

The competition between universities, with respect to the classification place imposed by these dynamics, was nourished by the spirit of excellence – synonymous with quality – and the place of reference of national knowledge, which had been granted to HEIs. Therefore, being left out of the new internationalization movement implied a loss of prestige at the local level, so university autonomy was limited to entering or not entering this displacement.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has managed to «naturalize» bibliometrics, rankings, university accreditation, the hegemonic model of recognition of academic studies and degrees, faculty and student mobility based on immersion in «good practices», and the commodification of academic productivity. This is the greatest triumph of the neoliberal evaluative culture and the model of university internationalization put in place by capitalism since the 70s of the twentieth century, to achieve a kind of «everyone inside».

Standardization and homogenization have turned out to be a constant trend in the historical time of the Latin American and Caribbean university, but it had never reached the dimensions, nor achieved such a degree of cohesion and directionality, as it has done since the third industrial revolution.

Of course, neoliberal university internationalization requires a «national adaptation» in order to be able to present the actions that converge with this strategy, making it appear as its own and unique; The aim is to show that local initiatives are shaping the global, when in reality the process has been generated in reverse. With the establishment of the neoliberal evaluative culture – the heart of university internationalization – capitalism intends to develop a dialectic between the global and the local, which allows it to make it more efficient, which in reality leads to redefining what is meant by university autonomy.

University autonomy is increasingly operational, functional and for the application of supranational policies. Today, there is no pole of autonomous resistance to the model of university internationalization based on the neoliberal evaluative culture, on the contrary, a passive acceptance prevails that is usually disguised with proposals for adaptation or the presentation of proposals for alternative classification schemes, which make the operation of change more efficient. We are living in a stage of formal autonomy, not because of the limiting excess of governments, which can continue to exist, but because of determining factors that come from supranational bodies and mechanisms.

This does not deny or hide the multiple and diverse struggles that are registered in defense of the public university, against the different modalities of privatization, facing disinvestment or for decent wages and working conditions. The class-oriented unions of education workers and the militant student federations are an expression of these resistances. What we underline is the lack of an international pole for coordinating resistance to the hegemonic model of internationalization.

Systemic operation, fragmented understanding

The problem lies in the complexity of the systemic interactions that are generated from the operations of the university internationalization strategy, which usually appear to institutional bureaucracies and the commons, as autonomous, fragmented, disconnected and diffuse.

Bibliometrics is usually approached as if it had no structural connections with the implemented model of academic-student mobility, accreditation for university quality assurance as a process disconnected from the ranking circuit, and finally, curricular reforms are little made explicit as convergent to the efforts to recognize degrees, accreditations and degrees, and all of them interacting dynamically.

It is difficult to understand the structural complementarity of the initiatives of the neoliberal evaluative culture. Many of the publications we obtained on university internationalization in the period tend to underestimate the systemic relationship of the five components of the neoliberal evaluative culture, overestimate some of them and fail to understand the gap between knowledge and innovation, within the framework of the cycles of industrial revolutions.

By not clearly grasping the directionality and complementary sense of the operations of hegemonic university internationalization, this can lead to errors of unequal prioritization of some of these policies or the omission of others, thus affecting the possibilities of achievement for the logic of capital itself. This, not to mention the negative impact that each of them contains, to the extent that they seek the functionalism of transformative critical thinking, the creativity associated with social justice, the complementarity of human rights, among others.

For the logic of capital, the success of the university internationalization strategy can only be achieved with the expected results, if each and every one of the initiatives inherent to the neoliberal evaluative culture are implemented simultaneously and complementarily. For alternative projects, opposing it and presenting proposals that break with standardization and homogenization are of special vitality and interest.

The illusion of national university education in neoliberal globalization

As Anderson (1991) explains, the national is an imagined community that entails subjectivities, because «the members of the nation … they will never know the majority of their countrymen, they will not see them or even hear about them, but in the mind of each one lives the image of their communion» (p. 24). This also applies to the national university, where labels such as academic, researcher, extensionist or intellectual have different scales of understanding based on the political, cultural, social and economic perspective of the actors involved. The ideas of «professional success» or social commitment build different conceptions of academic and university identity. Only institutional protocols and rituals can amalgamate such diverse understandings of the national university.

In the case of Latin America, there is usually no idea of «national university education» substantively differentiated in the global school and university sphere, from the external, nor is it exempt from the old and new forms of cultural colonization imposed on education by the capitalist world system. At most, references to the national are limited to local characters, commemoration dates and some milestone that is assumed to be singular and influential in the global. Everyone usually assumes that there is only one model of school system – in which HEIs play a role – although some of the sections of this system have a year or so of training than the one we find in other countries.

Consequently, the national educational identity is often a mirage, even more so if it is combined with the diffuse idea of educational quality in the framework of university internationalization. The very idea of a model to imitate entails in itself a loss of local-national identity, in societies that tend towards pedagogical cosmopolitanism. What you don’t have is imported and contextualized, it is usually the most used premise, but in reality more than contextualization what happens is homogenization.

National science bodies

A complementary initiative for the homogenization and sui generis breakdown of university autonomy has been the way in which the national institutionality created for the promotion of research has operated. The national bodies for the promotion of research, science and technology, which were created and spread like ivy in the region – after the Second World War and the framework of the emergence of the third industrial revolution – promoted by the ECLAC (United Nations) view of development, made it possible that, from the externality of the university world, The ideas of the national in university policies were aligned with the objectives that the center imposed on the capitalist periphery for the sector of the economy and education for employment.

We find as references for the promotion and creation of national science and technology organizations, the policies of capital for the development of productive areas in the post-war period, which was accentuated with the arrival of the third industrial revolution. To this end, the multilateral system and organization of the world economy that emerged from 1945 onwards was used.

From 1946 UNESCO assumed the mandate of promoting international cooperation in science, for which in 1949 and 1951 it published the first world reports on science policy containing recommendations for the establishment of national research councils; in 1963 it organized in Geneva the United Nations Conference on the Application of Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD, 1963) where it was recommended that these national organizations coordinate research priorities, linking universities with productive development and lines of international cooperation. Transcending the Cold War, this achieved consensus between the capitalist and Soviet worlds, the latter imbued with the paradigm of the development of the productive forces to achieve socialism.

In this orientation, ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) played a stellar role, especially since the Raúl Prebisch Report (1949) and the set of ECLAC documents of the fifties and early sixties that suggested a structural change in the management models of science and technology; in 1965, the Organization of American States (OAS), together with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), with the guidance of ECLAC, developed guidelines for countries to have comparable indicators and guidelines for S&T policies, promoting national governing bodies outside universities.

Previously, since 1959, the IDB began to grant non-returnable loans to finance national science and technology programs. During the 1960s, it financed studies in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico aimed at creating or strengthening national scientific development councils, in the cases of Argentina and Brazil, an initiative that led to the preparation of the Operational Policy Document on Science and Technology (1965) containing guidelines for financing the creation of these bodies.

The OAS, through its Secretariat for Scientific Affairs, launched the Regional Program for Scientific and Technological Development (PRDCT, 1968), which stimulated the creation of national science and technology councils in each country, an initiative that would be fundamental to the wave of creation of local bodies that we would observe from this moment on.

Finally, while the World Bank (WB) in its reports oriented to capitalist developmentalism recommended the creation of scientific and technological infrastructure linked to higher education, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) supported since 1966 technology transfer programs that reinforced the urgent need to create national science and technology bodies.

Summary table of the creation of national science and technology bodies

Country	Body for the promotion of Science and Technology with an impact on the agendas of HEIs within the framework of university internationalization
Argentina	CONICET (1958)
Brazil	CNPq (1951) – CAPES (1951)
Chile	CONICYT (1967) / ANID (2018-2020)
Colombia	Colciencias (1968) – Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (2019)
Mexico	CONACYT (1970) – CONAHCYT (2023)
Peru	CONI (1968) – CONSYTEC (1981, restructured)
Uruguay	YEARS (2006)
Paraguay	CONACYT (1997)
Ecuador	SENESCYTE (2011)
Venezuela	CONICIT (1967) – FONACIT (2001) – ONCTI (Observatorio)
Costa Rica	CONICIT (1972) – Costa Rican Promoter of Innovation and Research (2021) – MICITT (1990)
Panama	SENACYT (1997)
Guatemala	CONCYT (1991) – SENACYT (1992)
Dominican Republic	SEESCYT / MESCYT (2001) – Fondo CYT (2004)
Cuba	CITMA (1994)
Jamaica	Scientific Research Council – SRC (1960) – National Commission on Sciencie and Technology – NCST (1993)
Trinidad and Tobago	NIHERST (1984)
Barbados	National Council for Sciencie and Technology – NCST (1997)

These national organizations for the promotion of Science and Technology were directly or indirectly linked to the policies of university internationalization. In the case of bibliometrics, integrating metrics in its evaluation systems such as Qualis[31] and Publindex[32], using indicators in calls for funding and recognition of scientific work. Regarding university accreditation and rankings, although the national Science and Technology agencies are not formally part of rankings, their instruments for evaluating postgraduate studies, funding journals and working groups, contribute to the variables used by national and global rankings for educational quality assurance. Regarding academic and student mobility, scholarship programs for partial or comprehensive studies abroad are part of the indicators used for the university internationalization system. As for the recognition of studies and degrees obtained abroad, although many of these agencies do not have competence in this, they do grant financing to related programs.

The role of these organizations for the promotion of science, research and technology is usually thought of as support for the university sector, when in reality their work has meant sui generis ways of breaking university autonomy, due to three factors. First, the budget allocated to these instances should have been assigned directly to the universities themselves, and to the extent that its percentage increases, it has collateral effects of disinvestment for the HEIs. Second, the prioritization of research, teaching and extension agendas, elaborated from a place of enunciation outside the university, which suffers from problems of budgetary precariousness, becomes an indirect interference in the definition of emphasis, which violates autonomy itself. Third, these bodies create a referent of authority in university management that depends on the central governments and, therefore, their priorities (teaching, research and extension) are not usually those of academia, but those of the political superstructure.

In its beginnings, the «mediation» of these national science, technology and research bodies acquired special importance in the absence – or institutional weakness – of ministries dedicated exclusively to the university sector, as well as because of the precarious expertise and authority that UNESCO had over higher education in its beginnings^[33]. The truth is that the development of post-war multilateralism showed the renewed vocation of educational internationalization (within it the university) that capitalism would have in the third industrial revolution.

As in the anti-system alternatives – we would say today anti-capitalist – internationalism was an organic principle, the internationalization of education – and university – in many cases was erroneously valued as progressive. Even more so, when UNESCO – promoter of educational normalization – in the framework of the Cold War, played the role of a meeting space between the capitalist world and the Soviet socialist world. This not only facilitated the legitimization of UNESCO, but also endowed it with a false cloak of neutrality, which today endures in broad sectors of the teaching profession.

This does not deny or attempt to obviate the autonomous efforts to build national educational policies, which have arisen in the framework of inter-bourgeois, nationalist or national-popular contradictions, nor what the Cuban revolution (1959) meant in the region and the wave of university renewal that accompanied it throughout the continent. What we intend to underline is the hegemonic and standardized character that university internationalization is taking, in the third industrial revolution and the phase of imperialist hegemony of the United States.

Non-state scientific assessment systems

In the years following the period 1972-1980 – but we consider it appropriate to mention it at this time – other systems of scientific evaluation that do not depend directly or exclusively on national States would be promoted and consolidated.

In terms of bibliometrics and scientific visibility , we find RedALyC (Mexico, 2003) and SciELO (Brazil, 1997), which are open access networks capable of generating alternative metrics (altmetrics, regional impact) and are used as indicators of internationalization, as well as Latindex (Mexico, 1995), a regional information system for scientific journals that sets out criteria of editorial quality and international visibility. These systems show different impacts from the Web of Science/Scopus that can be used for academic mobility.

Associated with university accreditation and quality assurance are RAICES (Ibero-American Network for the Accreditation of the Quality of Higher Education), and ARCUSUR (Mercosur educational) that facilitate the recognition of studies for academic-student mobility.

Regarding university rankings and classifications , we find the SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR, 2009) that works on scientific production, citations and innovation and the Folha University Ranking (Brazil), among others, which are used to attract international students, advance in inter-institutional agreements and build other sources of academic prestige.

In relation to academic and student mobility , the work of the University Association of the Montevideo Group (AGUM, 1991), the Association of Latin American and Caribbean Universities for Integration (AUALCPI, 1990s), the Union of Latin American Universities (UDUAL), the Central American Higher University Council (CSUCA) and the Latin American and Caribbean Higher Education Space (ENLACES, 2008).

These initiatives are just a small sample of processes that dispute the control of university internationalization, with nuances around their strategic orientation, because most of the institutions that make it up have assumed as their own the five constituent operations of hegemonic university internationalization. We observe this in power relations, institutional architecture, and the place of the alternative, expressed in the discourses and narratives that we will address in the second part of this chapter.

PART TWO: Political Discourse, Power and Internationalization

Lacan in «Reverso del Psicoanálisis» (1974) identifies four levels of the production of political discourse in power relations, which mark the dynamic between oppression and liberation. These four levels are: a) the limitless discourse of the castrating master, b) the role of the academy in the construction of narratives that legitimize the position of the master, c) the hysteria of the commons, marked by the «limits» imposed by the master, d) the role of the «subversive» analyst (knowledge as a means of enjoyment) who tries to construct narratives that unveil this reality.

For the purposes of this work, paraphrasing Lacan, we are interested in identifying, first, the politics of the «capitalist master«, which is expressed in several and complementary simultaneous economic projects of capital^[34] that, although they have differences in the disputes for the profits derived from the educational markets, share the strategic orientation expressed in the neoliberal university internationalization.

In a second moment, to understand the «university absent-mindedness» about the political, economic and ideological orientation of the university internationalization that is implemented, thus generating a crisis of understanding about the real meaning of it and gaps in the alternative analytical corpus, which limit the autonomous capacity to think about and develop university public policies on internationalization. Sectors of academia – right-wing and linked to the logic of capital – only managed to carry out confirmatory studies, but did not have the capacity to open creative paths to implement the new, while the others – leftists and other anti-system alternatives – were prisoners of criticism of the forms and purposes that in educational and university matters were proper to capital in the first two industrial revolutions – not to the new moment – which made it possible to the landing of hegemonic university internationalization with fewer degrees of resistance than expected.

Third, a collective «hysteria» has been generated about educational quality, a polysemic and therefore ambiguous term, which, associated with the strategy of university internationalization and the neoliberal evaluative culture, builds false common sense about what citizens aspires for the education of their children and the community. This explains – does not justify – the limited resistance generated by the educational policies associated with the neoliberal evaluative culture (competition, classification, stratification, mobility, recognition of studies) implicit in university internationalization, because «common sense» had been colonized by the notion of quality.

Fourth, what bothers the prevailing hegemony is the construction from below and the margins of narratives, practices and collective proposals that reveal the system of power relations constituted around and within university internationalization. What is subversive is to analyze and show that university internationalization has capitalist rationality as its place of enunciation and not academic autonomy. The perversion of functional reproduction is overcome with the enjoyment of critical knowledge.

Lacanian metaphors serve to illustrate that what is at stake is a dispute over the meanings of academic activity and university internationalization.

Discourse on the Educational Crisis

In capitalist discourses, denominations emerge that are used to build social viability for neoliberal university internationalization in the framework of the third industrial revolution. The most commonly used expressions are «educational crisis«, «crisis of university quality«, «civilizational crisis in higher education». These statements have been promoted by the capitalist center, since the decade of the sixties of the twentieth century (six decades), especially in the decade 1962-1972 (from the World Bank memorandum on education to the Faure Report) – a period in which the conceptual and operational foundations of capitalist university internationalization were laid.

From the logic of capital, three major events mark milestones in the construction of the hegemonic idea of educational crisis in general and of the university sector in particular. First, the arrival of the third industrial revolution and its specific and novel demands on academic activity, especially in terms of the incorporation of innovation, the production of transdisciplinary knowledge and the orientation of the labor market. Second, the debates promoted by the instances of world power of capitalism on the urgency of a change in school systems and universities, especially in terms of skills and the STEM paradigm^{^[35]}. Third, the precariousness in the construction of contextualized and in-depth alternative analyses, as the relationship between industrial revolutions and education is not understood in all its complexity.

Paradoxically, also from the popular and revolutionary camp, the decade of the sixties meant an important milestone in the questioning of the management and strategic orientation of universities. The French May, the anti-racist mobilizations and against the Vietnam War in the United States, the Latin American movement for university reform, the student insurgencies in different countries, suggested that, in the face of the crisis of university education, it was necessary to be realistic and dream the impossible^{^[36]}.

Consequently, the word crisis was present on both sides of the coin, raising the urgency of transforming the university. In the capitalism of the third industrial revolution, the paradox arises, that from different places of enunciation – dominant power and alternatives – it has been proposed for six decades that the university must be radically changed, but this does not happen. HEIs, for different reasons, were being -and continue to be- questioned at the global level, which was taken advantage of by the promoters of neoliberalism to open the way to standardized and homogenized solutions in the format of university internationalization with the operations of the neoliberal evaluation culture.

Documents that served as the starting point for the neoliberal internationalization of universities

Without intending to simplify, we can identify the main founding documents of neoliberal university internationalization in the framework of the third industrial revolution. These are:

the World Bank memorandum on education (1962),
the Coleman report (1966),
The Working Papers and Conclusions of the International Conference on the World Education Crisis (1967),
the publication of Philip Coombs’ book on the global crisis in education (1968),
the formation of the International Commission of UNESCO that prepared the report «Learning to Be (1972), better known as the Faure Report.

Later, these documents would be complemented with a series of works by the World Bank, UNESCO (especially IIEP, CRESALC-IESALC and the Directorate of Higher Education of the multilateral organization), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), United Nations, among others. Among the subsequent documents, it is necessary to point out those that circulated for the three regional and global conferences on higher education, as well as CRES+5 (2024).

Let’s look at some of them.

World Bank

In the work «The World Bank in Higher Education 1962-2000» (Bonilla-Molina, 2023), it is shown how this instance of conducting world economic policy, created within the framework of the new order that emerged in the post-war period, openly deployed its work in education since 1962. With the exclusive document for the education sector, called the Memorandum of Education Policy (1962), educational loan policies were formalized. This memorandum arose from a meeting organized by the Rockefeller Foundation – supported by the World Bank – and held in Bellagio, Italy, in which the foundations were established to guide educational policies in the context of post-war economic development and international cooperation. The central lines of this memorandum were aimed at educational change to contribute to economic development, through the formation of human capital as a priority. The technical higher education focus of the memorandum was oriented towards «practical» disciplines such as engineering, agricultural sciences and management, as well as approaches in higher education that privileged «practical disciplines» over the humanities and social sciences[37]. A special chapter was dedicated to the expansion of university infrastructure in developing countries, conditionality in loans and the promotion of reforms based on metrics, that is, on institutional evaluation. Without explicitly mentioning it, university internationalization became a tool for modernization through the promotion of academic mobility, especially to institutions located in developed countries. International cooperation in higher education emphasized curricular standardization to facilitate the recognition of degrees, the influence of Western educational models such as that of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. The urgency of advancing in models that privilege meritocracy, classification and global comparability is repeatedly mentioned, for which the establishment of international standards and accreditation protocols, which at that time only had the form of the statement of educational quality, is fundamental. For the WB, it is essential to work on reducing costs and efficiency in higher education, through alternative financing that explores strategic partnerships with the private sector and cheaper methods of training, such as correspondence teaching – the antecedent of virtual education – the introduction of tuition fees for students, and the Optimization of resources by focusing training on areas that would allow a direct economic return. The influence on national university policies was expressed in the call to align local educational agendas with those defined by capitalism on an international scale, technical assistance and knowledge transfer, facilitating the integration of local learning management dynamics to those assumed by global networks. Finally, the World Bank promotes the strengthening of the influence of supranational organizations in global policies – which will then circulate at the national level – through «consensual» agreements at international conferences, summits and other formats.

The WB’s lending work in the education sector between 1962 and 1970 focused on strengthening teaching initiatives, aimed at meeting the demands for skilled labor for the capitalist mode of production.

It was in September 1971 that the World Bank, in the document «Education: sector working paper«, began to outline even more clearly the international work to promote educational change, through the systematic study of the national cases of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This World Bank document converges with the conclusions of the book by the American and IIEP UNESCO technician Philip Coombs, entitled «The World Crisis in Education: the view from the eighties». Thus, a series of World Bank documents are inaugurated, which even today continue to build a neoliberal regulatory framework for university change, especially in terms of university internationalization.

In the 1971 document, the World Bank (WB) states:

the need to update the management capacity of the university sector at the international level, in its areas of organization, planning, evaluation and supervision,
this update must impact the curriculum and teaching methods,
the growth of university coverage must be based on the identification of new and diverse sources of financing for HEIs,
structural and comprehensive reforms are needed and less sectoral changes.

Evidently, the World Bank was trying to align the responses of the university sector to the requirements of training, research and extension that emanated from the capitalist mode of production in the third industrial revolution. The umbrella on which he builds his proposals for change is the notion of «educational crisis«. The strategy is university internationalization with different converging dynamics and the political operation is presented in the form of a neoliberal institutional evaluative culture.

The WB’s open intervention in the educational agenda from that moment on, and especially in the university sector, is an unequivocal sign of the system’s interest in producing a radical change in HEIs, summoning all the actors of the superstructure to this task, trying to eliminate any doubts from governments and institutional leaders in this regard.

Coleman Report

After the 1962 flag was raised by the World Bank, the government of the imperial nation that emerged from the post-world wars of the twentieth century, opens a debate on the efficiency of education in its own backyard. In fact, the strategic interests of the United States were – and are – the most impacted by the maelstrom of acceleration of scientific and technological innovation brought about by the third industrial revolution. Therefore, the interest in updating school systems and universities to align them with the reproduction and consolidation of their imperial role.

The Coleman Report (1966) is a milestone in the characterization of complex problems in school systems that affect the governance of the system, including the impact of technology on the concentration of wealth, with the least generation of social inequalities in his country. The result of the Coleman Report installs the idea that American education is in crisis and that change must be promoted quickly and effectively. The meta message was to show that this was not an anomaly or a singularity, but that the crisis of education in North America and the need for educational reforms in that country should be a regularity in the rest of the industrialized nations, but also the dependent ones, that is, in the center and periphery of the world system.

This diagnosis permeated the social and media movement in the United States, which was beginning to be shaken by the hippie libertarian generation, the protests for peace in Southeast Asia, solidarity with movements that questioned the racialization of society, as well as the achievement of universal quotas for young people in universities. The wave of anti-system ideas of socialism, the Cuban revolution and the courses of national independence in Africa, as well as the belligerence of the subordinate classes in Asia contributed to the emergence of the protagonism of American university students and industrialized countries, which questioned – from another place of enunciation different from the establishment – the HEIs. The system sees in the student protests, the hippie movement and the growing social belligerence, clear signs of structural educational problems that confront the universities.

The Report was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, commissioned to American sociologist James S. Coleman and his team, under the cloak of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The study, which focused on the first levels of education, was intended to assess educational equality. Data from more than 650,000 students and 60,000 teachers were analyzed, finding significant achievement gaps between racial and economic groups, which led them to conclude that inequalities in institutional funding had limited impact on learning achievement. The report highlighted that the main determinant of school performance was families, which promoted criticism of the «victims», rather than the system.

What would influence university policies would be the findings of the study regarding the effects of the composition of the student body –peer effects– especially of the actions that promoted interracial integration in the classrooms, facilitating policies of openness and expansion in this sense, as well as in the generation of incentive programs under the perspective of equity (more so for those who require it most urgently). However, considering that families – cultural environment – have a greater impact on performance than school dynamics, he promoted the progressive abandonment of training in critical citizenship, creativity and transformative critical thinking, encouraging teaching in «practical areas» for production, with the excuse that it sought to improve the material situation of the environment.

The idea of an educational crisis that emerged from the Coleman Report sponsored a new wave of educational reforms that swept the Latin American and Caribbean continents, while the legitimacy and effectiveness of university education in the most powerful nation on the planet was questioned from different sides.

International Conference on the Global Education Crisis

This construction of hegemony for the internationalization of university change has a special chapter in the call made by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson himself, for the celebration of the International Conference on the World Crisis of Education (1967), which was attended by 152 delegates from 50 countries, who agreed to promote initiatives for a change in school systems and universities worldwide. taking a giant step forward in the reworking of the agendas for internationalization, according to the demands of that moment.

The International Conference, shaken by the results of the Coleman Report, came to the conclusion that the crisis is not exclusive to the United States, but a feature of education in the capitalist system as a whole, as a result of the new reality derived from the impact of the acceleration of innovation – the third industrial revolution – on the capitalist mode of production.

The central objectives of this event were:

diagnosing the nature, causes and projections of the global education crisis,
To agree on a common international strategy to confront and overcome the causes of this crisis. The exit would have to be made viable with a new model of university internationalization.

The central document of the event was commissioned to IIEP-UNESCO, created in 1962 and directed at that time by Philip Coombs, who had been at the head of the United States Department of Education in the Kennedy administration.

In order to carry out the debates and construct the discourse of power – the masters in the Lacanian sense – ten working groups were established, each led by specialists in the area:

school administration (Dr. King, OECD Department of Education),
aims and contents of education (Dr. Beeby, University of London),
structure of school systems (Dr. Bereday, Columbia University),
teacher training (Dr. Butts, Columbia University),
democratization of education (Bowles, Ford Foundation),
Informal education (Schwartz, French National Institute for Adult Training),
new technologies (Dr. Leussink, Fridericiana University of Karlsrube, Germany),
productivity of education (Dr. Edding, Berlin Institute for Pedagogical Research),
Research to Improve Education (Dr. Husén, Stockholm Institute for Pedagogical Research),
International Cooperation for the Promotion of Education (Dr. Quik, University Foundation for International Cooperation in The Hague).

The conclusions, mentioned by Villa-Gómez (1967) were:

promoting a Common Global Market for Education,
creation of an International Consortium for the coordination of technical and financial assistance programmes in the field of education,
doubling international aid in education over the next five years,
Concentrating cooperation on the so-called developing countries,
prioritizing funding for educational planning, technological innovation, change in curricula, rationalization and modernization of educational administration,
To condition educational aid to countries on four factors:
the strategy for implementing aid must be agreed between donors and the receiving education sector,
establish a system of periodic evaluation of changes (imposition of the evaluative culture in educational management),
productivity as a criterion for multilateral support and from multinational sources,
the education system and HEIs that receive international aid must be aligned with a national development plan in accordance with the international division of labor (a new approach to transnational policies). These elements would be central to the course that university internationalization would take the following decade.

The World Crisis in Education: the view from the eighties

The following year, Mr. Philip Coombs published in book format, an improved version of the documents he had worked on for the International Conference, under the title «World Educational Crisis» (1968), in which the concepts, affirmations, debates and conclusions of the international meeting convened by President Johnson were expanded. Coombs’ book, being a UNESCO world figure, takes the debate on the «educational crisis» out of the North American borders and places it at the very heart of the multilateral organization created by the United Nations for the promotion of education, culture and communication.

For Coombs (1968), the global crisis in education was characterized by the gap between educational expansion and available resources due to the explosive growth of enrollment combined with the inefficiency of States in financing HEIs; mismatch between education and socioeconomic needs, due to the lack of educational relevance – in the capitalist sense – that disconnected university education with national development priorities, causing graduates to have more and more problems inserting themselves into the labor market; inequity and exclusion because social inequalities persisted as a determinant of access to higher education; obsolescence of methods and structures due to pedagogical models anchored in the past (disciplinarity) and organizational designs that are not very dynamic (based on faculties, departments, schools).

Coombs’ proposal was that for the solution of the global crisis in education – from the perspective of capital – it was essential to promote systems-based approaches that incorporate scientific planning (indicators, standards, statistics, exit criteria) to manage institutions; the diversification of higher education promoting the establishment of polytechnic, technical and technological non-university higher education institutions that could absorb the demand for specialized training in the context of the acceleration of innovation, promoting flexible modalities; rationalization of educational expenditure by increasing efficiency, redistributing resources and reducing school dropouts; linking with economic development, planning the academic offer based on national development plans, national research agendas and the labor market; and, incorporating technological innovations into the pedagogical field, such as educational television, distance learning and models focused on self-learning that would allow training costs to be saved.

Coombs’ proposals would have an impact on the hegemonic model of university internationalization that was beginning to be imposed, especially by showing that no country could face the educational crisis alone , so any strategy had to contain academic and student mobility, affirming that the efficient use of available resources implied the implementation of metrics and evaluation systems comparable at an international level, which would condition university accreditation, for which the idea of a system implied the classification of universities (rankings), as a framework for validating university studies and degrees. The institutional diversification proposed by Coombs would stimulate the creation of technological institutes and polytechnic universities.

The proposals of the International Conference on the World Education Crisis (1967) and Coombs’ book (1968) pressured UNESCO to carry out global studies that would give universal legitimacy to the implementation of the strategies described.

UNESCO: Learning to be: the education of the future

The organization of the Place Fontenoy in Paris, escalated the debate – of the masters of power – to a planetary level. In this orientation, he calls for the formation of an international commission to study the «state of world education». Although the call for research does not initially align with the idea of an «educational crisis», the results of the same would.

In the section «Current points of reference» of «Learning to Be: the education of the future» (1973) it is based on the statement that «society rejects the products of education» (p.62) because the education that preceded the economic, technological and cultural transformations has lost its capacity to provide up-to-date knowledge and, consequently, has diluted its possibilities to foresee the immediate future.

In the section «inequalities in the university», the Faure report criticizes the effect of palliatives to promote equal opportunities, if they are not linked to a comprehensive meritocracy strategy that is capable of overcoming internal obstacles, which can also be adequately assessed through institutional evaluation models.

What the Faure Report (1972) confirms is the need for a radical change in the university and school systems on a global scale, which opens the way through an adequate evaluation culture of HEIs and other educational institutions in order to recover their capacity to provide, foresee and precede.

From this moment on, the altruistic and depoliticized mask of UNESCO began to fall, showing itself as a transnational or multilateral apparatus aligned with dominant interests, something that we analyze in depth in other texts.

Business philanthropy in the period

In addition to the work of the Ford, Rockefeller, Kellogg and Volkswagen Foundations already mentioned, in this period the Inter-American (USA), Friedrich Ebert (Germany), and the ecclesial (Misereor, Caritas, among others) joined with force.

The Inter-American Foundation, created in 1970, focused on the financing of community work and productive projects, generating indirect mobility opportunities for technicians and professionals from partner universities and non-governmental organizations, facilitating the exchange of practices and the supervision of applied theses that were generated in the HEIs.

For its part, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) developed during the seventies of the twentieth century its program of scholarships and support for political and social research, an initiative that consolidated links with universities and research centers in social sciences, promoting the creation of postgraduate positions and academic stays in Germany, financing publications that facilitated transatlantic dialogue with Latin American researchers.

The Misereor Foundation, a German Catholic aid agency, oriented its actions towards community work, often making alliances with universities and local extension workers, in whose results reports academics participated, who were invited to stays and internships in Europe as a mechanism for the international circulation of knowledge.

Caritas, linked to the Catholic Church, focused in this period on internships and community action research, in which work it facilitated exchange programs and university internships, working with faculties of theology, social work, health and education for the institutional recognition it required, favoring cooperation networks between Catholic universities.

The work of these foundations in this period had in common the indirect impulse of different models of academic and student mobility, especially from Latin America to Europe and the United States, the signing of agreements and curricular adaptation for the recognition of degrees, the strengthening of transnational networks such as CLACSO and FLACSO[38], the financing of publications (bibliometrics), research centers and academic networks, as well as quality assurance – especially for postgraduate studies – through the development of standards and indicators that would allow their international accreditation. Finally, institutional diversification was worked on by promoting technical education. However, the focus of policies for the new phase of university internationalization was more visible in the multilateral area.

New approach to internationalization from UNESCO

The «solutions» of capitalism in education began to be openly presented as global, standardized and comparable, in order to try to produce a change in school systems and universities. This operation was given the name of internationalization and it was made through various initiatives, which appeared unrelated, but which gave shape to each of the components of the neoliberal institutional evaluation culture: educational normalization, agreements for the recognition of degrees and validation of studies in different countries, curricular compatibility and complementarity, serialization systems for publications, arbitration and indexing mechanisms, financing of academic and student mobility, promotion of skilled migration, generation of categories and indicators for measurement and classification, university accreditation systems, university rankings, micro-accreditation of studies, diversification of financing, processes of neo-privatization (digital transformation of education) and delocalization of educational policy-making centers (business philanthropy, entrepreneurs for education, other forms of economic societies). All these initiatives were centred on multilateralism, especially UNESCO.

As we will see later, the Regional Conferences on Higher Education (CRES 1996, 2008, 2018, CRES+5 2024), the World Conferences on Higher Education (1998, 2009, 2022), multilateral agreements and global conventions were instruments for its application, also fulfilling the function of escape valves for criticism of the hegemonic trend.

In this period, university internationalization is no longer assumed as a national adaptation to the successful experiences located in other latitudes -typical of the previous cycles-, but as a need of the world system to align university efforts in the same direction, regardless of the graduations of the uneven and combined development of capitalism, in a new context of a new international division of labor. including the professional and intellectual.

Innovation as a problem

The natural question that arises is why at that moment capital redoubles its discourse on the educational crisis? Is it time for the radical transformation of school systems and universities? Why didn’t the world system do it before? It was always said from critical theory that school systems and universities had served for the symbolic and material reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, what had changed then?

Science, technology and innovation applied to the production of commodities are three pillars of industrial capitalism, which allow it in each historical time to organize work, commodity production, domination and seek a growing rate of profit based on surplus value (exploitation). School systems and universities were – and still are – part of the cultural machinery that had the task of guaranteeing the flow of innovation aimed at vocational training, employment, consumption and governance. In this sense, the duration of innovation cycles and rhythms shaped what had to be taught and learned in school systems and universities.

The way to guarantee that this would become a reality was based on «curricular surveillance» (biopolitics), that is, on the design and implementation of a curriculum that would guarantee the timely circulation of knowledge and innovative techniques in school systems and universities, guaranteeing the reproduction – symbolic, material – as well as the expansion of the capitalist system.

In the first two industrial revolutions this synchrony occurred continuously, not without shocks and peculiarities typical of the uneven and combined development of capitalism. Of course, in all territories and educational institutions, resistance was expressed – in different intensities – to this hegemonic mode, which used to be presented as pedagogical bets oriented by critical and creative thinking, with a counter-hegemonic perspective.

During the first two industrial revolutions, innovation cycles were extended, long, and could last between 30-40 years, which gave a certain stability and sense of tradition to curricular designs, curricula and study programs. This was progressively changing as the advent of the third industrial revolution approached, at which time there was an unusual leap in the spans of scientific and technological innovations, which shortened the renewal times and put more and more pressure on curricular (and pedagogical updating as a whole).

This dynamic became undeniable at the beginning of the third industrial revolution, whose origins date back to 1954 (Mandel) and 1961 (Bonilla-Molina). Cybernetics, programming and electronic machines, with memory and correction capacity, began to be incorporated by governments into offices and by the private sector into factories, at a speed and pace that quadrupled their understanding and capacity for explanation by school systems and universities. But it would be the arrival of the UNIMATE robot in the automotive industry that would mean – for the logic of capital – a point of no return that required major changes in the school and university systems, due to the relationship between training and jobs.

An asynchrony was occurring between what was taught and the accelerated dynamics of innovations that emerged, which was the basis for the perception of educational crisis by the capitalist system. Neoliberal university internationalization becomes a global strategy to produce a new coupling between education and commodity production.

However, this new situation also rebuked the class perspective, the anti-capitalist resistances, because the axis of the defense of public education (school systems and universities) lay – and still lies – in the trilogy democratization of knowledge in the popular sectors, critical thinking and creativity for social transformation. Consequently, it would be a contradiction to defend the school and university paralysis with respect to the updating of knowledge and technologies, which did not mean sharing the idea or the innovative directionality that capitalism intended to impose on it.

The question that arose was how to promote a permanent updating of school systems and universities that was not functional to the logic of capital, avoiding, of course, the temptation to entrench oneself in tradition to resist changes in the dynamics, processes and institutionality of teaching and learning. This question continues to rebuke critical pedagogies and popular education.

The question of overcoming disciplinarity in the logic of capital

A significant change in the logic of reproducing capital in educational matters occurred – as we will expand on later – when the mode of production in the third industrial revolution demanded the overcoming of the disciplinary paradigm. During the first two industrial revolutions, the disciplinary approach to teaching and learning had shaped didactics, curricular designs, evaluation, planning, management, but above all the functional structure of school systems and universities. Consequently, innovation had a disciplinary referential stamp, it was taught and reproduced by disciplinary fields.

For the capitalist mode of production in the first two industrial revolutions, the fragmentation of knowledge not only made it possible to control the knowledge-property relationship, but also made it possible to develop specific innovations to improve the mechanical mode of commodity creation and social subjectivities, promoting specific inventiveness to improve parts (innovation from parts to whole). from which production, reproduction and control became more efficient.

Cybernetics and all the computational and robotic development of logarithms -Napier-1614-, applied to the production of goods, communication and state control, now demanded multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary processes. The way of producing the new implied thinking about the whole first and together, and then implementing its design and implementation by resorting to the shared work of several disciplines.

This made transdisciplinarity – confused in many documents with multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity – a new demand of capital for school systems and universities. Although it was easy to understand this demand, from a conceptual point of view, it was not so clear when it came to operationalizing it, because it implied a radical restructuring of institutional designs, curricular structure, didactic approaches, ways of evaluating, planning and managing teaching, learning and innovations.

The disciplinary hegemony that capitalism had achieved in the first two industrial revolutions was so solid that it was now turning against it, by obstructing the change that the system required. Overcoming the disciplinary paradigm within the framework of capitalism implied a 180-degree turn that entailed that all actors modified their routines and protocols of work, conduction and relationship with knowledge.

The «flight drive» was expressed with a formal adaptation of transdisciplinarity as a «transversal axis of the curriculum» (preschool, primary, secondary, technical education) and as part of the vision/mission (universities).

The UNESCO machinery tried to promote change through the academic promotion of complex thinking (Morín, 1973), as a variant of transdisciplinarity that was assumed as part of an epochal change. The ideas of the transdisciplinary and the complex, which were «chic» for the academy accustomed to living in forms, were popularized, but the university and the transdisciplinary and complex school did not end up germinating or making their way, that is to say, they did not go to the bottom of the aspiration – neither from the perspective of capital nor of anti-capitalist resistance – because that implied a demolition. not only of reified paradigms but of institutionalized logics of power.

Despite the fact that critical theory, critical pedagogies and popular education had defended that disciplinarity was the sign of industrial capitalism in the first two industrial revolutions – although many continue to maintain it erroneously and in a timeless way, as if we were not in a new historical time – and that the alternative was the transdisciplinary, The radical change did not happen.

Transdisciplinarity – not disciplinarity – was the sign of demand of capitalism in the third industrial revolution, which did not mean eliminating disciplinary teaching – because all transdisciplinarity is based on several disciplines – but a change in the perspective of management in teaching and learning, knowledge and innovation, as well as in the ways of organizing institutionality (until now based on faculties, schools and disciplinary programs).

The pedagogical left nor the critical pedagogies managed to find ways to open the way to transdisciplinarity in institutionality, because it was one thing to think about it and another to do it, but also because they lacked a «finished model[39] to put together and replicate it.»

The experiences of Soviet education, very important and innovative, advanced – for example, education by complexes – but never ended up breaking with the school and university paradigms and disciplinary institutional designs. The Soviet university model, with its singularities and particularities, had many similarities with the Western model, because the universalist tendency of capitalism, prior to the Bolshevik revolution, promoted uniformity, something that ended up consolidating in the post-world wars and the promotion of multilateralism.

This kind of «dead end», lack of alternatives for the concrete materialization – not only discursive – of the radical change with respect to the disciplinary logic, strengthened the idea of educational crisis in the logic of capital, favoring the emergence of a rapid and global solution to the traffic jam that was occurring. University internationalization was the agreed strategy, the neoliberal evaluation culture its tool and educational quality the solvent of resistance.

Epistemology of education and university internationalization: convergent views

During an important part of the twentieth century – especially in the sixties and seventies – there was a debate about the epistemological character of pedagogy. While some defended that pedagogy was a science, others preferred to refer to it as a confluence of sciences (Millaret, 1985).

The course taken by the debate on the epistemological status of pedagogy would be decisive in the development of neoliberal university internationalization in the third industrial revolution. As the idea prevailed that pedagogy entailed a dynamic integration of disciplinary fields and was not a science as such, its structuring parts (didactics, curriculum, evaluation, planning and classroom management) were disaggregated and instrumentalized.

The immediate result of assuming this epistemological status was:

The idea – and practice – that had been cultivated in the university world for centuries was justified, regarding that it was not necessary to be a pedagogue to work teaching in the sector. Proposals such as andragogy, which was postulated as the science for adult education, cataloguing pedagogy as proper to work with children and adolescents, did not end up becoming popular to guide the training of teachers in higher education. Consequently, in most of the national chaos in Latin America and the Caribbean, it was enough to handle knowledge in depth to work in teaching;
The components of pedagogy (didactics, curriculum, evaluation, planning and classroom management) were dismantled and autonomized. Many universities and ministries created sectoral departments for each of these components, which fulfilled a technical role, disarticulated from the others. The depedagogization of university work was a prerequisite to be able to advance in internationalization based on homogenization, standardization and evaluation culture, whose indicators and goals sought to align the purposes of all higher education institutions;
The efforts of university renewal and transformation were oriented towards curriculum development, that is, in one of the components of pedagogy: the curriculum. An important part of the educational bureaucracy – akin to the logic of the capitalist system – was not interested in the way in which learning was constructed, but in the content that was transferred. The curricular change operated as a firewall or retaining wall to the overcoming of the disciplinary paradigm. The idea of curriculum development that expressed it sought to build a mechanism for the incessant updating of the curriculum, but the institutional tradition on the forms and processes of elaboration of curricula and programs prevented this dynamic. This stagnation of curricular development occurred – and continues – fundamentally because teacher autonomy caused concern among academic hierarchies, especially with regard to the maintenance of internal power relations. But the worst thing was that the pedagogical left ended up succumbing to the curricular of change, stripping transformation of all its radicalism; Evidence of this is that an important part of the reforms implemented by the so-called progressive governments (local, regional and national) focused on curricular reforms.
The curricular nature of teaching and learning, innovation and knowledge, turned teachers into curricular administrators, in charge of building the rhythms and processes to comply with a pre-established curriculum and in whose elaboration they had not participated. Good practices and adequate professional practice focused on the percentage of curricular compliance. The distortion had been consummated.
Critical thinking was reconceptualized, to concentrate on the ability to think of alternatives in the solution of problems – especially production – and considering the critique of the relations of power, domination and control as an ideological bias. Thus, critical thinking is tried to relocate it in the field of the «useful» in learning;
Creativity is also redefined as aesthetic and functional plasticity, breaking the link with reality and territories, which made it a benchmark for the construction of social justice;
Transdisciplinarity was reinterpreted as staging, simultaneously, of several disciplines around the solution of a problem, each field preserving its epistemic autonomy.
Transdisciplinary didactics did not end up emerging with the force of counter-hegemonic dispute, on the contrary, the idea of didactic integrality hid the permanence of the disciplinary paradigm;
Process evaluation was diverted to the epistemic falsification between quantitative and qualitative estimation, which distracted from the purpose of overcoming the disciplinary.
Planning by learning areas did not succeed in breaking with the disciplinary matrix because its approach was essentially multidisciplinary.
Classroom management mimicked the conceptualization of integrality, but it did not manage to make the leap towards transdisciplinarity, which does not hide or deny significant experiences in this sense, which were the exception, never the norm.

The disaggregated, disjointed and functional epistemology of pedagogy made it possible to develop a strategy of university internationalization from above, curbing resistance and alternatives that were built from the classrooms. The one-dimensional proposals of transdisciplinary assessment, didactics, curriculum, planning and management never managed to reconstruct the puzzle broken by the disciplinary paradigm.

Teaching as a technique and not as a critical pedagogy

In this period, the expansion and globalization of competency-based teaching began, as one of the functions of university internationalization. We can trace the origins of the current competency-based teaching model to the 1960s when people began to talk about «labor skills«, in a context of acceleration of innovations with an impact on the mode of production of goods. But, it would be in the seventies when this concept was applied to education, focusing on the acquisition of specific skills and knowledge.

Competencies ended up being the express request for technical capacity to operate knowledge in concrete reality. The perspective of competencies generates the notions of «useful knowledge» and «complementary knowledge», which are hierarchized, privileging the former – to the detriment of the latter – as an educational purpose.

Competency-based education would be central to the strategy of university internationalization and its key operation: the neoliberal evaluation culture. Competencies were expressed in the profiles of professional graduates, the evaluation indicators for employability and the standards of bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, mobility and recognition of studies.

What had to be learned and measured began to be structured -in this period- in a standardized and homogenized competency framework, which sought to contribute to solving the problems of asynchrony between teaching-learning in school systems and universities and the requirements of the capitalist mode of production impacted by scientific-technological innovation.

This was building an «institutional logic» that prioritized the competencies that contributed to standardized evaluations and classifications. These competencies are included in the indicators of quality, relevance (from the logic of the market), impact, innovation and efficiency that drive the institutional measurement parameters.

This posed new challenges for anti-capitalist resistances. Although the alternative did not manage to constitute institutional niches that expressed transdisciplinarity as the axis of pedagogical work, this did not mean passivity, but rather a reorientation of militant criticism towards the constitutive aspects of hegemonic university internationalization. Although this showed that the complexity of the conjuncture of renewal that capitalism was going through was not understood, it does not detract from the effort either, because it showed the forms that the class struggle took in the university sector in this period, beyond the strictly salary and demands.

The discourse of the alternative initially focused on the distinction between skills and competencies, something that was confusing for the less politicized sectors, but gained strength with the demands that claimed relevance from the popular, the communitarian, linking the interests of students and education workers with the community, the liberating integration – not oppressive or reproductive – of the individual with the common. The community appeared again as a sign of the alternative, as that which gives meaning to learning and what must be internationalized.

However, we insist on the fact that a unique crack in the system was wasted to bring about a radical change in the school and university systems. This crack is still open, but an important part of the alternative field is still tied to the archetype and symbols of the university inherited from the first two industrial revolutions.

The table was set for the staging of neoliberal university internationalization

As we have tried to explain so far, the correlations of forces and the paradigmatic bottlenecks that were evident in the decades of the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century contributed to building the conditions of possibility for the hegemony of the theoretical, conceptual, operational and systemic frameworks of neoliberal university internationalization. As we will delve into in the next work, the arrival in the eighties of neoliberal globalization would bring the components that were needed for its definitive implementation and consolidation.

In conclusion, the period of 1972-1980 was the period of the construction of hegemony of the narratives of neoliberal evaluative culture to solve the educational crisis. In this sense, the initiatives of the previous period were reinforced and new ones were created, especially after the Faure Report (1973). In this way, capital managed to get most school and university systems to introduce the need to evaluate in order to change. Neoliberalism would be in charge of the strategic sense of change, for its aims and purposes, from the eighties onwards.

References

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Berardi, B. (2020) Futurability. Black box. Argentina

Bonilla-Molina, L. (2023). The World Bank in Higher Education (1962–2000). Editions Other Voices in Education.

Bonilla-Molina, L. (2023). The economic projects of capital. Editions Other Voices in Education.

Bonilla-Molina, L (2023) Predictive Regime. OVE Editions. Venezuela.

Coombs, P. (1968). Global education crisis. Santillana.

Faure, E. (1973). Learning to be: The education of the future. Alliance.

Foucault, (1977) Biopolitics. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico.

Han, B. (2019) Psychopolitics. Herder Editions. Spain.

Lacan, J. (2008). Lacan’s Seminar: Book 17. The reverse side of psychoanalysis (1969–1970). Paidós Ediciones. (Original work published in 1992)

Mandel, E. (2023). Late capitalism. Ediciones Viento Sur and Sylone. (Original work published in 1962)

Mialaret, G. (1985). Education Sciences. UNESCO Publishing.

Morin, E. (1973). The lost paradigm. Kairós Editions.

UNESCO. (1972). Report «Learning to be». UNESCO Publishing.

Villa-Gómez, C. (1967). The International Conference on the Global Crisis in Education [mimeographed].

Zavaleta, R. (1986) The national-popular in Bolivia. Ediciones Siglo XXI. Mexico

CHAPTER 9: ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION:

Categories, indicators and institutionality for the evaluative culture as the epicenter of neoliberal university internationalization (1980-2025)^{^[40]}

Luis Bonilla-Molina

PART ONE:

Categories for the evaluative culture that guides university internationalization

In the 1980s, neoliberalism needed to make the economic, political, cultural, and social structures of countries more flexible in order to mold them to its format of transnationalization of capital and financialization of the market.

The discourse he constructed for this purpose was that of the reforms of the national states, with the intention of reducing their size and making their possibilities of governmental action more flexible, promoting the expansion of the social space for the logic of the market, the substitution of the public for the private, the entry of foreign capital, the generalization of the model of speculative actions and everything that implied the mutation towards the financialization of capital in that country. period.

The decentralization and deconcentration of competencies and functions of the institutions were part of the flexibility policies that were implemented in this period. In the case of school systems and universities, this made it possible to implement the neoliberal evaluation culture.

The reforms of the State were justified with the discourses of lack of efficiency, legitimacy and productivity of governments, as well as the need to «rationalize public spending». The World Bank, the World Monetary Fund and all the Development Banks were quick to point out that nation states lacked institutional effectiveness, because the institutions did not adequately fulfill the functions for which they were created and lacked legitimacy because more and more citizens questioned the fact that public policies were not consulted and therefore did not respond to their needs.

In addition, the spokesmen of the neoliberal state reforms maintained and argued that these factors had an impact on the low productivity of the public sector, with respect to the results obtained by institutions and companies managed by the private sector. In the case of universities, the profitability of investment began to be one of the discursive axes of neoliberalism.

The campaign against corruption, embezzlement, and nepotism was intensified – which was justified but had been promoted in the past by the status quo itself – avoiding, however, any reference to social inequalities and the mechanisms of capital accumulation around the business-state relationship. Autonomy in the budgetary administration of HEIs was placed as a topic of debate to promote the need for a radical change, which was expressed in the political operations contained in the university internationalization promoted by capital.

Added to this was the media campaign against superfluous expenditure – something that was public knowledge and notoriously rejected – but which was actually used to justify the reduction in the size of the State and its policies linked to the welfare state. It was a matter of breaking the systems of social relations that had sustained governability in the institutionality that was to be reformed, something that can be summarized in the popular phrase «there is no money for so many people«. Collaterally, this hit the policies of social ascent that had promoted the school and university systems in the Fordist period, affirming that it was only necessary to train the qualified labor force required by the mode of production in the conjuncture, speaking of the professional training that could not be incorporated into the labor market as a non-returnable cost. The precarious Keynesian Welfare State built on the capitalist periphery was being demolished from its foundations with demands for efficiency and legitimacy.

These pressures of neoliberalism are expressed in school systems and universities (education) in the calls for quality (synonymous with effectiveness), relevance (synonymous with legitimacy), impact (productivity/governance), efficiency (rationalization of spending), and innovation (real-time adaptation of school systems and universities to the acceleration of technological and knowledge innovations).

The way to achieve this was summarized in the promotion of meritocracy (revision of what was expected), competitiveness (reorienting production) and classification systems (structured around quantifiable achievement), dynamics that were grouped in the neoliberal institutional evaluative culture as a central political operation of university internationalization. Goodbye to the premises of citizenship, promotion of democracy and social justice that had defined, even nominally, educational activity in the liberal period. It was about the exacerbation of individualism and the attempt to break with all the collaborative forms of the social fabric. From the neoliberal perspective, this was only possible with measurements, weightings of results; neoliberalism opened the doors to illiberalism.

The evaluative culture in university education that had built hegemony in the seventies of the twentieth century, as a solution to the notion of «educational crisis«, now had the categories that allowed it to build indicators and performance standards: quality, relevance, effectiveness, innovation and impact. Knowing how these indicators, standards, and goals (competencies) were operationalized became the substantive occupation of capital, for which significant processes and learning mattered little.

The early years of the eighties of the twentieth century were a year of construction of narratives and public policies that accounted for these obscure advances – consensus from above in terms of indicators – thereby building viability for the formation of supranational institutions with significant degrees of autonomy with respect to national states. To institutionalize this process, the name «independent bodies for the assurance of educational quality» was coined that were «autonomous from the State», thus guaranteeing their subordination to centers of international reference that would guide the logic of capital; This would take the form of a transnational and multilateral framework in charge of monitoring educational quality with standardized evaluation tests, accreditation agencies, global university classification bodies, international mechanisms for the financing of mobility, agreements for the recognition of studies monitored by multilateralism, among other ways of guaranteeing the control of the institutionalization of these evaluation categories. Paradoxically, this transnational institutionality for the assurance of educational quality ended up being financed by public funds.

It was not enough to have a simple bureaucratic operationalization of guidelines emanating from the instances of global political and economic power, it was necessary to open the way to local citizen consensus that would allow the outsourcing of the reference sources to evaluate (quality, relevance, impact, efficiency and innovation) of the school systems and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). To this end, a special role was played in the construction of «common sense» oriented to the diffuse horizon of educational quality, entrepreneurs for education, non-governmental platforms for educational debate, the corporate co-optation of the pedagogical social movement through the conditioning of philanthropic financing to subordination to the agendas that took place of supranational enunciation, educational reforms advised by publishers and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The polysemic meaning of the term educational quality allowed sufficient plasticity to escalate the change in different historical moments, as if all the new reform proposals that were emerging were part of the same umbrella of public policy.

The national state and its governments, presented as inefficient, opened the way to the externalization of the evaluative culture, that is, the place of enunciation of the «evaluative truth» was placed in diffuse instances such as quality evaluation agencies, accreditation, peer-reviewed journal systems and rankings that did not depend on the public.

The resistance that could be generated by the fact that external agents were the ones who evaluated, was resolved with the appeal to neutrality and objectivity, arguing that the «internal» educational sector itself could not evaluate itself, as if other forms of evaluation, including community or heteroevaluation, could not be explored.

Thus, it was legitimized that the measurements were made by multilateralism (Latin American Laboratory for the Assessment of Educational Quality – LLECE UNESCO), Development Banks (PISA – OECD), as well as private companies (university rankings, indexing and arbitration systems for publications, accreditation mechanisms).

The regime of pedagogical truth was placed outside the borders of the school and university world, violating – with limited resistance – the autonomy of educational institutions. In the educational world, discourses, narratives and slogans that aspired to place each institution and individual academic career at the top of the rankings multiplied; discourses critical of this competitive logic were cataloged as politically incorrect.

Once viability was built, without significant resistance to the neoliberal educational evaluation culture, the greatest challenge that capital had to face from that moment on, consisted of avoiding dispersion, seeking the articulation and linking of all the processes of weighting and classification that were expressed in the daily routine of academic work.

Consequently, the results of standardized tests of student performance, teacher evaluations and classifications were oriented to contribute to the mechanisms of classification, allocation of extraordinary resources and categorization, which had as references good practices (relevance, innovation, impact, efficiency) and evidence of educational quality.

In the university sector, accreditation is nourished by bibliometrics (production and publication of academic articles in standardized, indexed, serialized, refereed and segmented journals and systems), the volume of access to research funding, the attraction of private capital to extension and study processes, student and academic mobility, the inter-institutional projects), the homologable curricular development that is guided by the STEM paradigm^[41], which in turn contribute to accreditation and rankings.

From the logic of the market, we began to identify what would be the formats, practices and protocols of the «new school and university factory» within the framework of the neoliberal evaluative culture for education, with the purpose of clearly defining what would be the educational commodities to produce and quantify (measure). The aim was for quality, relevance, efficiency, impact and innovation operations to be expressed in the institutional framework aligned towards the same horizon: the market. The purpose is to achieve local uniformity in approved and standardized processes using internationalization as a vehicle for implementation.

Then, after defining the products (commodities) of teaching, research and university extension, complementary goals could be configured to be evaluated, which correspond to each of the indicators (quality, relevance, efficiency, impact and innovation) established.

This made evident the historical tension that had surrounded the academic products of higher education (theses, books, reports), which were torn between the extensive and the synthesized. Although in some historical moments the volume was synonymous with analytical depth and multiplicity of possibilities of use for the symbolic and material reproduction of the capitalist system, now brevity, which contained usefulness of use, acquired greater exchange value in the classification scales of the neoliberal evaluative culture for education.

It evolved from the general to the detailed in the reproduction of innovation, while in teaching it was reoriented from the understanding of the complex to its particular concreteness, trying to highlight the knowledge that could be useful for the market.

In this route, historical, geographical, artistic, humanist, creative knowledge and anti-power critical thinking suffered «permanent devaluation», to the point that they were placed as suppressible or second-tier. Synthesis in the areas of STEM was privileged.

In practice, it was instituted that in terms of publications , special dispensation would be given to articles (productive synthesis) on books (an extension that is not very useful for reproduction in the current stage of capital), papers resulting from research with external funding – preferably those linked to the national-business development agenda – that concluded in suggestions for intervention to those who spoke of the need to overcome social inequalities.

In the social and community action projects – extension for governance – implemented by HEIs in places at risk of social conflict, they were sought to express the so-called useful knowledge, typical of academic pragmatism, which privileges the use by system managers to act as «firefighters of the conflict», avoiding social explosions. That is the difference in interpretation of the term pertinence, between what capital does versus what is assumed by the transformative social movement.

The neoliberal evaluative culture in education assumes productivist and functional objectivism as a paradigm. This is expressed in a sui generis way, penetrating the field of humanities and social sciences, objectifying subjectivities, that is, promoting the study of corporalities, oppressions and resistances in concrete frameworks of public policies. It is demanded that the subjective pay tribute to objective and concrete analyses, but disconnected from the set of inequalities. There is less and less room for humanist theoretical reflection, for intellectual production focused on the intersubjectivity of being, reality and transformative action, which disrupts the logics of installed powers. Neoliberalism brings the era of vulgar utilitarianism in academic production.

The notion of the global village that neoliberalism endorses postulates the imminent overcoming of localisms (the indicator of relevance of the neoliberal evaluative culture is not communitarian but business) and going to meet cultural globalization^{^[42]}.

Efforts and mechanisms for the normalization, homogenization and standardization of arbitration, indexing, establishment of repositories and access to them were redoubled. In the case of teaching, research and extension, the measurement of results privileged the form of external peers, as a standard of quality control of the evaluation processes, to guarantee the alignment and directionality that neoliberalism imposed – and imposes – on it.

In order to try to break with the institutional entropy that prevented the rapid incorporation of the new – the emerging that was useful to capital – and to be able to copy the successful experiences and incubators of university projects, the figures of good practices, student and academic mobility were incorporated as an evaluative criterion for the three university operations (teaching, research and extension) (according to indicators of quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency). Then the concept of qualified academic migration would be added, which is a complement and extension of the previous two.

In short, the decade of the eighties of the twentieth century served to «invent» the frameworks, categories, indicators, mechanisms and instances for the realization of the neoliberal paradigm in HEIs. As we have said, university internationalization synthesized all the elements of this orientation and acquired the status of capital’s educational policy, which was based – and continues to do so – on the neoliberal evaluative culture.

Although, as we have expressed in the previous chapter, the neoliberal evaluative culture in education seeks to resolve the asynchrony between the increasingly short cycles of scientific-technological innovation and what is taught in HEIs, over time a kind of institutional entropy was evident in the dynamics of evaluation. Many of the evaluation processes became ends in themselves, or mechanisms to operate circumstantial bureaucratic actions, losing the sense and strategic orientation for which they had been established. We will return to this at length later. For now, let’s try to see in detail the institutionalization of neoliberal paradigms in education.

PART TWO

Institutionality to operationalize university internationalization with a neoliberal perspective

The decades of the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century allowed capitalism to build world hegemony on the need to promote a standardized institutional evaluation culture in school and university systems. This evaluative culture would be guided by the neoliberal perspective. In the eighties, the definition of the indicators of achievement made it possible to shape the parameters to operationalize these measurements.

At the same time, the international organizational fabric was being built for its concretization in the university institutionality. This activity intensified in the late eighties, nineties and redoubled so far in the twenty-first century. Let’s look at each case in particular.

In this part, we will give an account of a significant part of this framework.

International indexing systems for terms associated with the Indicators

Having identified the five basic indicators of the neoliberal evaluation culture (quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency), capital set out to construct universally accepted standardized terms for each of them.

With the creation of multilateralism and with it UNESCO (1945), as a body specialized in education, science, culture and information, there was legitimacy for this body to advance the compilation of definitions and build the route for its indexing.

Indexing

Indexing is the process by which a term is conceptualized, given scope and given meaning (theoretical and practical). Indexing has been widely developed by the so-called natural sciences, for example, to classify animals into species, genus, and family (Harari, 2022), avoiding identification, categorization, and procedural confusions.

The first generation of educational indexing was based on four dynamics (UNESCO, 2019): a) terminological control, b) controlled languages, c) official list of authorities and d) Thesaurus.

Terminology control refers to the process of «ensuring that synonyms and related words are reflected as equivalent and that homonyms and polysemic words are differentiated by qualifiers» (UNESCO, website).

Controlled languages correspond to lists of agreed terms, resulting from ordering data and information that allows describing a fact, situation, document, proposal or practice, by means of keywords or descriptors. Controlled languages made possible the development and hegemony of curricular taxonomies, such as that of Bloom (1956; 1971) and others, as well as publication indexes, accreditation standards, and university rankings.

The official list of authorities is the process of nominating the instances, institutions and personalities empowered to elucidate interpretive controversies, as well as the conceptual development and revision of terms, keywords or descriptors. This body is usually convened by UNESCO for the purposes of the work of the Educational Thesaurus.

Thesauri are the «controlled and dynamic documentary language that contains semantically and generically related terms that comprehensively cover a specific sphere of knowledge» (UNESCO, 2019).

UNESCO became the highest educational authority in the field of Thesauri in the education, culture, communication and research sectors, as well as an «appeal body» to clarify denominations.

Evaluative categories in indexed thesauri

Indexing as a practice and methodology strengthened the scaffolding for conceptual and paradigmatic processes, typical of the neoliberal evaluative culture in higher education. Consequently, it is important to study the definitions made by the UNESCO Thesaurus (2019) on each of the five categories of the evaluative culture (quality, relevance, impact, efficiency and innovation), as well as the omissions in this regard and the so-called associated factors.

Quality

Educational quality (also known as educational excellence) appears as «criteria established by an educational institution to determine the level of performance of a student» (UNESCO, 2019). In other words, the focus is on the quality of the results. This generates variants, such as the quality of the teacher, the institutional quality, the quality of cultural capital, among others. The UNESCO Thesaurus closely links quality with educational relevance.

UNESCO’s educational quality indexing allows for a conceptual framework that is synthesis – the remaining indicators are worked on as linked – of the neoliberal evaluative culture, to implement measurements and classifications. Each of these categories is linked to achievements, goals and temporality, which acquire the denotation of competencies, that is, what the student (or the teacher as the case may be) must achieve expressed in ranges (values) during a given time.

Concepts, achievements, goals, competencies and temporality build the minimum floor to implement the measurements. In the logic of capital, these measurements must be standardized at the international level, in order to try to align school systems and universities on a global scale towards a certain end in the era of globalization.

This is further specified with the STEM paradigm (learning what the capitalist mode of production needs in the employment-production relationship), for both material and immaterial commodities.

This process is more evident at the first levels of the education system, with the standardized tests of the Latin American Laboratory for the Assessment of Educational Quality (LLECE) through the PERCE,^[43] SERCE,^[44] TERCE,^[45] ERCE,^[46] and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with the tests of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). with their studies of learning performance and achievement of competencies.

In higher education , it becomes a polysemic term, which focuses on the institutional dynamics of teaching, research, extension, and intellectual production, through university accreditation, bibliometrics, world rankings, mobility, skilled migration, recognition of studies, and co-financed extension and research projects for development. In this last aspect, capital seeks to focus the effort on the purposes of private companies, much more on the quality of use of teaching-learning results. In the different cases that apply to different levels of school systems, an attempt is made to build reference points for continuous improvement reforms, under the principle of business quality of Deming (1950, boom 1982).

Pertinence

Educational relevance is defined as the «adequacy between what is taught and the needs and interests of students and society^[47]» (UNESCO; 2019), establishing as related concepts a) education and employment (impact), b) evaluation of education (quality), c) evaluation of the curriculum (innovation) and, d) responsibility (efficiency).

This is the relevance that is functional to international standardization and not the one that tends to the community bond that transforms inequalities. This is important to emphasize, because there are sectors of critical theory in education that assume – from another conceptualization – that relevance refers to the ability to subvert in an emancipatory way the relations of power-oppression existing in the territories, ignoring that neoliberal globalization disputed the term relevance. Without this distinction, we can fall into the empiricist infantilism of contrasting relevance (as transformative) with educational quality (as reproductive).

Unfortunately, the UNESCO Thesaurus does not contain an indexed term for society, which allows for various uses in the field of education. This is explained as a way of evading a conceptualization that denounces class society. However, Marxism – as a theoretical corpus of class struggle – is not without problems, because by defining society as the way in which individuals organize themselves to satisfy their needs and demands, allowing them to subsist through the transformation of nature through work, it separates human life from the rest of the animal kingdom and from the life of the planet. something that revolutionary ecology has been resolving. This theoretical problem would force us, from an ecosocialist perspective, to develop the notion of a society of life, breaking with humancentrism, Anthropocene or Capitalocene. This rupture would be catastrophic for the logic of capital, of permanent growth and plundering of nature – and also for productivist Marxism – which is why we consider that the lack of conceptual indexation is in itself a position taken in the neoliberal perspective.

As long as there are functional interpretations of relevance – improving the situation of applicability and saving costs for the State – with institutional impact, the possibilities of building a radical relevance that contributes to overcoming the society of classes, of dominant and dominated are dissipated. This approach, which is functional to the system of relevance, is the one adopted by the neoliberal evaluative culture in education, at all levels, modalities and school/university subsystems.

For the World Bank, in its document «Education: sector working Paper (1970, p.14), educational relevance is associated with the ability of education systems to align with the objectives, contents and outcomes of learning, with the demands of the labor market and economic development priorities; It is clear that the priority is the market.

Innovation

UNESCO (2019) associates innovation with four interrelated processes: a) scientific innovation (technological change, innovative behaviour, diffusion of technologies, research and development, patents, application of results), b) cultural innovation (change through cultural creation), c) educational innovation (educational experiment, elaboration of an alternative educational program, reforms and trends of educational change), d) pedagogical innovation (teaching methods).

In this last aspect we see how UNESCO yields to the temptation to reduce pedagogy to teaching detached from learning, that is, as a didactic theme (non-active managerial), detached from the other components of pedagogy (evaluation, curriculum, planning and classroom management) or, taking for granted that didactics is synonymous with pedagogy.

The four meanings of the term innovation postulate the mobility of the accustomed to the new, which is the axis of the conceptual utility of the term that capitalism seeks.

The incorporation of innovation in schools and universities constitutes the backbone of the neoliberal evaluative culture in education (overcoming the distance between inventive novelties and what is taught-experienced in the classroom).

In order to accelerate the instrumental-functional and standardized incorporation of innovation, capital has chosen the path of fragmentation of pedagogy, in which pedagogical fashions constitute a mechanism of depedagogization. Thus, pedagogy goes from being an autonomous frame of reference for teaching and learning processes, to being a set of technologies for the transfer of information and its instrumentation in frameworks of utility for the market.

Educational fashions (Bonilla, 2018) are the moments in which, during the second half of the twentieth century, pedagogy is fragmented and some of its components are emphasized. Over time, some of the milestones of these educational fashions, during the second half of the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first century are:

Moda de las didácticas (’50s);
Fashion of planning and management of the educational center ( ́60s),
Evaluation fashion (objective measurement, standards and taxonomies) and qualitative evaluation scales (’70s);
Fashion of the curriculum as the center of the school-university (since the ’80s and in many places still in force in the third decade of the 21st century). This fashion that has lasted for decades has had sub-fashions within it: curriculum by objectives, curriculum by content, inter-disciplinary curriculum, transdisciplinary curriculum by axes, globalized and integrated curriculum, curriculum by competencies, among others;
Fashion of managerialism (’90s), as a variant of classroom management;
Fashion for educational quality (especially since 2006 and relaunched with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from 2015.

Educational fashions are mechanisms for breaking with the dialectical unity between the different components of pedagogy, turning each of them – at different historical moments – into the determining center of pedagogy. In this way, the components of pedagogy, fragmented, become simple mechanical techniques that not only break with the humanistic and holistic character of pedagogies, but also facilitate their mutation to the requirements of the neoliberal evaluative culture in education.

In this sense, pedagogy – in reality the depedagogization that generates the fragmentation of its components – becomes an element of symbolic and material reproduction, of productivist functionalism, disciplinary fragmentation, alienation and various school forms of domination.

Unfortunately, from the alternative field, especially from the anti-capitalist resistances and some places of critical pedagogies and popular education, pedagogy has been trivialized or «vulgarized», to such an extent that any teaching proposal is called pedagogy.

Thus, we find the so-called pedagogies of tenderness, pedagogies of embrace, pedagogies of diversity, multicultural pedagogies, pedagogies of play, pedagogies of the gaze, among others, which are, in the best of cases, only punctual methods of intervention in the classrooms, lacking directionality and integration between the five components that make possible the pedagogical field of a humanistic scientific character (didactics, evaluation, curriculum, planning and classroom management). There is no realistic approach to curriculum implementation or assessment, nor a credible approach to planning from tenderness, for example.

We often joke with the promoters and defenders of these pseudo-pedagogies, questioning them about how the pedagogy of the hug is evaluated, planned and managed. With this, I do not intend to downplay the importance of playfulness, tenderness and inclusion in the pedagogical act, but to specify the charlatanism that surrounds it. The adoption of these pedagogical pseudo-fashions as if they were pedagogy, by the field of alternative resistances, undoubtedly contributes to depedagogization.

Another form of depedagogization consisted of stripping teaching and learning of their scientific character. Consequently, although for the first educational levels it was required to be a pedagogue, in universities training to teach was limited to university teaching courses focused on didacticism, but in most cases there has been a lack of specific deontological professional preparation for teaching work in HEIs. In this way, capitalism guaranteed that the transfer of knowledge, rather than meaningful and critical learning of reality, would be the axis of what happened in the classroom.

Finally, we want to emphasize that pragmatic functionalism guides the neoliberal concept of relevance, thereby contributing to the capitalist school culture in education.

Efficiency

In the UNESCO Thesaurus (2019), efficiency is associated with the economics – and administration – of education – educational contribution to the mode of production, performance, cost analysis, fulfillment of planned goals and managerialism – and therefore with institutional evaluation (evaluative culture).

Neoliberal efficiency requires summoning the so-called teaching vocation, as a mechanism to dilute the demands for greater investment in salaries. This seeks to facilitate the increase in the volume of tasks assigned to education workers, in the school restructuring linked to the neoliberal evaluative culture, without this having an impact on remuneration or working conditions. Vocation, as a feature attributed to the professional practice of teaching, seeks to be taken out of the motivational field of pedagogical work, providing it with features that precede the labor-capital relations, implicit in the educational fact.

In the Middle Ages the word vocation was used as God’s call to fulfill a mission, while in the period of liberal capitalism it took the form of a personal inclination towards a profession or activity, but in both cases it implies an altruistic commitment devoid of class character of the teaching work. It is very important, for the alternative field, to understand the teaching work as a job and the so-called vocation as the praxis derived from the conjunction of will with qualified professional training and fair remuneration.

In the teaching work, in a symbolic and material way, ideological surplus value is produced -Ludovico Silva- which is why his work is subject to the dispute over wages, working conditions and protagonism in the popular orientation of education. Efficiency is an objective orientation of business productivism, while vocation is subjective, typical of the motivational approach in the so-called field of organizational development.

Efficiency is not alien to surplus value, requiring a less technical-orthodox interpretation, which includes it in the dynamics between capital and labor. In this field, critical pedagogies are called upon to resolve the conceptual void, if we understand teaching praxis as work, the graduate profile and learning as forms of merchandise for the logic of capital.

Impact

However, when we enter the search for the term Impact , the results appear more diffuse, it seems that it is a term pending indexing in education. However, other multilateral organizations and Development Banks have previously defined and updated – contextualized to each case – both the term and the indicators that compose it.

The World Bank (WB, 2019) most clearly defines impact in its Anticipated Impact Measurement and Monitoring (AIMM) methodology^[48], pointing out that impact consists of developing the greatest power of education in the transformation of the environment (macro, micro and meso), with solid financial returns in the productive sector and ability to optimize the design and implementation of sustainable educational projects on the fly.

The News Agency of the National Development Bank of Brazil (BNDES, 2019)^[49] specifies that the dimensions of the AIMM methodology to determine the impact are:

results (effects on stakeholders, economic, socio-environmental),
contribution to the creation of markets (competitiveness, resilience, integration, inclusion and sustainability).

Associated factors

One of the strongest criticisms that was made – and is – of standardized tests and classifications is that they are based on the product (commodity) of teaching and learning, measurable aspects for neoliberalism in the five dimensions described (quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency), ignoring the set of elements that converge and determine school and university learning. This configures what we know as associated factors.

The associated factors refer to socio-cultural characteristics (class origin, as well as ways of understanding and valuing the purposes of education), educational institutions (their vision and way of assuming the mission in charge, quality of teaching [number of students per teacher, teaching methods and materials, time spent by teachers preparing classes]), the socio-emotional-cultural characteristics of the family (motivation to achieve, effort and resources invested in education, appreciation of the so-called social ascent, among others) and the psycho-emotional traits of the students. (This characterization has four elements that intersect it: a) attention, b) active commitment, c) review based on problems, failures and errors, d) the possibilities of consolidating learning in the exercise of citizenship within and outside school).

It is necessary to specify that the theory of associated factors usually differentiates between them, the a) macro factors (characteristics and dynamics of social groups that can be standardized) and populations at the national and international levels, b) meso factors (the impact of educational institutions and the features of educational centers on learning achievement) and, c) micro:(characteristics of students, families, teachers and management staff).

Neoliberalism in education, in its race to destroy the social agenda and the imposition of the paradigm of each person is responsible for its success, prefers to focus its efforts on five other factors associated with student learning:

cognitive and metacognitive (thought structures and worldview)
affective (emotions, motivations, beliefs, habits)
Referring to the development of personality (skills, competencies, entrepreneurship, assertiveness, resilience, emotional intelligence)
Personal and social (social dialogue about individual and environmental expectations)
Individual differences (environment, heredity and learning rhythms)

With the indexing of this conceptual infrastructure, the neoliberal evaluative culture in education manages to advance in the operationalization of internationalization. What follows is the definition of standards and the educational normalization of applications, scope, regulations and institutional frameworks.

Standards Systems

Once the evaluative terms or categories (quality, relevance, impact, innovation and efficiency) have been indexed, it is necessary to establish the commensurability of the indicators, through standards.

Standards are the set of norms, criteria, rules, specifications that serve as a reference, establish parameters and make it possible to measure in a uniform and compatible way the categories of the neoliberal evaluation culture (educational performance).

For example, for the category of educational quality, one of its standards is the days of class, which must have commensurability, that is, scales that allow measuring, weighting, classifying and identifying good, improvable or deficient practices, each with value ranges. That is, continuing with the same example, ideal 200 days of class, acceptable 180 days, improvable 160 days, deficient 140 days, deplorable 100 days.

Commensurability is given by:

Define a common unit of measurement (e.g., a school day is a school day of a minimum of 3 hours of classroom work and a maximum of eight hours),
Establish clear and measurable criteria (as an imaginary example: 130 days is the minimum number of days accepted for education, below it would be poor quality. Whereas, 150 days indicates progression towards a recommended level of quality and 200 days of class a good quality institution (at least in that unit of measurement),
Use standardized measurement methods that are agreed upon (LLECE-UNESCO standardized tests, PISA tests, accreditation and university rankings, among others),
Use the method of reductio ad absurdum (assuming the opposite of what is proposed to be achieved and arriving at a contradiction, to confirm the validity of the standard),
Ensure interoperability between standards (complementarity for the construction of judgment),
Validate and certify the standard (through technical bodies of recognised prestige),
Updating and maintaining the standard (adapting it to new technical and technological developments)

UNESCO’s International Institute for Statistics (HEI) has designed a set of standards for each category of neoliberal evaluation culture. However, other bodies such as the OECD or the IDB have developed their own, which tend to see education as a business issue, productivity and classification.

Educational standardization and normalization

Standardization consists of the standardization of processes, products and expected results in education. International educational standardization has been a continuous process of capitalism since its origins, but it acquired special dynamism and relevance from the creation of the United Nations system, multilateralism, the educational demands of capital in the third industrial revolution and the convergence of efforts of nation states.

Educational normalization is the dynamic through which it is sought to establish minimum agreements and consensus expressed in the practical meaning (operationalization) assigned to definitions, processes, expected results, norms, procedures, standards and behaviors measurable by competencies (institutions, teachers, students, staff). Educational standardization allows progress in a consensual regulatory framework to order the way in which it is going to be measured, evaluated and classified.

International standardization consists of the agreements reached between nations, regarding the scope of the indexed terms of reference and their implementation protocols. When it is not possible to agree on all the operational aspects of a definition, synthesis words and expressions are established that can be considered synonyms or transitional terms (in development).

This operates as particular but complementary processes, which are oriented to the encounter of categorization and indexation. For example, in Brazil, secondary technical education is the equivalent of diversified education in Venezuela, and both are part of the final stretch of secondary education internationally established as a requirement for entry into higher education. However, in the first it corresponds to three years of study and in the second to two, being particularities within the same family of educational policies.

Standardization is promoted to align educational internationalization policies in general and university internationalization in particular. It corresponds to the scientific paradigm of establishing protocols based on universally accepted (indexed) concepts and sub-concepts, in order to be able to advance in a shared way in a field (in this case public policies in education).

This indexing and standardization is complemented by the determination of techniques, procedures and (work) practices and operationalization of standards (measurement and classification parameters) agreed upon and accepted, which allow anywhere to corroborate whether what happens corresponds to the same activity, process or result.

The Total Quality Management (TQM) business model – which would become an operational benchmark for educational quality – popularized the ISO system, as part of a more general process of standardization of the world and capitalist production. The ISO model has become a reference framework for educational standardization.

ISO Standardization in Education

The International Organization for Standardization (1947), known by its acronym ISO, is the heir to the International Federation of Standardization Associations (1926-1942). ISO standards refer to minimum requirements and practices of input , process and output , which allow to achieve in an optimal way and with the least waste, the products demanded by the market, the promotion and creation of consumption needs and guarantee the appropriation of surplus value.

The ISO Standards, emblem of industrial capitalism, seek to facilitate the parameters for the exchange of goods and services on an international scale, to achieve criteria and practices that tend to homogeneity in the management, development of products and provision of services, guaranteeing that companies homologate good practices and results. ISO standards apply to the manufacture of products (seeking to be approved for the graduation of professionals), process management (topicality, quality, relevance, impact, efficiency of teaching, research and extension), provision of services (necessary for the diversification of sources of financing), supply of materials (inputs, raw materials for teaching and learning), occupational health and safety (world of work), environmental management (impact on the ecological crisis), information technology (decision-making).

Educational normalization is not static, but evolves according to the requirements of capital and the market, in this sense it is necessary to monitor the variations in these definitions. For example, from the perspective of the ISO, education is reconceptualized, moving from the human right to educational service, and from a human right throughout life to a human right for employability.

The premise of education as a service made it possible – especially promoted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) – to bring teaching into the ISO standards. The ISO 21001:2018 standards were created that established the Management System for Educational Organizations (SGOE), focused on the evaluation of compliance with requirements for students and other stakeholders (seen as users of the service), the improvement of student satisfaction (customer, quality), the development of content and offers (innovation, relevance) and the evaluation of results (impact, efficiency).

For their part, the ISO 9001 standards allowed educational institutions to identify, plan, execute and control the processes of continuous improvement of education (quality) in an approved and contextualized way , within the parameters of the neoliberal agenda. However, many times the educational directors did not grasp this relational process, but assumed that what they were doing – within the framework of the neoliberal evaluative culture – had no structural links with the market and the requirements of capital.

As ISO standards are generated by an organization linked to the business world, it is difficult to adopt them uncritically by school and university systems, as well as by a significant part of the population. This is where UNESCO comes in to adapt the terminology and educational performance of these norms, assuming them as their own and erasing the traces of systemic connection.

UNESCO standardization

UNESCO has played a special role in the work of adapting business standardization to education. An important part of this normalization is achieved in global meetings, conventions, agreements and the General Conference of Education of that organization. In these events, business recipes are translated into educational terms, dressing them up with novelty, as if a political orientation were being discovered, drawing the outline of a horizon that in reality has already been drawn by the sector of the economy, technology and capitalist governance.

However, we believe that UNESCO is not a one-dimensional body, but a space in dispute , and the so-called consensus-building actually shows how far one can move in one direction based on the correlations of political, economic and social forces existing in the multilateral organization. In educational multilateralism, care is taken not to go beyond what is agreed upon to avoid resistance that puts governance at risk, not only in school systems and universities, but also in national societies themselves.

The multilateral consensus is based on the representations of governments that in their vast majority promote the logics of the market and capitalism. Consensus, then, constitutes the expression of the maximum intensity that can be applied to comply with the formulations of neoliberal recipes and the minimum expected within the capitalist framework.

The multilateral consensus must be elaborated in positive and proactive language, something that turns out to be like going to Robert Louis Stevenson to take a social photograph of Dr. Henry Jekyll, knowing that at any moment he will become Edward Hyde, who will mercilessly and considerately attack face-to-face public education.

These consensuses and their scope are reconfigured periodically and are not updated simultaneously, but each one has its own dynamics, according to the priority that the world-system has for each of the neoliberal reforms in the different historical moments.

These incessant and multi-referenced movements of change create superimposed layers of narratives and imaginaries, which play at collective hope and when they are not fulfilled, generate the necessary disillusionment for the emptying of utopias and the flexibilization of the defenses of the public, a path that leads to the world of realpolitik that capital seeks to establish.

For example, the three World Conferences on Higher Education (1998, 2009, 2022), although they express and reflect the defense of the public promoted by the academic and trade union sectors of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), have also made it possible to introduce the elements of neoliberal university internationalization, the ISO-Education Standards and their political operation: the Neoliberal Evaluative Culture in Education.

UNESCO has been structuring this «translation» and «adaptation» around the five major evaluation categories (quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency), creating the cognitive illusion that there is no other way than resigned adaptation.

The great usefulness for the system and the undeniable triumph of UNESCO in this direction has consisted in leading – in these meetings for consensus – those who defend the right to face-to-face public education of the peoples, to struggle with the use of words and the occasional slogan, resignedly abandoning the dispute over the structural. When many of these activists – usually very well-intentioned – are asked about the balance of what has been achieved in the framework of multilateral events, they usually say that they triumphed by not allowing «education as a commodity» to be placed, or «public financing» to be reaffirmed, but when the general orientation of what was agreed is reviewed, It is evident that commodification and privatization triumphed, although what was pointed out as an achievement was not explicitly mentioned in the «consensus».

The normalization of education has been evolving, in each specific historical moment of the capitalist mode of production, determined by the demands of the market on school systems and universities. The educational normalization designed for face-to-face learning is not the same as the one we have now in contexts of changes in the world-system in the third and fourth industrial revolutions, especially with the digital transformation of education. Without this view of processes, it is difficult to understand the framework and its scope. On the road to hegemonic normalization, competencies appear as a hinge issue.

Competences

In the period of the rise of educational neoliberalism, an important part of educational normalization has focused on formulations that allow the achievement of competencies. Competencies become the traits, skills, and exit capabilities (graduation profile) that the merchandise (graduate) must contain, in accordance with the goals contained in the indicators of quality, relevance, efficiency, impact, and innovation.

In the case of HEIs, the competencies are usually general (university professional training), particular (specific to each field of knowledge and knowledge) and specific to the historical moment of capitalism (entrepreneurship, self-management, problem solving through the promotion of so-called useful critical thinking).

Although in the first two industrial revolutions, competencies organized by disciplines were prioritized (with emphasis on sciences based on mathematical, physical, chemical, computational, design, and applicability thinking), in the third industrial revolution, transdisciplinarity (learning that integrated the epistemic premises of the different fields of science) was the formative demand of capital and, In the fourth industrial revolution, heuristic convergence is the same as the fusion of disciplinary fields based on their uses in the production of material and immaterial commodities.

In the current stage, in each of the academic tasks of teaching, research, extension and intellectual production^[50], concrete, soft skills – soft skills in business language – and diffuse skills are established.

The so-called (concrete) teaching skills are defined as linguistic communication, multilingual, digital management, entrepreneurship, cultural awareness and expression, personal and social empathy, management of science, training in citizenship, management of the STEM paradigm.

When we talk about Soft Skills, capital refers to the most important operation to reprogram languages and expected responses, that is, to reinterpret concepts and behaviors from new frameworks. Frameworks are the conceptual, methodological and operational structures designed to organize, guide and systematize processes, decisions and analyses. That is, they are the operating system from which the new relations between knowledge, work and production are established. These frameworks modify work routines, giving rise to new teaching know-how.

Soft skills emphases vary depending on the different epicenters of capitalism today:

the World Economic Forum (WEF) considers that they are critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity and collaboration, priorities, defined from surveys of employers and analysis of employment trends;
for UNESCO, in addition to the above, they add interculturality, empathy and respect for diversity to achieve global or planetary citizenship;
In the case of the OECD,^[51] emphasis is placed on collaboration, problem solving and self-regulation (resilience, entrepreneurship, self-management);
For its part, CASEL^[52] focuses on socio-emotional competencies such as emotional intelligence, responsible decision-making, and relationship management;
Partnership for 21st Century Learning – P21 emphasizes communication without neglecting critical (functional) thinking, creativity, and collaboration.

Once the categories that identify the competencies have been defined, they have common characteristics that allow them to re-semantise each of them: interdisciplinarity (to learn to build innovation and technology through the hybridization of disciplines), practical approach (all knowledge must be useful to solve problems and develop jobs in the context of the current world of work), operability from public policies (the insertion of the individual in the governmental logic) and have an enormous empirical basis (the problem is evidenced in data of reality on which knowledge must be poured).

Specific competencies refer to the application of knowledge from different disciplines or transdisciplinary approaches. Teaching-learning competencies focus on minimum achievements of (output): language, literature and writing (to understand manuals autonomously and write analyses of production processes), calculation (to understand mathematical logical thinking and to be able to learn different mathematical ways of solving problems), adequate use of information and communication technologies(logic of the enlightened worker) and surfing of the sciences (ability to understand the ways of developing scientific thinking and to be able to learn the innovations that derive from it).

Soft skills are to contribute to meeting goals and stabilize the metabolic reproduction of capital. The work of BBC News (2024) identifies 17 soft skills, based on the analysis of platforms such as LinkedIn, Ondeé, OCC, CompuTrabajo and the government of Mexico, which are: Leadership (leading and guiding proactively), Emotional intelligence (repressing conflict, positive thinking), critical and strategic thinking (not to subvert order, but to contribute to the company’s strategic plan), creativity and innovation (continuous improvement), professional ethics (integrity for production), effective communication (transmitting ideas clearly to improve tasks), teamwork (to achieve production goals), problem or conflict resolution (organizing solutions to problems not foreseen in production), adaptability (flexibility in the face of changes in the environment), time management (more tasks in less time), negotiation (promotion of consensus in the face of divergences), empathy (understanding and responding assertively to the requirements of others), customer orientation (additions to the product based on demands), fulfillment of goals (achieving what is planned by associating will and knowledge), mentoring and coaching (building their replacement), proactivity (initiatives that show the ability to anticipate), responsibility and honesty (fulfillment of obligations and duties).

The OECD (2019, p.18) defines the following socio-emotional competencies (diffuse) that teachers must have and promote: leadership for the execution of tasks (motivation to achieve results, responsibility, self-control, perseverance), emotional regulation (resistance to stress, optimism, emotional control), collaboration (empathy, trust, cooperation), open-mindedness (curiosity, tolerance, creativity), relationship with others (sociability, assertiveness, energy), combination of competences (critical thinking, metacognition, self-efficacy)

Among the diffuse competencies are adaptability (contextual), entrepreneurship (success is the result of individual effort), taking responsibility for one’s own life (self-management), self-learning (vital in the face of the acceleration of innovation and school and university precariousness to incorporate the new in real time).

Competencies are heirs and have been influenced by psychologism (taxonomies of Bloom et al., behavioral learning objectives, predictive assessment, educational Darwinism) that seeks to replace the pedagogical field, and neuroscience that sees the mind and brain as programmable machines. In this logic of thought, conflict and class struggle (criticism of the establishment and the dominant order) are seen as a software defect (education), which must be replaced by another programming language (competency-based reforms) and operating system (redesign of school systems and universities) to make it absolutely functional to the capitalist mode of production.

In the interface of «popularization» of the competency approach, UNESCO has played a stellar role in giving viability to this new look at the purposes of the school system and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). In this transition, it has built «consensus» for its progressive installation, as evidenced in the biannual reports of the organization’s activities over the last forty years.

Then, it establishes semantic adaptations for each of these competencies, for school and university systems. Each of these fields and categories must move from conceptualization and relational enunciation to the measurable dimension, to data, number, statistics, which must move from the enunciative in multilateralism to its concretization in regional, national and local educational policies.

As UNESCO is a multilateral organization, whose governing council includes the official educational representatives of national governments, the task is much easier. These «consensuses» agreed upon at UNESCO’s General Conferences or their summits, forums and documents – whose conclusions have been endorsed by governments, their statements validated and their recommendations accepted – clearly give a place of transnational enunciation and directionality to the educational policies of the countries, that is, where the administration of school systems and HEIs is oriented. as well as change management. This is the paradigmatic basis of university internationalization from UNESCO.

STEM Normalization

Neoliberalism as a paradigm of the capitalist system, in the context of the third industrial revolution, is little interested in «competencies» in literature (even less Latin American and that recovers collective memory), geography (that generates identity), history (that explains where we come from, where we are and where we can go), ethics (capitalism has a morality contingent on each historical time of its uneven and combined development), health (for capital everything that does not produce profit is disease), art (as memory, but if art aimed at the design of innovations would therefore develop STEM+A), nor sociability.

Even today, capital disdains the role of education in the construction of citizenship for its model of democracy and governance, because it managed to achieve biopolitics (Foucault, 1977), move to psychopolitics (Chul-Han, 2019) and initiate the transition to the predictive regime (Bonilla-Molina, 2023) using only a fraction of the school and university systems. As Berardi (2020) points out, capitalism seems to have abandoned liberal democracy – and its conception of citizenship – as its central political project, entering a phase that goes from illiberalism to technologized neo-fascism. To focus the effort, the system developed STEM as a guiding program for school and university competencies. STEM is also a global attempt to make school and university systems functional to the new demands of capital, without altruism in between, only the aspiration to solve what they consider to be an educational decoupling.

To this end, STEM tries to make a continuous «renormalization» of concrete, soft and diffuse skills, which it now complements with four blocks of areas of knowledge, which it hopes will concentrate the effort of educational systems and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs): STEM.

STEM aims to:

To promote interdisciplinary skills to solve complex problems, integrating methods to build knowledge in the different sciences. This implies disrupting many of the founding premises of disciplinarity, allowing science, technology, mathematics and engineering to work simultaneously;
preparing the labor force required by the capitalist mode of production in the transition from the third to the fourth industrial revolution and the economy (work) in the twenty-first century;
to promote a model of equity based on individual effort, systems of competition, reward and punishment, as well as classifications;
to contribute to the promotion of the acceleration of innovation and the hyper-concentration of wealth that has occurred in recent decades;
building common sense of work based on soft skills aligned with production and reproduction, not with social transformation (collaboration, communication, resilience, creativity).

STEM has made it seem inevitable to update itself with respect to innovations that come from outside schools and HEIs and that these changes guide public policies in education. We do not intend to say that HEIs should be entropic, but that the adoption of innovations should be mediated by the principles of humanistic equity, social justice and construction of the commons, taking care that it is not the market that determines training priorities.

Philanthropy and its renewed effort for the normalization and standardization of change

In the period from 1980-2025, the number of foundations and philanthropic organizations that gravitate around the educational agenda and university internationalization has multiplied exponentially. In addition to those already mentioned, others with renewed impetus entered the stage, such as Banco Santander-Santander Universities, Mastercard Foundation-Scholars Program, Amgen Foundation, the Caixa Foundation, Iberdrola -and its subsidiaries ScottishPower / Iberdrola Mexico-, the Bertelsmann Stiftung – CHE (Centrum fùr Hoschschulentwicklung), Elsevier Foundation, CISCO-Networking Academy (NetAcad), IBM Foundation/CSR, Google PhD Fellowship & Scholarships, among others. Let’s look at some of them with work and impact on Latin American and Caribbean university internationalization.

Santander Universities

Santander Universities, part of the Santander Banking Economic Group, created the «Santander Universities» division/programme in 1996 to link itself to the dynamics of university internationalisation. On 9 July 2000, the launch of Universia was announced, a platform for the creation of a network of universities linked to its vision of vocational training. A little later, between 2002-2005, investment in scholarships for the student and academic sector was scaled up, which made it possible to expand associated platforms for mobility (Santander Open Academy) and online training (such as Women Emerging Leaders Scholarships) from 2010 onwards; calculating that more than 430,000 scholarships have been awarded for the sector.

Santander’s Educational Credit Programs were specified in three operating formats. The first, direct loans to students to finance tuition and studies (Matricula Universidad Loan / Total Carrera Loan), which link commodification and financialization of higher education. The second, Indirect Credits in the form of grants/credits that allow students to use the credit funds for the purchase of materials or cash withdrawals (Santander Scholars/Grants). The third, hybrid programs, especially aimed at allowing access to services such as accounts, credit cards and microcredits (incoming/outgoing).

Educational credit policies introduce the logic of debt in the passage through the university sector, whose payment can be extended over years of professional practice, transforming education into individual investment with economic return, facilitating the depoliticization of the student body with a negative impact on the struggle for public education with universal access.

In terms of university internationalization, Santander Universities promotes private governance of the public sector, since strategic alliances with HEIs are conditioned by employability, metrics, competence and classifications, leaving aside proposals for social justice in the curricula and curricula; curricular standardization and credentialism, especially with its strategy of micro-credentials, short training and focus on productive skills evidences this.

The scholarship policies of this foundation are aligned with the employability approaches of the transition period to the fourth industrial revolution, the metrics of the neoliberal evaluation culture and the academic mobility schemes that privilege students with greater cultural capital, which compromises the pedagogical autonomy and critical capacities of the institutions. Its strategy of promoting micro-credentials with programs aligned with business purposes fragments training and limits the critical capacity of graduates.

The work of Santander Universities has managed to penetrate the places of enunciation of the university internationalization agenda, to such an extent that it was the convening instance of the Third World Conference on Higher Education (Barcelona, 2022), where its influence on the agenda of discussions and debates, especially in employability and micro-accreditation policies, was clearly shown.

For this reason, critical pedagogies raise the need to prioritize non-reimbursable scholarships and funds for critical research, participatory governance that includes students and academics in the design, monitoring and evaluation of the initiatives of this foundation, critical evaluation of the impact especially in terms of equity, community return and generation of critical thinking. Any philanthropic initiative should be conditional on the strengthening of the public sphere; This applies to the other foundations that we will analyze.

Mastercard Foundation – Scholars Program

This initiative, announced in September 2012, initially has a pan-African emphasis on the normalizing and standardizing framework of hegemonic university internationalization. Initially, the link with Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) was indirect through alliances with North American and Canadian universities – Stanford, Berkeley, McGill, among others – that had mobility and research agreements with the LAC academy.

As of 2020, as part of the Foundation’s Scholars@10 strategy and 2030 vision, LAC is included as an associated region in global research and training networks, which has made it possible to start projects (2023-2025) with institutions in Mexico, Brazil and the English-speaking Caribbean, in leadership training initiatives. digital education and internship linkages for African fellows. Its emphasis on skills for employment is mainly in skills for entrepreneurship and sustainable development, digital work and leadership.

The biggest problem with this programme lies in the influence of universities in the global north – the US, Canada and Europe – which act as neocolonial factors, limiting autonomy and the possibilities of greater cooperation from the direct south-south perspective, especially between Africa and LAC. This generates tensions regarding the credentialist orientation, the selection and reproduction of elites that sustain the new international division of labor resulting from the acceleration of innovation, the dependence of universities on agendas enunciated with the logic of capital and measurement based on employability, not on social justice.

Therefore, the alternative formulations revolve around the reorientation of the program towards the financing of direct cooperation between Africa and LAC, through joint and autonomous research, curricular expansion oriented towards social justice and mobility processes that prioritize local needs.

Iberdrola Foundation

Iberdrola is a Foundation associated with the Spanish multinational company that is dedicated to the production, distribution and marketing of electricity. It has been criticized for its involvement in the Mexican energy sector, especially after the sector’s reform in 2013. Iberdrola began its expansion in Mexico in the nineties, actively participating in privatization processes of the energy sector, to such an extent that President Manuel López Obrador himself in 2020 expressed his rejection of the sale of gas at low cost to this transnational, for the generation of electricity from the thermal plant in Tuxpan. Veracruz. It has also been criticised by local communities who are concerned about the environmental impact of Iberdrola’s activities, which is why it has now been proposing support for green employment initiatives, as evidenced in the calls for its university programme (2024-2025) that included universities in Latin America, through its subsidiaries and inter-institutional agreements.

The philanthropy of this multinational seems to be oriented towards the creation of links with the academic elite for its expansionist purposes. In this sense, it made the call for Master’s scholarships (2025-2027) to finance studies in Mexican and Spanish universities, especially in areas related to energy and the so-called energy transition. With a view to attracting talent and guiding the training of local management cadres in the energy sector, the Iberdrola Foundation calls for research grants and aid programmes for young researchers interested in energy, sustainability and the environment, promoting short stays and internships in different LAC countries.

Iberdrola’s work has an instrumental orientation focused on the energy market, with a model of competitive scholarships that benefit those with the best cultural capital and prefigure as a potential academic and governmental elite, prioritising research areas of corporate interest.

Bertelsmann Stiftung – CHE (Centrum fur Hochschulentwicklung)

The Bertelsmann Stiftung is a German private foundation that finances public policy and education projects, with influence in Latin America. Together with the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK ) they created the think thank Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung (CHE), responsible for implementing the CHE University Ranking, which serves as a reference for the neoliberal evaluative culture.

Between 1990-2020, the CHE consolidated its methodologies for rankings and consulting services, focused on Germany and Europe, with its influence in the region being indirect and ideological. The CHE offers policies, recommendations and advice for reforms in higher education, promoting good academic practices that influence global university internationalization, especially in academic mobility destinations. Its influence in the region is conceptual transfer and academic soft power (structure, standards, metrics).

The CHE promotes the academic quality model focused on professional skills, employability, results-oriented teaching and lifelong learning. The criticisms of his work focus on the transplantation of paradigms without contextualization between the capitalist center and periphery, the promotion of university policies based on international metrics and classifications, the promotion of productivism and neoliberal efficiency, its asymmetrical influence and local participation limited to operationalization.

Elsevier Foundation

Elsevier is a company that is at the forefront of content, analytics and decision support in science and health. In 2005 he established the Elsevier Foundation, based in New York, and in recent times he has focused on supporting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including educational quality. Since its inception, it has awarded US$1.5 million per year in scholarships, grants and support to more than 100 organizations in 70 countries.

The foundation does not manage databases, but parent company Elsevier is in charge of Scopus, the global bibliographic database, as well as SciVal, a versatile institutional analysis tool and other tools used by universities for visibility, benchmarking and strategic decisions.

In terms of academic mobility, its contribution is through the OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Awards, which operates as an annual award for emerging scientists from low- and middle-income countries. The award includes access to ScienceDirect – an online platform that offers access to peer-reviewed scientific and technical journals – and participation in international conferences it organizes, which constitute sui generis forms of professional mobility.

The Elsevier Foundation and its funding company not only work on the normalization of university internationalization and the neoliberal institutional evaluation culture, but also strengthen the hegemony of global metrics to evaluate scientific quality, based on commercial, proprietary or referenced references in the corporate world. Equity does not appear as a referent of his work, on the contrary, competitiveness and classifications by productivism.

CISCO-Networking Academy (NetAcad)

It acts as an associative platform and foundation, although it is a global training program in networks, cybersecurity and digital skills, created by Cisco Systems in 1997. Its purpose is to train students in networking and Cisco technologies, being a pioneer in what is now called the digital transformation of education. Currently, this program has activities in 190 countries, with 17.5 million students trained since its launch, with 29,700 instructors in 11,800 educational institutions, of which 3,500 belong to Latin America and the Caribbean. Between 2000-2010 its expansion became evident and it began to have an important presence in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, among other places.

Between 2015-2020, he integrates the new elements of cybersecurity, the Internet of Things^[53] (IoT) and Python programming into his training^[54], something that would be relevant for his incorporation from 2020 into the UNESCO Global Education Coalition (GEC), for the development of online training in the so-called developing countries.

By providing NetAcad certified training in global standards, it contributes to educational standardization and the culture of bibliographic metrics. In terms of institutional management, they contribute to university accreditation processes by offering global professional certifications – CCNA, ^[55]CCNP^[56], CyberOps^[57] and DevNet^[58], among others – while some HEIs integrate NetAcad as part of their accredited curriculum.

In terms of academic mobility, its standardized certifications allow validating competencies of students and academics, as well as for qualified migrants. Another mechanism is the Cisco Networking Academy NetRiders that allows the exchange of instructors in global competitions in the digital-virtual area.

In terms of microcredentials, they are pioneers, because Cisco awards digital badges and global certifications that are recognized by universities in more than 190 countries, a dynamic that operates as a parallel system of international recognition that complements classic university degrees.

Its work expands throughout the LAC region, as evidenced by Brazil, which has one of the largest NetAcad ecosystems integrated into national universities; in Mexico, alliances with public universities such as UNAM and IPN are known; in Colombia it is integrated into the National Learning Service (SENA), as a regional hub; while in the Caribbean it is used as a state policy to modernize training in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, to cite just a few cases. This has the complexity that reinforces corporate standards in universities, impacting the homogenization of curricula, running the risk that they subordinate national educational agendas, in addition to concentrating university internationalization on employability.

IBM Foundation/CSR

IBM’s philanthropic initiatives date back to 1931 when Thomas J. Watson urged his employees to have a greater social commitment, under the CSR (community service) scheme. In the 70’s it launched its Community Service Program that would institutionalize CSR initiatives, but it would be from 2010 when its work with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) would deepen, whose results in education, equity, and sustainability -under its approach- are published in IBM Impact Report -we highlight the 2023 edition- which would be reinforced with the IBM Sustainability Accelerator (2022) and SkillsBuild under the slogan – the latter – of education as a common good.

Its alignment with the university internationalization strategy operates from different angles, especially through academic chairs and collaborations (SkillsBuild – topics of soft skills and digital transformation of education – and P-TECH through access to digital educational resources), mobility and skills development (Smarter Cities Challenge, IBM STEM for girls and the P-TECH program in 28 countries), research and sustainability (Jeferson Project at Lake Geoge), internationalization indicators (participation in global networks, number of co-authored publications, multicultural curricula, UNESCO objectives).

Google PhD Fellowship & Scholarships

In 2009, the Google PhD Fellowship was launched internationally, with an initial impact in Europe and the United States, expanding to other regions the following year. Between 2013 and 2021, ^[59] Google’s LARA supported a hundred researchers in LAC, especially in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, a figure that rose in 2024 alone to more than 800 fellows.

Google is part of the Global Education Coalition (GEC), under the commitment to contribute with teaching and learning products, as well as philanthropic support through its programs and instances. At GEC, Google contributes to digital infrastructure (workspace for education, teacher training, connectivity, remote learning) by promoting virtual education within the framework of the digital transformation of education.

The transition from LARA to PhD Fellowship has strengthened the value that Google gives to the improvement of bibliometric indicators, to access scholarships and funding, especially in papers, citations and co-authorships with Google Research that circulate from the works of laboratories and universities. Google’s publication metrics system, on the other hand, is increasingly used as a transitional benchmark for rankings. The conception of the PhD Fellowship contributes to the academic and student mobility scheme of the digital transformation of education that we will address in subsequent chapters; soft mobility, mentoring by Google researchers and the international online exhibition days typical of the internship model, strengthen new models of transdisciplinary and multi-situated know-how.

Since 2022, the PhD Fellowship Latin America has emphasized calls to support doctoral students studying at Latin American universities, incentives for young professors, and the creation of virtual research ecosystems. In terms of professional employability on the road to the fourth industrial revolution, this business philanthropy program privileges deep learning, computer vision, NLP, open science project management, and ethics in the use of artificial intelligence.

North-South asymmetries, the hegemony of paradigms and metrics that are useful to the capitalist center, as well as the emphasis on the rapid transition to virtual education of this philanthropic model, have had an impact on university internationalization in the pandemic and post-pandemic period, as evidenced by the growing weight of virtual teaching hours in universities in the region. Practically all HEIs have entered the regular career – which actually ends up being promotion – of the percentages of classroom hours that are carried out online. Normalization also operates in transitional frameworks and contexts, making the formalization of its initiatives in thesauri in reality the legitimization of ongoing practices.

Partners

In the decade of the 50’s of the twentieth century, UNESCO promoted the creation of the so-called Partners in education. This initiative was resized in the 90’s, at the height of the neoliberal boom, when the De Jomtein Declaration was drafted and its work plan was launched (1990), UNESCO reconfigured the office of the Regional Commission for Higher Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (CRESALC) and converted it into the Institute of Higher Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC, 1997), the World Conferences on Higher Education begin (1998, 2009, 2022), the Bologna Declaration (1999) emerges, the Dakar Agreements and the Millennium Goals (2000) are promoted, as well as the Sustainable Development Goals (2015), Futures of Education (2019) and the document Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education (2022).

Since 2010, UNESCO has professionalized its partnership strategy, especially through documents such as the Comprehensive partnership strategy^{^[60]} (2013/2019) and Key Partners‘ policies, aimed at strengthening intergovernmental cooperation with international organizations of the private sector, as well as with civil society, academia and other parties, now broadening the horizon to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in education. especially in the areas that complement and renew efforts for educational quality (SDG4) as a synthesis umbrella, seeking the convergent mobilization of resources to foster innovation and expand the impact of UNESCO consensus. This has managed to sit at the same table and coordinate efforts between governments, the private sector (Microsoft, Huawei, OCP Foundation and others), international organizations (European Union, World Bank, IDB, among others), Non-Governmental and Civil Society Organizations at the international level (322 NGOs in total), academia (770 institutions in 126 countries) and other actors (foundations, cities with model projects and youth communities).

Some of the mechanisms through which this alliance is presented to the public are UNESCO Chairs, the Global Education Coalition (GEC, 2020), as well as initiatives such as the Revive the Spirit of Mosul program (cultural reconstruction in Iraq), the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030), the Internal Partnerships Portal and the Global Education Coalition Reports (2025), but his work is much broader and has an impact on each of the political operations of university internationalization; an example of this are the more than 858,898 young people who have participated in programs for the development of skills for employment or the Global Learning House that establishes 409 open educational resources (ER) accessible to universities and students around the world, initiatives promoted by the GEC.

In the ecosystem of hegemonic university internationalization, Partners include academic networks and associations (IAU, USA, regional networks), multilateral and specialized agencies (UNESCO, IESALC, IDB, WB, among others), philanthropic foundations and donors, institutions in charge of publishing and providing higher education data (Scopus and others), private companies and ranking publishers (QS, THE, others). bilateral agencies and non-governmental organizations. They work in a coordinated manner through contracts, agreements, cooperation agreements, academic consortia and partnership programmes that articulate shared research, training initiatives, mobility projects and the provision of data and services. Its purpose is to build and disseminate narrative hegemony over the strategy of university internationalization, the political operations that express it and the neoliberal institutional evaluative culture, which does not deny the existence of differences between them, but rather highlights the aspects of convergence. Even those who participate in this fabric through the calls for the granting of financing essential for its operation, end up directly or indirectly contributing to the purpose of the ecosystem, for example, with the consensual objective of educational quality that ends up being expressed through bibliometrics, university accreditation, rankings and other classifications, models of academic mobility and mechanisms for the recognition of studies and degrees that are aligned with the five quality indicators and the STEM paradigm. The Partners contribute to the normalization, standardization and hegemony of university internationalization with a neoliberal perspective.

UNESCO acts as coordinator and convener of the Partners, whose role has been relevant for the expansion of the Bologna Process (1999), especially with regard to the maturity of the indicators of management and mobility of university internationalization. In fact, many of the members of the Partnership are linked to bibliometrics processes, ranking regionalisation initiatives, accreditation networks and relevant tools for the recognition of studies and degrees such as the World Higher Education Database (WHED), which influence mobility policies.

Partners’ policy has negative effects, especially in terms of increasing North-South asymmetries, the rise of metrics and commodification, inequality in benefits and unequal actions in terms of regional accreditation. The partners of the global north, made up of wealthy universities, large corporations, philanthropic foundations, consultancies, service and data providers, control the agenda and resources, producing dependency and structuring inequalities. The entry into this alliance of companies that classify universities on a global scale acts to the detriment of local agendas, affecting proposals for justice and social equality. On the other hand, scholarship and internship programs are increasingly focused on competitiveness and the prevalence of productivism, deepening inequalities. However, a global anti-system alliance does not seem on the horizon in a clear and forceful way, although there are more and more efforts in this direction, as represented by the World Congresses against Educational Neoliberalism. The standardization in its chapter of the Partners ends up contributing significantly to university internationalization.

Standardization in civil society, teachers’ unions and unions

In order to reduce resistance to the implementation of multilateral consensus, an international network of relations has been established with civil society organizations, trade unions and trade unions.

In February 2003, the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General created a «high-level panel to assess civil society cooperation with the United Nations.» The work of this task force made it possible to refine the mechanisms for co-opting non-governmental organizations for the purposes of the standardization agenda. One of the working groups (WGs) of this commission referred to the educational agenda.

This was part of the scaling up of educational standardization that came from the Jomteim Conference (1990), the Dakar Agreements (2000), the Millennium Goals (2000-2015), the Regional and World Conferences on Higher Education (1998-), dynamics that would later be consolidated with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially with SDG4 quality of education (2015-2030). The purpose, now of a specific nature, was to align the actions of the organizations of society with the purposes of university internationalization and the neoliberal evaluative culture, making the outside of these agendas not «profitable» in terms of political effectiveness.

To achieve this, they not only encouraged the meeting of non-governmental organizations with other actors, especially from the business sector – in search of consensus that would reduce belligerence and proposals outside the status quo – but also directed the financing of business philanthropy and cooperation from the global north, especially from the Nordic countries, who provide resources for the activities of a large part of the so-called civil society. This reorientation was intended to motivate civil society organizations, in need of sources of funding, to focus on the normalized agenda of the neoliberal evaluative culture and hegemonic university internationalization, introduced yesterday through the Millennium Goals, today through the SDGs and convergent initiatives.

In other words, the conditioning of philanthropic financing for civil society was promoted, so that its activities were aligned with standardized university internationalization programs; in fact, today it is practically impossible to obtain funds from international cooperation for purposes other than those approved by the United Nations (SDGs).

This has contributed to the slowing down of the processes of incorporation of innovation and change, due to a growing entropy, typical of the times of completion of the formal and bureaucratic tasks of the global governance system. The SDGs are the umbrella that unifies the multisectoral requirements for updating, they are not the strategy for HEIs since this is university internationalization, with its central political operation the neoliberal institutional evaluation culture. Even SDG4 only manages to be an accelerator of processes that began decades ago. This organizational labyrinth, which takes on tongue-twisting edges, is further entangled with the terms of reference of financing, which do not always distinguish between the strategic and the tactical. The result is the dispersion of energies by making the real goals set by the system for HEIs more diffuse, that is, the updating of the paradigm of learning and knowledge management, which reinforces the asynchrony between what is taught and the acceleration of innovation.

As the institutional framework and multilateral mechanisms become bureaucratized, they seem to lose their effectiveness in capitalist strategy. This is one of the reasons why the United States and the second Trump administration are committed to quick solutions, which lower the costs of the transfer of innovation in education, privileging those initiatives that occur outside the United Nations lane, especially those that emanate from corporate corporatism and the illiberal logic of the State.

The normalization of educational civil society – which in some cases reaches the pedagogical social movement – was doing the same with international organizations that brought together sectors of the resistance in defense of public education, unions and unions of education workers – in a much slower and imperceptible way than in other areas – which were given the status of consultative bodies in global forums. This new rank within a process of which they were not a foundational part, allowed them – and continues to happen – to attend multiple events on the university reform agenda and even, in some cases, to access funding for the participation of these groups in working groups and commissions. All in exchange for working within «umbrellas» of agendas limited to objectives and goals of the multilateral consensus.

In this way, they ensure that the prioritization of issues on the multilateral standardized agenda become the axes of the work plans of these groups. The echo of the period in which class autonomy was the principle that guided the work of many social and trade union organizations is very far away. The reconciliation of classes, the convergence of interests between employers, workers and institutions, becomes the banner that makes the agenda viable, especially based on the objectives, targets and indicators of the SDGs. Of course, a significant number of education workers’ trade union organizations – and to a lesser extent civil society – still escape and resist this logic, despite the increasing pressures to achieve an «all in».

At present, in UNESCO alone, the network of civil society organizations reaches 335 international non-governmental organizations (with their regional and national representations, which exponentially multiplies the number of associations and the impact of this strategy), 21 global foundations, 3,600 UNESCO club centers and associations^{^[61]} , and the most important international trade unions. of the education sector. We repeat, not everything is co-opted, but the multilateral effort is focused on diluting everything that has nothing to do with the SDGs. The central axis of normalization occurs within the SDGs, hence the effort to attract all the energy of university thought and action to this field. Paradoxically, this can not only disperse the focus of hegemonic university internationalization, but also the emphases that the present imposes on the struggles for the human right to education and public education supported by the States.

In this way, it is possible to carry out «advance damage control» with respect to the resistance that may be generated to the standardized educational agenda and facilitates its implementation in each country. The system does not always achieve a balance that tends to mobilize for its purposes.

Standardization of National Ministries and Secretariats of Education

The next phase is that of nationalizing the internationally standardized educational agenda, that is, converting multilateral consensus into educational public policies in each country. The nationalization of educational normalization, is specified through:

Government plans that speak of educational transformation – including university education – and use as a frame of reference the standardised educational agenda, synthesised with the aspiration of ensuring educational quality;
Programs to improve the quality of education, which are adapted to the local political language and are often presented as their own definitions. In the case of HEIs, this takes the form of initiatives associated with the neoliberal evaluation culture (bibliometrics, accreditation for quality assurance, rankings, mobility and recognition of studies) as political operations of university internationalization;
Adaptations, reforms and radical renewal in the training of trainers to align national education policy with the working perspective of the multilateral consensus, all expressed in concrete terms, in changes for knowledge management and teaching in the classrooms;
The agendas, agreements and resolutions of the national pedagogical congresses that prioritize the assurance of educational quality as a synthesis of educational normalization;
Agreements with the organizations that represent teachers and education workers, to make them converge in the territories with the elements of the agenda of educational quality and hegemonic university internationalization.

In recent years, these changes, which nationalize educational normalization, have been introduced through transformations in the mission and vision of HEIs, curricular reforms, curricula and study programs, which all coincide with the definition of achievement indicators that are specific to educational and university internationalization. In the case of higher education, accreditation for educational quality assurance usually contains elements of bibliometrics (even if it is through local adaptations), academic and student mobility, policies for the recognition of studies and degrees, as well as institutional classification mechanisms, which together play a central role in the construction of hegemony for the implementation of the multilateral consensus of educational standardization.

As a complement, educational normalization demands definitions, mechanisms, protocols, and procedures to quantify its definitions, moving towards other expressions of discursive consensus.

Statistical Normalization

In the 1960s, specifically from 20 October to 20 November 1964 – the marked impact of the third industrial revolution on the capitalist mode of production had just begun – the General Conference of UNESCO, meeting in Paris, approved the «Recommendation concerning the International Standardization of Statistics for the Publication of Books and Periodicals”. It reasons its decision on the desirability «that the national authorities responsible for compiling and communicating statistical data relating to the publication of books and periodicals should be guided by uniform criteria in terms of definitions, classifications and tabulations, in order to improve the international comparability of such data» (UNESCO, 1964).^[62]

The recommendation covers non-recurrent and printed periodicals, published at the country level. The recommendation indexes the terms book (non-periodical publication with at least 49 effective pages), brochure (non-periodical publication with less than 48 pages), first edition, reedition, reprint, translation and title, assuming for classification and enumeration the Universal Decimal System (DCU), which includes 23 groups of publications^[63]

The DCU is an adaptation of the method developed by Melvil Dewey (1851-1931), worked that was updated by Paul Otlet (1858-1944) and Henri La Fontaine (1854-1943), published in 1905 as Manuel du Repertoire Bibliographique Universel, whose characteristics are:

Universal Decimal Rating Labels (0-9),
universal (all human knowledge),
faceted (associated with the shade you select),
hierarchical (divisions, subdivisions and more logical groupings),
(block, classes and simple notational resources).

But, in order to promote in a normalized and standardized way the educational changes required by the new global cycle of scientific and technological innovations, the collection of data that went beyond publications was required, something that the capitalist center had been demanding for long before.

Within the framework of the transition from the first to the second industrial revolution, the Royal Statistical Society – founded in 1834 – and other similar associations in France, Germany and the United States began to raise the need for an international body to work on the flows of data on trade, population and the market. Between 1853-1876, International Statistical Congresses were organized^[64] that brought together government officials who sought to standardize data collection methods and statistical definitions. The International Congress of 1853, held in Brussels, rated educational statistics for the first time, even if these were simple ad hoc summaries made by academics.

In 1885, the world system created the International Institute of Statistics (ISI^[65]), currently made up of seven associations and more than 4,500 member organizations, an instance that built over time the culture of compiling, processing and publishing standardized data comparable at the international level.

In 1929, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in charge of carrying out surveys and compiling data on pedagogy and the organization of national school systems, an effort that led in 1932 to the publication of an International Report on 53 countries, which would be complemented by the publication of the first comparative tables in 1937^[66], allowing the progressive overcoming of differences in definitions and to go down the path of statistical standardization.

At the request of the United States, once the Second World War was over and UNESCO was created (1945) – successor to the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations – the task of establishing international standards and compiling global data that would make it possible to materialize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) was incorporated into the new multilateral organization. This task initially focused on the definition of key terms such as population of compulsory school age, types of education and variability of school systems, facing challenges of international comparability as evidenced in the 1955 World Education Survey. The situation would advance slowly in the following decades, while reports such as that of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in 1986 highlight the unreliability of UNESCO statistics.

Within the framework of the process of indexing, normalization and international standardization of data and information typical of university change operations that have been promoted since the third industrial revolution, global consensuses emerged, including the one known as the Jomtien Conference (1990), in which the limitations of UNESCO to measure learning outcomes. The demands of the Jomtein meeting in this area promoted the creation of an autonomous institute, which would be supported by the International Programme for the Improvement of Educational Outcomes (1996) and an Advisory Committee that would establish principles of autonomy, data quality and public access, a process that led to the creation of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 1999. However, as we will see later, the Latin American Laboratory for the Evaluation of Educational Quality (LLECE) had already been created in LAC in 1994, which contributed in this direction.

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics, whose acronym is UIS, is created ^[67] to work on the standardization of numerical information emanating from school systems and universities around the world. Statistical standardization would acquire a new boom with the creation of the IUS, because this work had previously been carried out, partially, by the International Bureau of Education (IBE/BIE) of UNESCO, based in Geneva, which would become once the UIS was created, to be an instance much more dedicated to the issue of curricular reforms. The OIE/IBE would be Piaget’s operations centre prior to its secondment to the United Nations system.

Statistical standardization becomes an important part of educational and university internationalization, as well as of its central strategy, the neoliberal evaluative culture in education. Statistical standardisation is of special importance for conducting and standardising data and processes for university accreditation, classification of publications, mobility studies and rankings, which are constituent elements of university internationalisation today.

Scientific classification

The neoliberal evaluative culture in education promotes educational and university internationalization as its central strategy. To this end, it builds, renews and consolidates the indexing, normalization and standardization processes that enable the homogenization of educational policies and their expected results.

These dynamics demand comparison (similarities/differences). The comparison allows us to monitor the trends of change on a global scale, its problems and progress. Operationalizing the comparison requires that standardization and indexing move towards classification systems by fields of knowledge (teaching-learning-research-extension). You cannot compare apples with carts, or lettuce with elephants, therefore, the technique must be fine-tuned to obtain results.

Only to the extent that the comparison allows establishing the parameters of complementarity and correspondence between different disciplines, the interdisciplinarity that capitalism requires since the third industrial revolution becomes not only viable, but fundamentally operable.

Classifications – for the purposes of this paper – are understood by fields and/or hierarchies. When we classify the social sciences with their differentiated characteristics from the natural sciences, we do so by their field, while when we assess the rhythms and impact of university internationalization in institutions, we are hierarchizing. As the quantitative paradigm guides the epistemology of the market, measurable classifications (by fields/hierarchies) make it possible to establish educational goals linked to production and innovation, hence their systemic importance.

This is a debate that goes back to the first industrial revolution and the debates that accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism. In his Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-1842), Auguste Comte, founder of positivism, proposes the classification of the sciences based on their decreasing complexity and increasing generality, placing the abstract and quantitative sciences as the basis of the rest.

For his part, the American Charles Sanders Peirce refined this idea with a classification proposal that began with mathematics and ended in sociology, emphasizing progressive abstraction. Sanders proposed a triadic classification (discovery sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology, revision sciences including history and literary criticism, and practical sciences such as engineering and medicine), with an emphasis on logic and semiotics, and a focus on the scientific method.

Marxism had a fundamental impact on the way in which the relationship between science and society is understood, emphasizing that science is a social construction that is oriented by class interests. In this sense, he makes a strong critique of the supposed neutrality of science, giving singular importance to transformative praxis, even Engels proposes a dialectical understanding of nature. Marxism has influenced the development of the sociology of science, which in turn contributes to the study of reforms of the school, university and scientific systems.

Although the term social sciences was introduced in 1767 by Mirabeau, and in 1895 Émile Durkheim established the first sociology department, this was not part of an explicit hierarchical normalization. It would be in 1858 when the Journal of the Society of Arts clearly introduced the term hard science, which would become popular in the twentieth century. More recently, in 1964, in the midst of the take-off of the current hegemonic model of university internationalization, John R. Platt published an article in Science analyzing scientific productivism, a precursor to Norman W. Storer’s 1967 work in which he formalizes the division between hard sciences – intensive use of mathematics and calculus, integration of knowledge and recognition of errors – versus social sciences considered as soft sciences – less rigorous methodological and subjectivity – which has had a significant impact on the structure of HEIs. These classifications – hard and soft sciences – would influence the classification systems of publications, institutions and the differentiated emphases of mobility between high-, middle- and low-income countries.

International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED)

In 1976, UNESCO created the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), a numerical classification structure that allows educational information to be organized and classified in an internationally standardized manner. The data have an approved denotation that makes them comparable between school-university systems, as well as between localities, countries, regions and on a global scale. The ISCED has been updated several times, with significant ones being carried out in 1997 and 2011.

For example, the ISCED classifies

educational programs in series of levels, based on their content, duration and results obtained;
education at nine levels, ranging from early childhood education to doctorates;
Educational programs by areas of study, using the ISCED Fields of Education and Training (ISCED-F), include 11 broad fields, 29 narrow fields, and approximately 80 detailed fields.

The reports and reports of national governments are presented with these standards, which facilitates international comparability, the assessment of general and specific trends. The ISCED has the difficulty, that some school and university systems are still going through the homologation of educational normalization, which is why some information still does not fit into the interface.

UNESCO Nomenclature for Field of Science and Thecnology

This classification is produced by scaling up the standardization work carried out by UNESCO’s International System of Scientific and Technical Information (UNISIST). Its main purpose was to facilitate a standardized and unified system to be used in the classification of research articles, doctoral theses and scientific dissertations, events and meetings of researchers, academics and intellectuals.

This system, proposed in 1973 and widely disseminated since 1974 by the Division of Science Policy and Statistics for Science and Technology of the multilateral organization, has a numerical hierarchical structure^[68]. Its implementation was made in the SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) format compatible with semantic databases.

Its usefulness is linked to:

management of research, development and application projects,
Systematization of doctoral theses and postdoctoral studies
Classification of academic articles

The UNESCO classification covered more than 4,000 terms and was updated in 1988. However, in the process of increasingly evident alignment of the multilateral organization with the objectives of the capitalist center, in 1992 it abandoned this system and decided to assume the Classification of Fields of Science and Technology (FOS) of the OECD Frascati Manual, especially in its revised versions of 2007 and 2015.

However, the UNESCO nomenclature contributed to the standardization of the operations inherent to university internationalization, by providing a framework of reference. In bibliometrics, it allowed the quantitative analysis of publications classified by fields, allowing comparable metrics. In terms of rankings and accreditation, it influenced global rankings – such as ARWU – that use their fields to determine levels of excellence. Student and academic mobility uses classifications to facilitate exchange and influenced Conventions such as the Lisbon Convention (1997) for mutual recognition and the validations of equivalences that are built from the Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications (2019).

The progressive adoption of this nomenclature by countries contributed to the standardization of the neoliberal evaluation culture in education. Countries such as Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, among others, have been using it for quite some time.

OECD Frascati Handbook for Fields of Science and Technology (FOS)

In 1963, at the dawn of the third industrial revolution and the unusual explosion of the acceleration of scientific and technological innovation, a meeting of experts took place in Frascati, Italy, convened by the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) to prepare the Proposal for Practical Standards for Experimental Research and Development Surveys (Proposed Standard Practice for Survey of Research and Experimental Development). The Frascati Manual classifies the fields of science and technology in a complementary way.

Its first edition was in 1963, which was followed by periodic updates and improvements (1970, 1976 and 1981). In 2002, the sixth edition incorporated the classification called «fields of science«, and in 2015 guidelines for public financing of R+D were added, based on various modalities, including tax exemption, which is an important part of the sources of financing of national science and technology organizations.

This standards manual is used to classify the fields of science and technology into natural sciences (mathematics, computing and information, physical, chemical, earth and environmental sciences, biological, other natural sciences), engineering and technology (civil, electrical, mechanical, chemical, materials, medical, environmental, biotechnology, other engineering and technological sciences such as aeronautics), medical and health sciences (basic medical sciences, clinical medicine, health sciences, medical biotechnology, other medical sciences), agricultural and veterinary sciences (agriculture, forestry and fisheries, animal and dairy science, veterinary, agricultural biotechnology, other agricultural sciences) and social sciences (psychology and cognitive sciences, economics and business, educational sciences, sociology, law, political science, social geography, media and communications, other social sciences), humanities and arts (history and archaeology, language and literature, philosophy, ethics and religion, arts, other humanities), contemplating 42 subcategories. Consequently, university internationalization corresponds to social science studies.

The manual states:

standardised definitions of Research and Development (R+D), especially in basic research (experimental theoretical work without a specific application objective), applied research (use of scientific knowledge for specific practical objectives) and experimental development (development or improvement of products, processes and/or services),
Classification of research fields (categories, subcategories),
Data collection and processing (guidelines for data handling in R+D),
Support for scientific and technological policies (assessment of resources invested, sources of financing and basis for granting credits in the area),
International comparability (the manual is used by 75% of the countries in the world).

The FOS classification is designed to measure expenditures, personnel and results in research + development (R+D), recognizing the growing interdisciplinarity of knowledge and the relationship between hard and soft sciences. Since the 2007 update, emerging fields such as nanotechnology and biotechnology have been incorporated. Today, the FOS classification is used by UNESCO and many national statistical offices to assess the impact of public policies on R+D.

These standards are essential for the interconnection of laboratories and scientific research teams around the world, including the determination of funding priorities. These classifications began to be used for laboratories, research and documentation centers of universities and educational institutions in order to align their protocols and strategic horizon, having an impact on accreditation systems and rankings.

International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED)

ISCED (2011) is an update and development of the work of ISCED-UNESCO in the seventies of the twentieth century. The first edition of ISCED was taken over in 1976, revised in 1997, incorporating elements of the expansion of tertiary and non-formal education. The 2011 version was approved by the 36th General Conference of UNESCO, after detailed work by the UIS (Canada), the OECD and the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat), showing the character of the capitalist center as an instrument.

ISCED is an independent but complementary statistical framework to Frascati (OECD), by studying data on the evolution, management and impact of R+D in HEIs. This complementarity is evidenced in the OECD Handbook for Comparative Statistics, in which Frascati defines R+D and ISCED classifies the related educational programmes.

ISCED impacts university internationalization in each of the operations of the neoliberal evaluative culture. In bibliometrics by providing precise frameworks for the classification of publications and research indicators by scientific field; in accreditation by mapping the relationship of national programs with global standards, which is especially useful to agencies such as AACSB and EQUIS for the evaluation of equivalences; regarding rankings, QS, ARWU and THE use ISCED information to adjust the proportions of measurement of the impact of international students, research and employability possibilities; while in academic and student mobility it facilitates the standardisation of qualifications for international scholarship and support programmes.

Accreditation for educational quality assurance

University Accrediting Agencies

University accreditation is the process by which Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) voluntarily submit to the evaluation of their teaching, research, extension and intellectual creation programs, through standards of quality, efficiency, relevance, impact and innovation. Accreditation involves an evaluation of performance in institutional management (governance, infrastructure, financial resources), learning outcomes (especially impact on employability), academic excellence (curricula, teachers, research), social engagement (community link, service offer, relationship with the productive world and innovation) and relationship with other dynamics of university internationalisation (mobility, agreements, publications, international classifications, participation in global networks and internationally funded projects). University accreditation implies institutional acceptance of classification (local, national, and international).

Accreditation can be institutional (the entire university), of programs (specific careers), in national modalities (State agencies) or international (global networks). The main actors in these processes are the accreditation agencies (public, private or mixed, national or international), universities and academic programs that request it, and the States and international organizations in charge of establishing the regulatory frameworks.

As we mentioned, one of the central focuses of university accreditation are the programs, because they express institutional achievements and scope, especially in terms of:

The management and its link of the programs with the strategic vision-mission of the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs);
Comprehensive training;
The institutional capacity to provide support to teaching, research and extension, especially in terms of infrastructure, equipment and allocated budgetary resources;
The profiles of graduates and their results in terms of the professional career of the graduates;
The relationship between the educational model and the forms that curriculum development takes;

The standards are usually contrasted through:

Surveys of students, teachers, graduates and authorities;
Data collections are reviewed, sources are verified, and scientific criteria for their validation are established;
The figures and data handled by the institution are counted;

Every day the number of networks and groups that promote university accreditation grows, as a process that converges the set of initiatives of university internationalization, while contributing to continuous improvement, typical of the paradigm of educational quality. Accreditation has an impact on the rest of the dynamics of internationalization; in bibliometrics and rankings by requiring published and cited research, in academic and student mobility by privileging international agreements and scholarships, in the recognition of studies and degrees because the university systems and employment agencies of the countries usually take the results of accreditations as a reference.

In this context of global alignment of the vision, mission and indicators of university achievement, there is a precarious contribution of alternatives to the hegemonic model, on the contrary, it has been naturalized that this is what should be done. Of course, there are more and more critical voices warning that the recommendations that emanate from these accreditation processes for the assurance of university educational quality, tend to the standardization and homogenization of the sector, in accordance with the requirements of the neoliberal capitalist mode of production. By privileging productivity, employability and quantitative metrics over cultural diversity, social relevance, local knowledge and social justice, the dominant system is reproduced in a symbolic and concrete way. Therefore, a clear challenge is to achieve other forms of solidarity, accreditation and validation of university processes and dynamics.

The alternative has to emerge from distancing itself from the neoliberal evaluative culture, because it penetrates all levels of academic life, both at the epistemological level and in the formulation and management of public policies. The only way to present alternatives to the production and reproduction of practices that dilute the social mission of universities is to show their contrast with the hegemonic mode in progress. This acquires special relevance with university accreditation, because it has been institutionalized in an often uncritical way, when in reality it is from this work that the information that will feed the indices is produced, according to the ranges of scores that contribute to the classifications and opinion judgments are issued -recommendations, observations by the personnel in charge of accreditation- that feed the entire machinery of the neoliberal evaluative culture.

Let us now look at part of the institutional, supranational and national fabric that makes the hegemony of this accreditation approach possible.

International Network of University Quality Assurance Agencies

In 1991, at the International Conference on University Quality Assurance organized by the Hong Kong Academic Accreditation Council (HKCAA), the International Network of Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education, known by its acronym INQAAHE, was created. University quality is assumed as the umbrella name of its actions.

This initiative was initially put into operation through a convergence of 8 agencies and currently brings together more than 280 national, regional and international agencies, with its headquarters in Barcelona, Spain. The moment of creation of this network occurs when the neoliberal evaluation culture is institutionalized in the university sector, based on the precise identification of the measurement categories that emerge from neoliberal globalization (quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency). Its work is that of a second-order arbiter, aligning the work of its member agencies.

INQAAHE has a strategic alliance with the following quality assurance networks in Higher Education Institutions: AfricaQAN (Africa), ANQAHE (Arabic), APQN (Asia and the Pacific), AQAN (ASEAN), ASPA (Association of Specialized and Professional Accreditors), CAMES (African and Malagasy Council of Higher Education), CANQATE (Caribbean Area Network for Quality Management in Tertiary Education), CEENQA (Central and Eastern European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education), CHEA/CIQG (Higher Education Accreditation Council / International Quality Group), EAQAN (East African Higher Education Quality Assurance Network), EASPA (European Alliance for Professional and Subject-Specific Accreditation and Quality Assurance), ECA (European Consortium for Accreditation in Higher Education), ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education), ENAEE (European Network for the Accreditation of Engineering Education), EQANIE (European Quality Assurance Network for Computer Education), ICAN (International Curriculum and Assessment Network), AQAAIW/IQA (Association of Quality Assurance Agencies of the Islamic World), PNQAHE (Pakistani Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education), REALCUP (Network of Latin American and Caribbean Associations of Private Universities), SAQAN (Southern African Quality Assurance Network) and SIACES (Ibero-American System of Quality Assurance in Higher Education). INQAAHE has full members and associate members all over the world.

INQAAHE recognises good practices and supports the capacity building of affiliated agencies and accredited universities, through the Guidelines of Good Practice (GGP). The specific goals of the GGP are to strengthen accreditation frameworks, provide evaluation criteria (self-assessment and external evaluation) with recognized and certified quality standards, foster the professional development of the associated institutional network, and facilitate international cooperation mechanisms, by generating reciprocal recognition of their results and reports. Although the GPPs are intended to serve as a framework of reference for accreditation agencies, not for universities, it is undeniable that their parameters and suggestions guide the institutional culture of evaluation in HEIs.

Although INQAAHE does not directly accredit, its work influences the form and mechanisms of university quality assessment on a global scale, being a priority in hegemonic university internationalisation. Bibliometrics is influenced by the fact that the attached agencies require research and publication policies, which are oriented towards continuous improvement and evidence, the standardization of metrics and the use of bibliographic databases -for example, Scopus/WoS- as weighting references. In the area of rankings, it contributes to standardizing quality expectations in teaching, research, governance and internationalization, which facilitate institutional comparability. In recent years, its work has strengthened the dominant mobility scheme, by aligning itself with UNESCO’s work on the recognition of studies and degrees.

INQAAHE has strengthened its work on quality assurance of micro-credentials, through two specific conferences for LAC (2024-2025) in partnership with REALCUP^[69], as part of its work for the convergence of standards and regional recognition of micro-accreditation.

This work by INQAAHE impacts the density and impact of membership, reaching articulation in the region with 17 countries, 27 full member institutions, 4 associates and 1 affiliate, being one of the most dynamic factors in the implementation of micro-accreditation. Therefore, the alternative seems to be given by using INQAAHE as a vehicle not as a model, promoting the incorporation of criteria of equity, interculturality and social commitment in national accreditation systems, based on consensus with the different actors of the university world.

RIACES

In 2003, the Ibero-American Network for the Accreditation of the Quality of Higher Education (RIACES) was created, made up of 25 accreditation agencies from 18 countries. RIACES works on university internationalization in accreditation, as part of the evaluation culture that seeks to guarantee quality in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Its work is not to accredit but to articulate the work of agencies in LAC, Spain and Portugal, strengthening the culture of evaluation for university quality assurance, acting as an intermediate platform for meeting, dialogue and advancing consensus.

This has as a frame of reference the old cultural relations of colonial dependence between the European metropolis and the Latin American periphery. We do not intend to say that it is a neocolonial initiative, but that its actions are based on the old political, economic, cultural and social relations inherited from the colonial period.

Its specificity lies in the perspective of a meeting network, not a control network, contributing to the inter-agency link that contributes to the technical support and continuous training of evaluators in quality management, through the promotion of the regionalization of assurance. In recent times he has incorporated into his work the promotion of regional micro-accreditation projects such as ARCUSUR,^[70] ALFA^[71] and the Tuning Project^[72].

The case of RIACES is unique, because it shows how neoliberalism in education achieved an all in the logic of capital, since countries governed by the right, left, center or any other political identity, are part of this space. There is no ideological outside, there is no anti-capitalist governmental alternative in terms of educational quality, accreditations, evaluation culture and neoliberal university internationalization. Not even Cuba escapes this dynamic of absorption, the market trend in education. Since there is no governmental outside in this field, the hegemony that capitalism managed to achieve as a world system is evident. Those who have not yet done so seem to be on the path to doing so through the establishment of national accreditation mechanisms that tend towards convergence.

Moreover, many educational resistances that define themselves as anti-neoliberal, are part of and even feed processes that contribute to the model of university internationalization and neoliberal evaluation culture (bibliometrics, dynamics of rankings and accreditations), normalizing the hegemony achieved by capital.

RIACES is a space of special interest for those who want to study the achievements of capitalism in education.

SIACES

The Ibero-American System for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (CIASES), officially created in 2019, is an interregional body created to strengthen accreditation systems in Ibero-America. Its space of action is Latin America, Spain and Portugal, including public and private management institutions. SIACES is an initiative of the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), ^[73]which was the convening body of the third world conference on higher education (CMES, 2022), integrated into its structure, to such an extent that SEGIB has facilitated the meeting between national accreditation agencies and experts to promote its mechanisms.

SIACES It is distinguished from RIACES because it emphasizes good practices, promoting its certification, as is the case of the National Accreditation Council (CNA) of Colombia. The stated purposes of SIACE are

articulate national quality assurance agencies in HEIs,
strengthen technical capacities for evaluation, accreditation and regulation of educational quality,
promote regional cooperation, in good practices and standards,
supporting academic mobility, through the recognition of degrees, competences and accreditations,
to promote respect for the diversity of approaches and national sovereignty.

SIACES is made up of:

National Agencies:
Argentina: the National Commission for University Evaluation and Accreditation (CONEAU),
Bolivia: Executive Committee of the Bolivian University / National Accreditation Committee (CEUB/CNA),
Brazil: National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anisio Teixeira / National System for the Evaluation of Higher Education (SINAES),
Chile: National Accreditation Commission (CNA-Chile),
Colombia: National Accreditation Council (CNA),
Costa Rica: National System of Accreditation of Higher Education (SINAES) / Costa Rican Entity for the Accreditation of Higher Education – attached to CONARE (ENQAES),
Cuba: National Accreditation Board (JNA),
Ecuador: CEAACES (replaced by the CES and CACES),
El Salvador: Salvadoran Accreditation Commission (CSA),
Guatemala: Council of Private Higher Education (CEPS),
Honduras: Council of Higher Education (CES),
Mexico: Council for the Accreditation of Higher Education (COPAES) / Interinstitutional Committees for the Evaluation of Higher Education (CIEES).
Nicaragua: National Council for Evaluation and Accreditation (CNEA),
Panama: National Council for University Evaluation and Accreditation of Panama (CONEAUPA),
Paraguay: National Agency for the Evaluation and Accreditation of Higher Education (ANEAES),
Peru: National Superintendence of University Higher Education (SUNEDU),
Dominican Republic: Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology / Quality and Accreditation Unit (MESCyT),
Uruguay: Ministry of Education and Culture (through ANEP) and UDELAR,
Venezuela: National Council for the Accreditation of Postgraduate Studies / National Council of Universities (CNU),
Spain: National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA),
Portugal: Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (AEAS).

Specialized regional networks:
Ibero-American Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (RIACES),
European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA),
International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies un Higher Education (INQAAHE)

Multilateral and regional integration organizations:
Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), within the Ibero-American Knowledge Space (EIC).
Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI),
Institute of Higher Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC – UNESCO),
Andean Development Corporation (CAF).

Articulating spaces and programs:
Ibero-American Knowledge Space (EIC),
Ibero-American Recognition of the Quality of Higher Education (PRICES) Program,
Observatory of Good Practices
Working Group on Accreditation of Careers,
Working Group on Institutional Accreditation,
Working Group on Regional Quality Indicators.

Other indirectly linked bodies:
Councils of Rectors of public universities in each country.
Ministries of Higher Education (or university) in each country

AACSB

The AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) accreditation works to recognize business schools worldwide. Accreditation certifies institutional excellence (quality).

The main features of AACSB accreditation are:

It accredits undergraduate and postgraduate business schools, as well as advanced training programs in accounting,
Its global standards accept contextual adaptations when these are the technical support product,
They especially value the relationship between research and academic innovation,

Its standards of quality, relevance, impact, innovation and efficiency are defined by:

Mission (clear and defined),
Leadership (effectiveness in governance),
Academic quality (professors active in research and innovation, up-to-date programs aligned with the needs of the labor market),
Student experience (innovative learning and practical skills)
Impact of the school (society, economy, research and improvement of the business sector)

The European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) is an accreditation granted by the European Foundation for Management Development^[74]. This accreditation is specialized in business schools and training programs in business administration and management. The ranking still does not reach the 200 institutions recognized by EQUIS.

The characteristics of the EQUIS accreditation are:

Comprehensive quality approach (institutional strategy and mission, links with the business environment, academic research, cultural diversity
Internationalization policy (coupled with the trend of innovation, quality, relevance, impact and efficiency),
International recognition (alliances with other international institutions, international diversity of the faculty and student composition, academic exchange),
Ethics and sustainability (corporate social responsibility),
Flexibility in educational models (adaptation to the needs of the world market),
Global recognition (EQUIS seal as a reference in manager training).

BOTH

The AMBA (Association of MBAs) accreditation focuses on the evaluation and accreditation of graduate programs in business management, especially Doctorates in Business Administration and specialized Master’s degrees in management. The body in charge is the Association of MBAs based in London. The main objective is to ensure academic excellence, through the verification of international standards of relevance, impact, innovation, quality and efficiency. Currently, only 2% of business schools in the world are accredited by this system.

The central characteristics of this accreditation are:

Exclusively for postgraduate degrees in business administration and similar,
Standards applied to the programs, faculty, profile and previous experience of the students, internationalization policies, links with the productive environment,
A symbol of excellence, focused on quality and not on the quantity of accreditations,
Impact on professional careers due to the high recognition that private employers have,
Innovation focused on the market and global challenges of production.

The evaluation criteria are: structure and design of the program (training focused on business management and market trends), quality of the teaching staff (experience and ability to integrate theory-experience-proposals), profile of the students (work experience in management, minimum of 3 years), teaching methodology (combining theory-practice, tradition and innovation, innovative approaches, case studies, simulations and collaborative learning), monitoring (employability of graduates and their professional development), internationalization (diversity of student backgrounds, exchanges and agreements with other global institutions).

Although there are many more accreditation agencies, we thought it was important to mention those referred to here, as a panoramic approach to a much broader spectrum.

Publication registration systems (ISBN, ISSN and others) as reference frameworks for the arbitration and indexing systems of publications

In 1946, post-World War II capitalism relaunched the International Institute for Standardization (ISO)^{^[75]} as an institutional mechanism to agree on production standards and the quality, safety and efficiency of the production chains of goods and services. In reality, what was at stake was to regulate and control the parameters of industrial production in the post-war period, something that fit perfectly with the Fordist models of production developed between 1930-1970, and was later adapted to pay tribute to post-Fordist managerial approaches (1971-present).

In this context, in 1951 the first ISO Standards were created, as a standard reference for industrial length measurements, which would evolve over time and acquire the feature of quality standards in the post-Fordist period.

In 1965, just a few years after the start of the third industrial revolution, inspired by the system of standards promoted by the ISO, the Anglo-Saxon publisher WH-Smith, the British National Bibliographic Company and the British Association of Publishers, proposed and implemented a book registration system known as Standard Book Number (SBN), which would be the predecessor of the ISBN.

With the arrival of the Third Industrial Revolution and the impact of the acceleration of innovation, which proposes emerging forms of its use in the production of goods and services, ISO redoubles its standardization effort, which in the framework of post-Fordism, would be shown with the business management models of Total Quality Management (TQM). Benchmarking, Just-in-Time, Fifth Discipline, Flexible Models in the style of High Innovation Companies, among others.

In the context of the debates on the «educational crisis» that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ISO proposed the need to create even more specific standards for the education sector, especially in the area of so-called publishing services.

In 1971, ISO proposed the creation of an International Standard Serial Number^[76], which would be identified by its acronym ISSN. The ISSN, which is made up of eight issues (two groups of four separated by a hyphen), would begin to be the mechanism for creating the records, certifications and classifications of those publications that had several volumes. The way to operationalize this process has generally been in alliance between ISO and a national entity, which is responsible for the admission of applications.

In 1972, the ISO published the ISO 2108 Standard, which created the official identification of ISBN (International Standard Book Number), making it possible to standardize the book registration system worldwide.

The ISBN, like the ISSN, would emerge from the hand of the business sector and not from academia, which, without being mandatory for the latter, would quickly accept and implement both registers in its dynamics. Because this would allow the development of one of the productivist elements of the neoliberal evaluative culture: bibliometrics.

The ISBN was made up of ten digits preceded by the letters ISBN, until in 2007 it became thirteen digits.

This practice of standardization, assumed as typical of the neoliberal evaluative culture in university education, would give rise to parallel systems of lesser scope and others of a complementary nature that serve as a reference for university classifications. In other cases, systems for the classification of official documents have been put in place, such as the NIPO in Spain or the North American systems for declassified documents.

Other standardization systems are the DOI (Digital Object Identifier), created in 1996, which is frequently used for scientific articles in electronic format, complete journals, fractions of academic articles, audio, videos, images and software. This record allows access through a link to the academic production of interest, based on its essential metadata, through the relational format of XML (Extensible Markup Language). The DOI is a significant precedent in the transition from biopolitics and psychopolitics to the predictive regime (Bonilla-Molina, 2024) that we will expand on later when we talk about university internationalization in the fourth industrial revolution.

The DOI is awarded by a range of specialized agencies including CrossRef^[77], CSIC,^[78] DataCite^[79], Airiti, among others. The process of centralization of this dynamic has been assumed by the DOI Foundation^[80], which is in charge of officially applying the ISO 26324 Standard created by DOI in 2012.

Other standards linked to intellectual production activities in academia are:

International Standard Music Number (ISMN), created through the ISO 10957 Standard of 1993, which is made up of thirteen numbers grouped into five components,
International Standard Works Code (ISWC) for musical works included in the registers of the International Confederation of Authors and Composers (CISAC), the ISWC being made up of 9 numbers preceded by the letter T,
The International Standard Recording Code (ISRC), created from the ISO 3901 Standards of 2001, which serves to identify video recordings and sound recordings, is composed of four sections that admit 12 digits and characters, this system being administered by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
International Standard Audiovisual Number (ISAN), made up of 24 hexadecimal digits, segmented into three groups of data, is a system for the registration of films, documentaries, series episodes, short films, audiovisual records of sporting events, among others.

We want to emphasize two things, first, that these systems were created, popularized and disseminated from the third industrial revolution and, second, the place of business enunciation of the most used records in university classification systems, typical of bibliometrics within the framework of the neoliberal evaluative culture. It is the mode of production that shapes the university and not the other way around.

Curricular taxonomies in the process of university internationalization

As we have explained in other works, educational depedagogization was part of the actions that opened the way to the neoliberal evaluative culture, as part of the model of university and educational internationalization imposed by globalization. We will now briefly analyze the impact of curricular taxonomies on the process of standardized internationalization of higher education.

Curricular

Depedagogization^[81] separated and autonomized the components of pedagogy (didactics, evaluation, planning, management, and curriculum). The autonomous curriculum (programs, curricula, content organized for classroom work) became a specialized area, considered the epicenter of school and university activities in the neoliberal period (1980 – ).

The teacher was converted by the force of depedagogization into an operator of the pre-elaborated curriculum, into a curricular administrator. To do this, it was necessary to adapt the curriculum to the logic of measurement, learning rhythms (time, space and duration), teaching and learning sequence organized with a common programming pattern (concepts, subconcepts, contents, relational thinking, skills, competencies to be achieved), methodology selected to teach (didactics as a functional technology), planned execution (objectives, goals), implementation criteria (diagnosis of initial learning), continuous improvement mechanisms (summative and corrective evaluation), learning resources (materials, tools, infrastructure), Uniform achievement (grades expressed in qualitative and/or quantitative scales, graduation profile). Input, development and productive output.

The criterion for being a good teacher ceased to be presented in terms (even if only enunciative) of promoting critical thinking, creativity, teaching lifelong learning for active citizenship, to become the neoliberal aegis, around the number of objectives provided in the classroom and the learning outcomes of students measured in standardized assessments.

All this curricular dynamic made it possible to move towards the curricular homologation and standardization necessary for university internationalization. This required indexing and curricular normalization, which in this field made sense from the contributions of psychological metrics and its field of taxonomies.

Taxonomies

Taxonomies are classification systems that organize the elements of a field into categories based on common features and characteristics. The main characteristics of a taxonomy are hierarchical classification (general to particular), having defined criteria (characteristics and properties), having defined purposes (knowing, analyzing and applying).

Educational taxonomies emerge as mechanisms for the classification and ordering of learning objectives, sequentially, from the simple to the complex, according to levels of knowledge. The purpose is to organize the curriculum, guiding teaching and establishing parameters to weigh learning.

Educational taxonomies are an import to education of psychological metrics, which understands learning as an algorithmic sequence. This metric was developed in its beginnings in the United States of America, in the forties and fifties of the twentieth century, becoming popular in the seventies with the rise of the neoliberal evaluative culture. Psychological taxonomies serve to standardize curricula, a necessary action for the capitalism of the third industrial revolution to try to resolve the epistemic gap^[82].

Educational taxonomies express a transition or bridge between behaviorism and neuroscience, which consider the human brain and mind as programmable. Therefore, no matter how much taxonomies are wanted to be reconciled on paper with active and open pedagogies, the latter end up colliding with the closed and prescribed curriculum, which is the product of the taxonomic field in education. It is increasingly evident that the straitjackets imposed by educational taxonomies in the curriculum limit the possibilities of creative, critical, contextual and multi-horizon learning for students.

However, in a context of «educational crisis» for the logic of capital, especially since the third industrial revolution and the intention of the world system to generalize the neoliberal evaluative culture at the international level, in order to try to redirect and align school and university systems to the requirements of the capitalist mode of production, taxonomies became a tool of special use. These establish the areas of curricular work, the verbs that allow measuring and relating to the performance and achievement indicators.

Bloom’s taxonomy

The taxonomy of Bloom et al., developed in 1956, is one of the most popular in the field of curriculum design in the logic of the market. This taxonomy seeks to focus classroom activity on the achievement of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor skills.

The cognitive domain is organized hierarchically into: remembering (memorizing, recognizing), understanding (interpreting, summarizing), applying (using knowledge in contingent and concrete situations), analyzing (breaking down information, identifying relationships), evaluating (making judgments, arguing), creating (designing, producing).

The affective domain is associated with values, attitudes and emotions, structured in the following levels: receiving, responding, valuing, organizing and characterizing.

The psychomotor domain is focused on the development of physical and manual skills (perception, coordination and execution of movements).

It is important to note that, from the psychological perspective, domains are like parts of the puzzle comparable to training skills and competencies . The domains organize the curriculum, sequentially, by degrees of complexity that start from the simple to that which requires a greater degree of difficulty, which have differentiated characteristics for entry, process and exit in the dynamics of teaching and learning. Taxonomies become the programming language of educational software.

Taxonomies allowed the turn to educational curricularization. The curriculum was organized based on these domains and the verbs that represent it structured the learning objectives. Today, a level of mechanical sophistication of such magnitude has been reached that there are lists of common verbs to use in the writing of each of the objectives that guide the curriculum.

Other taxonomies, less popular, but which correspond to psychologism are Marzano’s (updated in 2001) (dimensions of learning that include attitudes, mental processes, and enunciative and procedural knowledge), as well as Biggs and Collis (1982), known by its acronym SOLO, which stands for Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes).^[83]

University internationalization therefore has comparable taxonomies to align learning, evaluate curricula, generate accreditation processes and recognition of studies, enhancing classifications.

Once the adoption of curricular taxonomies is achieved on a global scale, the challenge for capital is to harmonize graduate profiles and advance in their global recognition, through the certification of degrees and professions.

Written discursive syntheses, publications and institutional arbitration

For capitalism, knowledge is useful insofar as it can have a positive impact on the mode of production, production chains, the provision of services and systems of governance. This utility is instrumentalized with the operational idea of discursive synthesis, that is, the value (use and exchange) of knowledge, which is multiplied to the extent that it can be briefly explained, the way in which it was investigated -or the results achieved- as well as its conclusions, and how these can be useful for reproduction (symbolic, material and systemic) and enlargement (rate of profit).

Because of this demand for discursive synthesis, short articles are privileged over books, to such an extent that today the tendency is to give greater weight in the evaluation scales to the former. In addition, business productivism transferred to university education encourages the mass production of articles, often cloned in their essence, from each other. A professor who published a book every two years can now write and disseminate ten articles in the same period, obtaining a higher score for it. In addition, the brevity of the articles limits the development of critical anti-system thinking and forces us to concentrate on the description of the research processes, presentation of results and recommendations for application, that is, the paradigmatic empire of useful knowledge for the system.

In this sense, critical explanations, with a class perspective, studies on structural causes of inequalities and oppressions are «useless» for the dominant publishing system. Capitalism is interested in the study of the manifestations of these oppressions and inequalities – with partial and fragmented analyses – but it finds the analysis of structural causes redundant and unnecessary. Going to «the concrete» seems to be the watchword. For this reason, the evaluation of articles over books is privileged, and refereed articles over those that are not subjected to prior scrutiny. Now, to a lesser extent and in use, the modality of the refereed book has been extended, which incorporates rules of length, discursive emphasis and methodology, which are specific to the procedures for evaluating the refereed articles.

Peer-reviewed journals

Its origins can be traced back to the peer-reviewed editorial review implemented by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1665, at the height of the Enlightenment and the route of innovations that led to the first industrial revolution. It would be in the post-World War II period that peer review would be established as a standard of global scope.

Peer-reviewed journals are publications considered scientific or academic, which disseminate articles submitted by professors and researchers, which are peer-reviewed before being published. We must distinguish peer-reviewed journals from peer-reviewed articles; refereed journals are periodical publications and enter the registration systems -such as the ISSN, DOI and others- in which articles, research results, reviews of publications, events and other academic activities are communicated, in scientific terms, whose content in form and substance, are submitted to arbitration.

There is an unfinished academic debate regarding whether all peer-reviewed university publications are scientific or are divided into scientific, cultural and humanistic, but the most widespread criterion is to avoid this debate, subjecting the referees to the communication scheme of the scientific method. This does not deny that some peer-reviewed publications manage to escape the straitjacket of scientific rationality.

Peer-reviewed journals must ensure predictable regularity, which has a decisive influence on the classification of the different systems.

Within the framework of the neoliberal evaluative culture as a political operation of hegemonic university internationalization, arbitration reaches publishers that are benchmarks in international scientific work such as Elsevier, Springer^[84], Wiley^[85], Taylor & Francis^[86], and its processes are linked to bibliometric indexes such as Scopus, Web of Science and rankings such as QS, THE and Sanghai that use publications as references.

Refereed articles

A peer-reviewed article is one that meets the requirements of length, form and emphasis of the journal or the call for each issue and that is submitted to the evaluation of experts in the field, in what has been called peer review.

As Codina (2017) explains, there is a whole academic debate about the most used types of arbitration, which do not compromise the use of one to the detriment of the other. Arbitrations are usually double-blind (the evaluating referees do not know the authors and the authors do not know whom they grade their works), single-blind (the evaluators know the authors, but the latter do not know who their referees are) and open (the names of the authors and evaluators are known to both). An increasing effort is being made to increase the number of reviewers external to the institution that finances and hosts the peer-reviewed journal.

In addition, the dominant tendency aims to positively qualify those journals in which the refereed articles published in each issue belong to other institutions of higher education, laboratories or widely recognized think tanks, as part of the effort to culturally homogenize the orientation of change in each field of knowledge. For this reason, in the current university internationalization, this trend is becoming more and more popular.

Each refereed journal has its own list of referees and a system of thematic relationships to assign external referees. Referees usually make their opinions on parameters of length, thematic quality, relevance and relevance of their content, references used, topicality of the topic, elements of innovation included, impact of the results and research methodology used, in order to reach conclusions and proposals.

In most of the cases reviewed, the evaluative categories are quality, relevance, timeliness, relevance, impact, innovation, possibilities of implementing knowledge (public policies) and efficiency criteria, that is, the categories of the neoliberal evaluation culture for the university sector.

There are very particular cases, such as that of scientific journals with a high circulation and shorter frequency, such as Nature Journals – founded in 1889 – whose publication is in charge of Springer Nature, which focuses on the communication of research results in technology, medicine and scientific advances, especially discoveries. It has a multidisciplinary scope, its articles are peer-reviewed, it has a weekly periodicity, most of its articles are privately accessible.

Peer-reviewed journal classification systems

The neoliberal evaluative culture in education has created a set of instances and systems for the registration, categorization and evaluation of peer-reviewed publications (scientific or not), which influence institutional rankings. Classification systems are usually national and international.

The most commonly used evaluation categories in these classification systems are quality, relevance, timeliness, relevance, innovation and impact, as criteria for weighting the neoliberal evaluation culture in university education, whose origins -in the current orientation- can be traced to the beginnings of the third industrial revolution. Let’s look at some of them.

SCI

In 1964 Eugene Garfield presented the Science Citation Index (SCI), which is the result of his work begun in the fifties of the twentieth century (1956), to find a way to group the most relevant journals in academia and scientific production.

The SCI is based on the impact factor (IF), based on the number of citations registered, in other scientific articles, in prestigious publications and wide circulation. Garfield used the statistical method of frequency for the development of this quantitative model.

The SCI concentrates its work on citation indexing and analysis. The criteria for selecting the peer-reviewed journals that are part of its database are: periodicity (efficiency), editorial content (relevance), internationalization (quality), citation analysis (innovation and impact).

The SCI periodically calculates and publishes the impact factors (IFs) of indexed and peer-reviewed journals, which are published in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

The ISI (Institute of Scientific Information), is an organization founded by Garfield himself in 1960 and is the body that accredited the SCI, until the company Clarivate Analytics was incorporated.^[87]. In 1992 ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare, which would later become Thomson Reuters, and later (2016) passed into the hands of Onex and Bering, who acquired the intellectual property and science division of Reuters. In 2018 ISI became a brand again, within the consortium that acquired it.

From critical pedagogy, the SCI is seen as a device that reproduces and legitimizes the dominant power structures and inequalities in the production of knowledge. The central challenge is to the idea that citations are the only or best indicator of impact, quality and relevance. In addition, when looking at the list of publications considered to have high impact, those from the global north prevail. Not to mention that in order to publish in many of the journals considered by this index as high-impact, fees must be paid for the processing of articles.

JCR

The Journal Citation Reports is a complementary product to SCI and its impact factors, both integrated into Clarivate Analytics. The JCR is a journal evaluation and analysis mechanism, which uses data from Web of Science (including the SCI), to classify journals according to their impact.

The JCR generates metrics for the analysis and classification of journals by quartiles, enabling those who use it to compare and assess the significance and relationship of journals with their field of work.

The JCR is a WOS-SCI bibliometrics analysis report, which tells you which are the most cited books, those that can be consulted more quickly after being published and the ranking of the most influential texts in academia.

Among the criticisms of the JCR are the decontextualization, because the citation system is not based on the valuation of knowledge in the resolution of problems in the communities and territories where the university has an impact. On the other hand, selectivity in the indexing of journals and publications becomes a tool for silencing other voices, especially those of the South, the anti-systems and much more those of an anti-capitalist nature.

Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)

SSCI is a database that uses WoS. Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) indexes and classifies peer-reviewed academic journals in the social sciences. It seeks to measure the quality, relevance (relevance and innovation) and impact of journals dedicated to the disciplines of Sociology, Psychology, Education, Economics, Political Science, Law, Anthropology, Communication, among others. It has more than 3,400 cataloged journals, prioritizing those that circulate internationally. SSCI does not evaluate articles but the approach of journals and their use in academia.

The inclusion of journals in this database is carried out based on criteria a) relevance and academic scope, b) editorial quality (peer review process, standardization with technical formats such as use of keywords, abstracts, relationship of citations with content), c) impact of citations, based on the number of times articles are cited by other researchers, d) international diversity in authors, e) frequency of publication, in accordance with the published calendar.

The metric used by SSCI for journal classification is based on a) Journal Impact Factor (JIF), consisting of a formula that divides the number of articles published in a period (year-years), by the number of times they are cited in the following two years, b) quality quartiles (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4), defined from their JIF with respect to other publications in the same discipline. In Q1, which is the highest rating, there are 25% of the journals cataloged, in Q2 between 25-50%, Q3 between 50-75%, Q4 those in the bottom 25%, c) citation index and rankings use the h-index (h-index^[88]) to determine the influence of the journal.

These classifications are used to (a) to measure the impact of researchers, according to the quartile in which their publication is located, b) to build publication guides that guide the work towards the search for the best results in this classification, c) institutional evaluation in the determination of the productivity of accreditation and university rankings.

Critics of the JIF point out that it is possible to find limitations in the impact factor: a) it focuses on journals, not on individual articles, b) it is biased towards the volume of mentions or citations, c) it can encourage self-citation, d) it focuses on two years later, when in social sciences the impact of the article can take much longer. In addition, militant research promoted by the social sciences is made invisible – a form of penalization.

Arts & Humanites Citation Index (A&HCI)

A&HCI is a database used by WoS for scholarly publications in the arts and humanities. He concentrates his work on publications in history, literature, art and design, philosophy, linguistics, music, religion, theatre and performing arts, and cultural studies.

A&HCI uses the criteria of a) editorial quality ( peer review and publication standards), b) thematic diversity (multidisciplinarity and international scope), c) academic impact, d) accessible content (clear abstracts and accessible documentation).

The central differences between A&HCI and the other indices are due to the fact that publications in these areas are cited less often. He also values that in this field the importance of books is greater than articles and the impact is long-term.

However, it privileges hegemonic concepts of art and culture, even constituting a factor that makes innovation invisible, emerging thinking, which in essence tends to be disruptive and unpopular in its beginnings. This is not a minor or exclusive fact of this index, which acquires special relevance because paradoxically it operates as a brake on the need for capital to optimize the circuits of circulation of innovation, especially since the third industrial revolution.

Wos

The SCI can be considered one of the predecessors of the Web Of Science (WoS). WoS – formerly Web of Knowledge – has been working since 1999 with its own indexes and those of the Science Citation Index (CSI), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanites Citation Index. WoS is currently attached to Clarivate analítica.

WoS focuses on:

Quantitative analysis of research performance over time,
Science Study Trends

This is done based on bibliographic information (articles from the journals with the highest impact, both private and open access, proceedings of academic events and scientific conferences, as well as books), with which it analyzes performance (impact, relevance, efficiency, innovation) and scientific quality of research in the fields of science in general and in particular of medicine, social science, humanities, arts and technology. Research methods and topics can be analyzed through WoS. Access to information can be done by analyzing the databases separately or integrated.

From critical pedagogies, it is questioned that WoS contributes to the epistemic hegemony and coloniality of knowledge, by privileging journals in English, reinforcing the epistemic hierarchy of the centers of power in knowledge based in the United States, the United Kingdom and the capitalist center as a whole, promoting the marginality of local, community, anti-system productions and alternatives to the status quo.

The popularity of WoS acts as an influencing factor in the reduction of knowledge to quantitative metrics, which dismiss the emancipatory social and political value of knowledge, restricting university work to academic productivism instead of solidarity and dialogue of knowledge.

By prioritizing mainstream issues – widely accepted, popular and dominant – it reinforces the alignment of academia with the knowledge industries, contributing to the commodification of knowledge because these indices are linked to corporations that obtain profits from indexation, subscription, metrics and productivist prestige.

CiteScore

The CiteScore is very similar to the JIF metric, only the former is managed directly by Scopus. CiteScore, unlike JIF, uses a citation rating range from the last 4 years, which is based on a wider variety of academic publications. While CiteScore and JIF produce their annual reports, the former issues preliminary reports. CiteScore is exclusive to Scopus, while JIF is exclusive to Web of Science (WoS).

CiteScore produces percentiles by subject area or discipline, has a tracker that shows the (monthly) evolution of publications, makes comparisons with SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) and SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) metrics, makes interdisciplinary performance comparisons, tracks the impact in the field of study and is free to access, does not require a subscription because the data is open and accessible.

The biggest limitation is that it only shows publications indexed in Scopus.

SNIP

The Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) was developed by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University. It is currently available in Scopus. This metric takes into account the different citation patterns between disciplines, based on the context and tradition in the frequency of citation in each discipline.

The SNIP calculates its index based on the relationship between the citations received from articles published in a journal and their «citation potential» in their disciplinary field. The key word for this metric is citation potential, however, this potential can be high relative to average, similar, or low.

The advantages of the SNIP lie in standardization by discipline, less bias by specific disciplines, recognition of academic contexts and free accessibility. Its limitations derive from the dependence on Scopus, the lower popularity achieved and the less intuitive approach to the context category.

The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) was developed by the SCImago Research Group and bases its work on the Scopus database. The three central evaluation criteria are impact, influence and prestige, which constitute for this metric the synonym of the quality of the journal, in which the evaluated articles are published. A citation from an influential journal has greater evaluative weight than one of less academic prestige.

SJR gives each journal a prestige score, determined by the citations it has generated in other journals historically and currently. Journals that cite others transfer fractions of their prestige, using an algorithm similar to Page Rank^[89]. It uses as a temporality the last three years, the prestige of the journals from which the citations contained in its articles come and the number of articles published in the journal. That is, it not only weights citations, but also that they come from reliable sources for the metric.

SJR’s greatest limitations come from its dependence on Scopus, the algorithmic complexity of its calculation, and the weight it gives to journals with a high academic tradition.

Scopus

It is one of the largest bibliographic databases in the world. Its information is based on articles, journals, conference proceedings, books, and the full range of scholarly publications. It works with a wide spectrum of scientific, technological, social and humanistic disciplines.

SCOPUS is developed by Elsevier, one of the world’s leading publishers of scientific content, with a clear economic interest in this classification.

Its fundamental characteristics are: a) multidisciplinary coverage (more than 27,000 peer-reviewed academic journals, conference proceedings, books and book chapters), b) citation analysis, c) indexes and cross-metrics (h-index, CiteScore. SNIP, SJR and others), d) international coverage with more than 40 languages, e) greater frequency of information updates, f) advanced search interface (author, topic, keyword, journal, institution, collaborators).

The limitations for the use of Scopus derive from its private (paid) access, with institutional subscriptions that are not usually universal for all its members, epistemic focus on the so-called hard sciences, exclusions based on language (without abstracts in English) or certain geographical regions.

In addition, critical pedagogy questions whether Scopus reinforces the idea that knowledge and knowledge must be validated in circuits of the world academic center, making intellectual production subordinate to the logic of the market, even re-semantizing the idea of the common good. On the other hand, its normalizing metric is oriented towards technocratic, quantifiable and standardized models, which use educational quality assurance as a cover to promote the model of university internationalization that most favors capital.

University autonomy is indirectly intervened, as research and publications are oriented to what scores in their rankings. Today many university authorities guide their academics to publish in scopus and an important part of the internal organizational development of HEIs is highly impacted by this dynamic.

Finally, scopus reinforces the gap between the living knowledge of peoples, intellectual production aimed at the radical transformation of society and indexed knowledge; All of this marked by Darwinism and academic productivism.

Limits of academic productivism

Criticisms of academic productivism come from sociology and the philosophy of science, as well as from the field of critical pedagogies. Its central arguments are that quantity is privileged over depth, contributes to inequality and competition between teachers, students and education workers, but above all that it limits the real impact of research on society. The most salient consequences are the rise of superficial research and the loss of diversity, when working on topics and areas that are considered «non-conflictive», «safe» or «profitable»

All the systems of registration and classification of peer-reviewed journals are standardized models that seek to enhance the production of useful knowledge for the production model. They are based on the premise that publishing short films (articles) requires showing the impact, relevance, efficiency, relevance and quality of research and its grouping into species of productive chains of knowledge. This constitutes a desperate attempt to ensure that HEIs contribute in a more concrete, timely and efficient way to the improvement of the obtaining of surplus value – including the ideological – and positive rate of profit.

This has generated an exacerbated academic productivism. Today, most university professors are immersed in a race to publish as many articles as possible in the shortest possible time, in high-rating systems. However, this does not guarantee that innovation is being introduced into university circuits, to promote their renewal, nor that there will be a new creative leap that benefits capital, which was the initial purpose that encouraged capitalism to encourage this network.

On the contrary, it is generating a phenomenon in HEIs that we could call Academic Sisyphus, which is expressed – except in a few cases – in the tendency to write the same substantive content in various articles that differ only in form, adding new citations and empirical data. Supposed innovation quickly becomes tradition, mobility becomes stagnation, change becomes gatopardism. Contradictorily, today it is more complex to place new knowledge in these structures of article classification, because «the emergent» requires chains of references and other linked citations, which validate it. In other words, if you want to be published, you must work on what is popular, not on authentic innovation. This confusion between fashion and innovation is having disastrous effects on the university’s prospective analyses.

Recognition of studies, certifications and degrees at an international level

In order to guarantee academic-student mobility, skilled migration and the legitimacy of all the neoliberal university internationalisation actions that we are analysing – in the context of the third industrial revolution and its impact on the capitalist mode of production – UNESCO has promoted the recognition of studies, degrees and vocational training. In this direction, it is easier to advance in international curricular compatibility, through the minimums for approved curricularization.^[90]

These actions are intensified after the central events that we have analyzed above, especially the International Conference on the World Crisis in Education (1967), the results of the Faure Commission (1972) and the promotion of the evaluative culture as a central operation of neoliberal university internationalization, since the seventies of the twentieth century.

The recognition of studies and validation of degrees is a dynamic that pressures to consider as a reference studies that aim to solve the epistemic gap^[91], a central problem that drives capitalism to value school systems and universities as institutions immersed in an «educational crisis». We reiterate that the solution proposed by the world system is of an international nature, with different expressions.

Let us look at the most outstanding milestones of the orientation that seeks to reach consensus regarding the recognition and homologation of university studies and degrees. This has the plus that it favors possibilities for the subjects involved in the dynamics of qualified migration and academic-student mobility, to be able -and can- continue studies and practice in the destination countries. The journey of this dynamic can be seen in some of its most relevant milestones:

Buenos Aires Convention – Latin America and the Caribbean (1974), revised and updated in July 2019 to enter into force in 2022, subject to ratification by parliaments;
Lisbon Convention – Europe and North America (1997);
Tokyo Convention – Asia and the Pacific (2011);
Addis Adeba Convention – Africa (2014), which replaces the 1981 Arusha Convention;
Convention of the Arab Region (1978, revised in 2019);
Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education (2019)

In the latter case (Global Convention), it is the first global agreement in the last four decades for the recognition of studies, degrees and diplomas at an international level, promoting evaluation criteria^[92] for their validation, framing the convention in the university internationalization strategy.

At the other levels and modalities of the education system, bodies such as the Executive Secretariat of the Andrés Bello Convention (SECAB), as well as Mercosur Education, have promoted the recognition of primary and secondary studies in Latin American countries as part of the integration mechanisms and recognition of university degrees, in accordance with the Hague Convention.

The truth is that internationally comparable knowledge is unifying the mechanisms, parameters and indicators of validity established by the neoliberal evaluation culture (university accreditation, rankings and bibliometrics).

Think tanks

Think Tanks are research, analysis, advisory, thematic training and accompaniment institutions, whose central activity is to generate ideas and proposals regarding social, economic, political, cultural and educational problems, with the purpose of influencing strategic decision-making, public policies and courses of change. This institutionality plays an important role in the dissemination of educational normalization and standardization.

Depending on the legal nature, «think tanks» can be independent (self-managed), public (linked to governments), business (related to the philanthropy of large fortunes), ideological (associated with political parties) and academic (focused on practical solutions from their disciplines).

Its production focuses on reports, articles, books, surveys and analyses derived from studies, events, conferences, workshops and debates. Some think tanks are the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico, the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Fedesarrollo (Colombia), or the Pew Research Center in the United States.

What has been happening, within the framework of university internationalization with special impetus in the eighties and nineties of the twentieth century, is the creation of new forms of privatization of these think tanks, many of which have passed from the public to the private sphere, a process in which, the financing they are granted conditions the agenda and intellectual property. Other paths for privatization have been conditional donations, contracts for the sale of services that force research agendas to be redirected, consultancies that transfer funds from the private sector to HEIs demanding associated research effort and, finally, support in kind and materials. The payment of memberships to companies or individuals, especially philanthropy, acts as an enhancer of the privatization of think tanks.

Student-Academic Mobility Programs and Skilled Migration

Mobility refers to crossing borders to study in another country. This mobility can be promoted by the State of origin or host of the young person, to facilitate university studies at undergraduate, master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral levels, as well as the figures of visiting professor. Mobility, which can be student, academic and education workers, implies the return to the country of origin once the studies or stays in the host country have been completed.

it includes those who, for reasons of refuge or security, must leave their countries and are

Academic migration refers to the processes in which the mobilization from one country to another, to study, participate in research projects or visiting professors, occur due to reasons of refuge, political asylum or forced displacement of the population. In these cases, the end of the training cycle or the stay does not imply a return to the country of origin. Academic migration entails a transit stay to another destination(s) or the intention to seek forms of permanent stay in the host country of the host institution.

UNESCO‘s Global Education Monitoring Report (2019) considers student and academic mobility as part of university internationalization. This report specifies that half of international students go to 5 English-speaking countries that are at the center of capitalist development: Australia, Canada, the United States of America, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. By 2016, China, India and the Republic of Korea accounted for 25% of all academic mobility, while 23% came from European Union countries. A revealing fact is that 76% of the 900,000 students on mobility in the Eurozone do so with another country in the community, that is, they do not go to the United States, China or the capitalist periphery.

The other related phenomenon is the so-called skilled migration, referring to the movement of people between institutions in countries or regions, who have a high level of academic training and professional experience. Upon entering the university circuit, qualified migrants contribute with better performance in the measurements of the accreditation, evaluation and classification systems of university internationalization.

In the rise of neoliberalism, we can identify some initiatives to promote skilled migration. The Express Entry program (Canada), Skilled Migration (Australia), European Blue Card (EU), the H-1B Visa (United States), the post-Brexi points system (United Kingdom), as well as the scholarships or scholarships awarded by national science organizations for visiting professors, tutors, international postdocs, sandwich doctorates, among others.

For neoliberalism, student-academic mobility and migration, as well as qualified migration, are ways of contributing to the central achievement of university internationalization, breaking the gap between what is taught and the latest generation advances in knowledge, knowledge and technology. These migratory modalities cannot be seen and analyzed in a fragmented and disconnected way with respect to the neoliberal evaluative culture in education, on the contrary, they are promoted in that direction.

University rankings^[93]

In the case of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), in which, due to the complexity of their dynamics, they are more sensitive to external evaluation, unlike what happens in the first levels of education, standardized tests were not applied, but based on the five categories that we have been identifying (quality, relevance, impact, innovation and efficiency) and the subcategories derived from them, classification processes were promoted that allowed the consolidation of the neoliberal evaluation culture, as a political operation of university internationalization. One of these mechanisms has been the University Rankings. Let’s look at the evolution of these rankings in the last four decades (1990-2024) of neoliberal aegis.

Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)

The Quacquarelli Symonds ranking, better known as QS,^[94] is generated by an English company of the same name founded in 1990 by Nunzio Quacquarelli, which, at the height of the neoliberal boom, worked to generate world rankings, presented with the instrumental purpose that would serve to assess the impact of studying abroad. In 2004 it partnered with Times Higher Education (THE) to launch its first global university ranking, known as THE – QS World University Ranking; an alliance that was broken in 2009, so that from 2010 QS republished its own ranking.

The objectives of the ranking are determined by measuring the fundamental missions of world-class universities, based on excellence in research, training for employment, high teaching quality and active internationalization.

This is how the Rankings Tracker was born at the beginning of the 21st century,^[95] which has worked with more than 8,000 organizations that train management leaders, ranking 2590 of them, based on 144,136 academic responses and 101,038 opinions from employers.

The QS is a ranking that models internationalization in education. In recent times he has been studying different careers in undergraduate, postgraduate studies, especially Master’s, Doctorate, PhD and business or MBA postgraduate courses.

This classification offers:

Global Ranking (the best universities in the world in general terms),
Rankings by specific disciplines (arts and humanities, social sciences and management, engineering and technology, medicine and life sciences),
Ranking of young universities
QS universities by region: Europe,
Universities by Region – Latin America and the Caribbean,
universities in QS by region: Arab region,
universities in QS by region: Asia,
colleges in QS: best student cities,
QS of global universities,
QS employability for graduates,
QS of global universities with an emphasis on Sustainability,
QS of global universities by subject,
QS Specialized Master’s Degrees,
QS International Trade,
QS Global de MBA.
QS Online MBA,
QS Executive MBA,

The QS Global MBA Ranking 2022 studied 286 programs from 45 countries. Based on three surveys: i) the QS Global Employer Survey, ii) QS Global Academic Survey and, iii) surveys applied in the business schools studied.

The methodology used to make this classification allowed us to assess its orientation, benefits and limits. The surveys focused on the following evaluation criteria:

academic reputation (perception of the quality of a university’s research and teaching) with a weight of 30%,
citations per faculty (of publications, using the Scopus database) by 20%,
reputation among employers (employers’ perception of graduates’ skills) by 15%,
Employment results 5%
student-teacher ratio (influence of the number of students per teacher on the personalization of teaching) with 10%,
proportion of international professors (diversity and globality of the teaching staff) 5%.
Participation in international research networks 5%
proportion of international students (ability to attract students from other countries, including skilled migration) 5%,
Sustainability 5%

To do this, they used the For Reporting Specialty Masters Employment Statistics model of standards, used by large companies and corporations to hire graduates of specialized master’s degrees. These standards are based on:

Employment rate (time between student graduation and employment attainment),
Areas of employment (sectors and industries where graduates are employed),
Geographical location (graduates work as locals or foreigners),
Average salaries (starting income, bonuses, and other initial benefits of graduates),
Titles or roles used (typology of positions held by graduates),
Prominent employers (companies that hire graduates)

Agencies such as the AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA provide information on a regular basis for For Reporting Specialty Masters Employment Statistics.

The QS published on June 4, 2024 incorporates new indicators, using the following structure:

Research and discovery (academic reputation: 30%; citations by Faculty: 20%),
Employability and outcomes (reputation among employers: 15%; employment outcomes: 5%),
Learning experience (faculty-student ratio 10%),
Global engagement (proportion of international students: 5%; Proportion of international teachers: 5%; international research networks: 5%),
Sustainability: 5%

In addition, the measurements of the International Research Network, Employment Outcomes and Sustainability were incorporated in 2023 and have been maintained in the following edition.

The QS ranking is important for students (choosing universities with greater prestige that contain extra opportunities upon graduation), universities (improves international visibility and makes comparability a management criterion) and for employers (reference for hiring graduates).

The QS ranking reinforces the idea of the university as a competitive global company, which shows its value through its position in the ranking, orienting its focus on education for employability. By using bibliometric databases such as scopus as a reference, it contributes to individualization and competition among HEIs, depoliticizing university education. Rankings in general end up strengthening the ideas of creation of an intellectual elite associated with business logic, the market and capitalism as a system.

Shanghai Ranking

The issue of the University Rankings clearly shows not only the emergence of a new world economic power, but also its full adherence to the neoliberal educational paradigm. China emerges as one of the benchmarks of these rankings that seek to guide the activity of world academia.

The Shanghai Ranking^[96] (Ranking of World Universities – ARWU) began its work in 2003 under the responsibility of Shanghai Jiao Tong University – through the Center for World-Class Universities – CWCU – until it was taken over by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy^[97]. It was created as part of the process of Chinese coupling to the logic of the educational market and the neoliberal evaluative culture in education.

The Shanghai Ranking is the first global ranking with multiple objective indicators, which has been published annually since 2003. In 2009, the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, an independent organization focused on intelligence and consulting in higher education, was created, which became in charge of ARWU. In 2011, the International Advisory Council of Academics and University Policy Managers was established, a body in charge of incorporating recommendations for this classification; at which time the Ranking of the main universities in Greater China was also presented. In 2015, the Ranking of Best Universities in China was published for the first time, with a special methodology for it. Between 2009 and 2017, the Shanghai Ranking began to develop classifications by areas, such as the Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (2009) and the updated version with expanded methodologies for a greater number of areas analyzed (2017).

The criteria of this ranking are based on educational quality, which, as we have explained, constitutes the umbrella for the presentation of university internationalization in the period of neoliberal globalization.

There are several classifications generated by the Shanghai Ranking, among them the following stand out:

Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU),^[98]
Global Academic Subject Rankings (GRAS),^[99]
Global Ranking of Sports Science Schools and Departments,
Ranking of the best Chinese universities.

ARWU^[100] works on the quality of processes and research results, adding its relationship with the relevance, impact, innovation and per capita efficiency of institutional activity. ARWU ranks more than 2500 colleges each year and publishes the top 1000.

Regarding its methodology, each criterion has an indicator and a percentage weight. The sum of the weighting assigned to the criteria and indicators must be 100%, the maximum score that is only awarded to a university. From that point on, the other institutions are calculated and ranked with a percentage of the highest score.

In ARWU published on August 15, 2025, the criteria, indicators, and percentages were:

quality of education (graduates of the institution who win Nobel Prizes^[101] and Fields medals^[102] 10%), + quality of the faculty (composed of staff from an institution that has won Nobel Prizes and Fields medals 20%,
Impact of academic work (Highly Cited Researchers (HiCi) on Clarivate^[103] and other metrics 20%)
Innovation and relevance (research results published as articles in Nature and Science ^[104] 20%, and in articles indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) 20%), and
Efficiency (per capita performance, i.e., the per capita academic performance of an institution^[105] 10%).

The Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (GRAS) appeared with a first exercise in 2009, but it was not until 2017 that it was published in all its complexity. Some 1,900 universities from 104 countries participate in its preparation.

As of 2023, 1447 professors had participated in the survey, belonging to 122 universities, referring to 64 subjects in 21 countries and regions. The ranking inventoried 121 important journals dedicated to 43 subjects, 36 relevant awards referring to research work in 29 subjects and the existence of 31 high-level conferences in computer science and engineering. The social sciences do not appear in this classification, which seems to be more oriented towards the relationship between knowledge and the business world.

The version published in 2024 presents the classifications in 55 subjects, which were grouped into five major areas (natural sciences, life sciences, medical sciences, engineering and social sciences). The objectives of GRAS are to evaluate university performance by discipline, with bibliometric indicators and other academic criteria related to the neoliberal evaluation culture, focusing on excellence in specific fields.

The information for the development of GRAS includes:

World-Class Faculty: Laurate (international academic awards), HCR (highly cited researchers), Editor (number of editors-in-chief), Landership (international academic leadership),
World~Class Output: TJ (papers in top journals or conferences), Award (academic awards according to AES),
High-Quality Research (Q1, publications in journals belonging to the first quartile),
Research Impact (CNCI or Normalized Impact by Category),
International Collaboration (IC or proportion of publications with international co-authorship)

The complexity of the calculation methodology means that each indicator is presented as a relative percentage with respect to the leader of the classification or «top». To do this, a formula is applied in which the square root is taken and multiplied by the weight assigned to that indicator, then the results are added to reach the final score.

The fields and subjects in this range are Natural Sciences (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Geography, Ecology, Oceanography, Atmospheric Science), Engineering (Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Automation and Control, Telecommunications Engineering, Science and Technology Instruments, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science Engineering, Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Science and Engineering Materials Engineering, Nanoscience & Nanotechnology, Energy Engineering & Sciences, Engineering & Environmental Sciences, Biotechnology, Aerospace Engineering, Marine/Ocean Engineering, Transportation Science & Technology, Remote Sensing, Mining & Mineral Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering, Textile Science & Engineering, Water Resources, Food Science & Technology, Biotechnology, Aerospace Engineering, Marine / Ocean Engineering, Transportation Science & Technology, Remote Sensing, Mining & Mineral Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering, Textile Science & Engineering), Life Sciences (Biological Sciences, Human Biological Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, Veterinary Sciences), Medical Sciences (Clinical Medicine, Public Health, Dentistry and Oral Sciences, Nursing, Medical Sciences, Medical Technology, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences), and Social Sciences (Economics, Statistics, Law, Political Science, Sociology, Education, Communication, Psychology, Business Administration, Finance, Management, Administration Public, Hotel and Tourism Management, Library and Information Sciences).

In 2016, the Shanghai Ranking published for the first time the Global Ranking of Sport Science Schools and Departments. The review of the 2022, 2023 and 2024 editions allows us to specify that their objectives are to evaluate the performance of sports schools, making comparisons between specialized university units, which allows establishing classifications based on objective bibliometric indicators, related to the impact, quality and internationalization of academic production.

The mechanism used consists of assessing

mentions of publications in the area,
citations per publication,
publications that have international collaborations; these data are obtained from Web de Ciencias (Wen of Science), which allows this Ranking to establish the 300 best universities in the world

We work with categories, indicators, reference codes and weighting percentages . The three categories used are

research results (articles indexed in Web of Science: 10%),
Research impact (total citations per article (CIT): 20%),
Citations per article (CPP: 30%)
Quality (publications in TOP journals: 30%)
international collaboration (Percentage of articles with international co-authorship (IC): 10%).

In addition, the ShanghaiRanking has specialized in rankings of Chinese universities, especially rankings of a) medical, b) economic and financial, c) Chinese languages, d) political science and law, e) sports sciences, f) non-governmental, g) sports sciences, h) cooperation, i) non-governmental languages, j) non-governmental economies and finance, k) art, l) best non-governmental.

In the latter case, the priority of the Chinese government is the construction of the new state linked to its role as an economic power, being a sui generis case because the territorial and governmental dimensions of China endow it with a conjunctural particularity -transition of coupling to the capitalist center-, which cannot confuse us, in terms of the momentary particularities, sense and strategic orientation of their classifications. In no case is it a separate or autonomous movement, on the contrary, this ranking not only shares the paradigmatic horizon of the neoliberal evaluative culture, but also imprints directionality on it.

What is undeniable is China’s role in the construction of hegemony, within the neoliberal evaluative culture imposed by capital, with the particularity that the characteristics of its late capitalism imprint on it. China, a powerful emerging economy that is successful due to its competitiveness, has become a benchmark for university reforms on a global scale, but within capitalism and not in anti-system opposition. It is a nation that has decided to move towards the capitalist business and financial model that, although endowing it with its own characteristics, forces it to simultaneously develop and consolidate an industrial park that resolves issues and issues of four industrial revolutions, almost simultaneously. In this sense, the rankings become for them a mechanism for the implementation and monitoring of the university, in dialogue with local singularities and global trends in capital.

China’s cultural – and economic – neo-imperialist conception, as well as its vision of colonial cultural and commercial domination, are absolutely different from the imperialist forms and representations of the West, especially of the British, French, German and North American imperialisms, which does not exempt it from its imperialist vocation, but raises the need for its study in a differentiated way within the uneven and combined development of capitalism. For this reason, these rankings acquire additional relevance.

THE

The THE ranking, the acronym for Times Higher Education created in 2001, has been presenting world university rankings since 2004. THE acquires new emphasis since 2010 when it will separate in 2009 from QS World University Rankings, becoming a bibliometric ranking that works with the information provided by Thomson Reuters, an information company that is listed on the stock exchange and is part of the cultural industrial complex of the 21st century.

THE’s work focuses much more on research carried out in universities, making a series of global, regional and thematic classifications. For example, it recently presented the World University Ranking 2024: a broader look at research quality, the Young University Ranking 2023, the World Reputation Ranking 2022.

THE ranking focuses on analyzing the behavior of the evaluative categories based on a) teaching (learning environments and link with research activity), b) research (environments, volume, income and reputation of the work carried out), c) quality of research (measured by results associated with bibliometrics and potential impact on economic activity), d) transfer of knowledge to the industrial sector, e) internationalization (teachers, students and high-performance researchers).

We have found (THE Ranking, 2024), 13 categories and indicators, with their sources and weightings, that are used by THE to make its classifications. These are: a) teaching (teaching reputation based on the global survey, 15%), faculty-student ratio (self-reported data, 4.5%), PhD and undergraduate student ratios (self-reported data, 2.25%), ratio of PhDs submitted per professor (self-reported data, 6%), institutional budget (self-reported data, 2.25%), search (search reputation based on the global survey, 18%), research productivity (Scopus index, 6%), competitive search resources (self-reported data, 6%), citations (normalized citation rates by field of knowledge (FWCI), using the Scopus index, 30%), internationalization (proportion of foreign professors, self-reported data, 2.5%), proportion of foreign students (self-reported data, 2.5%), international collaboration (Scopus index, 2.5%), Industry (income derived from the relationship with the industry, 2.5%). Quality, relevance, impact, innovation and efficiency are confirmed as the categories that modulate this ranking.

In 2019 they published THE Impact Rankings, a classification specialized in the work of universities linked to the goals of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2015-2030) as another form of alignment with the international standardization trend. In order to assess the relationship between research and university teaching, in 2016 they released the Teaching Ranking, which tends to be more national and regional due to the specificity of the cases, without losing the characteristic of international classification.

THE ranking has been preparing global, national, regional ( Arab, Asian, Latin American, Sub-Saharan Africa) rankings, by route (young universities), prestige (global reputation) and the trend is to expand the range of hierarchies.

On its website, an article by Carolina Torrealba (2024) poses the challenge of getting out of the notion of permanent crisis of universities, promoting conversations between disciplines (transdisciplinarity), an approach that shows the limits of these rankings within the framework of the current disciplinary structural design of universities, since achieving this level of institutional dialogue implies overcoming the epistemic gap on the role of the university and school systems in the transition between the third and fourth industrial revolution, after the period that generated their institutional design.

World University Rankings

Since 2012, the Center for World-Class Universities (CWUR),^[106] currently based in the United Arab Emirates, has developed the World University Rankings^[107], focusing on the quality of education, based on the employability of graduates, the training and performance of teachers, and the use of research carried out. Its classification is not subject to the application of surveys or the sending of data from the universities. Since 2017, it has also been preparing a classification by topics^[108] that complements and expands the university ranking.

The specific methodology of the World University Ranking is based on seven indicators grouped into four categories: a) education (number of graduates with prestigious academic distinctions in relation to the size of the university, 25%), b) employability (number of graduates who have reached high positions in corporations and important companies in relation to the size of the university, 25%), c) rating (number of professors who have won highly prestigious academic distinctions, 10%) and d) research (number of research articles published as a result indicator 10%, number of articles and research published in top-level journals 10%, capacity for influence assessed by the number of articles and research of the university that are published in influential journals 10% and, number of most cited research articles 10%).

In the case of this ranking, it is striking that the number of successful graduates has a greater weight than professors with distinctions, which shows that the focus of interest is not on the improvement of university processes but on the incorporation of graduates into the different instances and mechanisms of symbolic and material reproduction of the system. The emphasis is on quality, and the indicators gravitate to the orbits of the categories relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency.

The edition of the World University Ranking published in June 2025, contains the Global 2000 list, with its ranking of the best universities and colleges in the world, in which Harvard, MIT and Stanford lead, highlighting the rise of Asian and European universities.

Eduniversal Ranking Bussines Schools

The Eduniversal Business Schools Ranking^[109] promoted by the Eduniversal Evaluation Agency, is a ranking of the 1000 best Business Schools in 153 countries. Its base of operations is in Paris and it began working on French university rankings in 1994, expanding its radius of action worldwide from 2001. The work is coordinated by the corporation’s International Scientific Committee, made up of two Eduniversal directors and nine independent experts.

The methodology focuses on the application of the Deans’ Vote Survey, which allows the development of the horizontal selection system, country by country, from which three steps are applied: a) step 1: select schools by country, b) step 2: selection of schools according to the Palme levels of each country, c) step 3: selection made by the body of deans in each Palme League.

The Palme level of each business school is determined by the internationalization achievements achieved (membership in international and national academic associations of global rank, accreditation systems assumed, positions obtained in the main business rankings).

The ranking of the 1000 Business Schools gives rise to the Palme Leagues with the following levels: a) Strong global influence: they obtain 5 Palma Leagues and there are 100 institutions, b) Important International influence: they obtain 4 Palmas Leagues and there are 200 schools, c) Excellent Business Schools with reinforcement of international influence: they obtain 3 Palmas Leagues and 400 were selected, d) Good business schools with strong regional influence; they receive 2 Palm Leagues and there are 200 schools, and e) Business Schools with considerable local influence: they receive a Palma League and there are 100.

This is a classification system that uses internationalization to promote quality, relevance, impact, innovation and efficiency, with the particularity that the classification is developed by means of a Committee composed of personalities from the different continents and regions of the world, who are united by the same paradigm of the relationship between the university and production.

More rankings

Other rankings are:

the G-Factor focused on the use of Google’s search engine,
the National Taiwan University Ranking prepared by the Taiwan Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council,
the HRLR (2007) which in Spanish means Labor and Human Resources Review in aspects associated with graduates, executives and the competitiveness of the human capital formed by universities,
d) the RPI (2010) or Australian index of research performance in high-impact universities,
the Nature Index or Nature Index focused on research in the so-called natural sciences and life sciences,
el Mines Paris Tech,
the RUR generated in Moscow.

These rankings are increasingly cited as benchmarks for bibliometric activities (university publishing and research), as well as in the accreditation of higher education institutions. What they have in common is that their indicators gravitate around the categories of quality, relevance, impact, innovation and educational efficiency.

The Ouroboros Effect^[110]

An important element to be taken into account is that most of these classifications concentrated on showing widely referenced works between authors and renowned institutions, becoming a kind of game of «turning around and biting one’s tail».

These rankings proved inefficient in breaking all dimensions of the epistemic gap, since many of the «ranked» activities did not necessarily account for the trends of the acceleration of technological innovation in terms of its impact on the world of work, education and governance. Many of them ended up reaffirming what the Faure Report (1972) denounced, inability to foresee educational and social situations such as the one that occurred in COVID-19, limitations to provide emerging virtual education practices and to generate digital content; The non-exclusive educational platforms to face the privatizing effects of virtuality, denounced in the manifesto against the global pedagogical blackout, never emerged. The solutions came from the corporate world despite the promises that the neoliberal evaluative culture had raised.

What has actually been happening is similar to trying to take a car to the mechanic’s workshop, made with technology from the fifties of the twentieth century, to try to transform it into a rocket that transports a satellite to the earth’s orbit. As it enters with noises in its engine and is burning oil – apparently due to the drip in the engine valves – the technician concentrates on proposing how to tune it up. The owner remains hopeful that if it works better he will be able to get the power to embark on a trip to space. The mechanic ends up realizing that it is impossible to place parts that are of different design, because its functional structure would collapse. No matter how much you try to rebuild the vehicle to turn it into a hybrid, the transformation has limits and the specialist ends up clarifying that this car serves what it was created for, traveling dirt roads. As much as the owner has lived the illusion of a «meteor from space«, the functional structure of the automobile corresponds to the development of knowledge, technology and mechanics of a moment. You can’t ask the old vehicle to do things it wasn’t designed to do. At most, the mechanic will end up changing the transmission belt and recommending periodically placing additives so that it achieves the best possible performance, within the parameters of its real possibilities. To fulfill the goal of going to space, one must «build a new machine.» As childish as it may seem, that is the rationality of the neoliberal evaluative culture.

That is the current drama of the university in the logic of capital. The dominant system made such an effort to carry out an organizational and paradigmatic design of HEIs, which would be useful and functional in the framework of the first two industrial revolutions, that when it wanted to redesign it for the tasks of the third industrial revolution, it could not do so within the archetype and the preceding institutional culture. To achieve this, it implemented the neoliberal evaluation culture publicized with the idea of ensuring educational quality and disseminated on a global scale through the hegemonic model of university internationalization. But, tradition ended up having more weight than the novelty required. Unlike the mechanic of the previous imaginary story, who was honest and made clear the limits of his work, the gentlemen of the bibliometrics and rankings businesses have preferred to continue like automatons in their own way, maintaining the illusion that the new will emerge in this way; What they are achieving is producing an unprecedented logjam in the social, political, cultural and even economic purpose of universities.

But the worst thing is that the alternative has succumbed many times to this illusion, proposing only other forms of bibliometrics, rankings and university accreditation, abandoning the task that the anti-system field had assumed before the neoliberal aegis: radically transforming the university, changing its organizational structure and developing an epistemology that would overcome disciplinarity in the construction and management of knowledge. Others have preferred to entrench themselves in paradigmatic immobility, as if this would conjure up the offensive of capital and make possible the emergence of the miracle of a friendly, comfortable transition that does not imply having to abandon performance and inherited protocols; Although the dynamics and organization of the university world were criticized, assuming the role of rebels with a cause, the university that we knew in the first two industrial revolutions ended up assuming as their own. Today the structural anti-capitalist discourse in the university is absolutely minority and marginal.

The fact that there are many classification schemes does not mean that we have anti-system paths for university change. The Leiden Rankings (2008), SCImago Institutions Rankings SIR (2009), SCImago Journal & Country Rank SJR (2009), Web Ranking of Universities, Webometrics (2004), Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities NTU (2007), International Colleges & Universities UNIRAK (2005), do not escape the trends described above.

The rankings stimulated university competition and facilitated the landing of educational commodification in formats of quality, relevance, impact, innovation and efficiency, but they did not resolve the epistemological gap between academic activity and what was required to connect with the pace of innovation acceleration. And this is not only a demand of capital, a central task in the task of democratizing knowledge for the poor of the earth, it consists of turning HEIs into the epicenter of emerging and innovation, yes, from a critical, creative perspective and radical transformation of society, in the face of the injustice generated by capitalism.

What we are interested in underlining at this time are not only the ways and mechanisms through which universities entered the neoliberal evaluative culture and its five categories, using ranking systems, but also its devastating effects, comparable to artifacts that kill institutions of higher education. It has been a process in which universities have tried unsuccessfully to align universities with the acceleration of innovation without being able to transform their paradigmatic and organizational tradition. The result is chaos, confusion and loss of directionality.

Digital repositories as a source of consultation

With the advent of the internet and the increasing digitization of publications, digital repositories have developed unique ways to group books, articles, reports, theses, conference proceedings. Many are reluctant to classify these spaces as libraries, although they are obviously inspired by them.

The COVID-19 pandemic was used as a paradigmatic accelerator in all fields, including places of access to information for university education. In this matter, the analog continued to prevail over the digital-virtual, which evidenced the gap between teaching and expectations of innovation raised by technological corporatism. The pandemic operated as an opportunity to trigger a large-scale political operation to try to resolve this bottleneck.

The full arrival of virtuality in HEIs, from the global confinement, cannot be seen as a contingent solution, because in reality it expresses one of the faces of the effort to integrate acceleration of innovation and institutional educational work. However, far from what the promoters of the neoliberal evaluative culture expected, the academic institutionality did not open up to a structural transition towards another organizational model of university, but opted for adaptation without major changes, the coupling of the new without transforming the old, incorporating the emerging without changing the tradition. Hybrid teaching models are a transitional caricature of the change expected by capitalism, however it has facilitated the popularization of digital repositories for the consultation of students and teachers.

As confirmed in the book by Schwab and Mallaret (2020), as well as in the Singularity University debates on the «Educational Reset» (2020), big capital is reconfiguring the world of work, sociability, consumption, finance, banking and currency, democracy and the role of states, which demands an urgent reworking of academic work styles with the capacity to incorporate in real time the results of knowledge and Innovations. The alternative has to understand the deep dimensions of this offensive in order to generate proposals that give another meaning to innovation.

The times of incessant educational change that is being imposed are distancing themselves from the tradition of curricular reforms of the past, because these could become obsolete in months or a few years. These new dynamics of change have found in the digital and virtuality mechanisms to approach change, but also oppressive forms of segmentation and stratification. However, it should be noted that in terms of digital repositories, universities have presented alternatives, not everything has been managed to hegemonize capital, which is encouraging. The normalization of education in this area has met with creative resistance.

Digital repositories are centralized spaces for the storage, organization, preservation, and dissemination of scientific and academic productions. Digital repositories are built and carried out their activities with international standards for the use of metadata such as OAI-OPMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), which facilitates interoperability.

Repositories are classified as follows: (a) institutional (e.g., RI-UNAM, RDI-UBA), b) thematic (PubMed Central type specialized in medical sciences or arXiv in physics and mathematics), c) data (collect scientific research results and publications to be cited), d) cultural heritage (preservation of digital objects and cultural creations).

Repositories are freely accessible or proprietary. The problem is that many of the bibliometric evaluation systems give better weight to citations belonging to databases whose access is paid, compared to those that are freely accessible.

Among the most recognized Open Access repositories we have:

Google Scholar (multidisciplinary, multilingual, all academic fields),
Redalyc (25,000 academic sources in Spanish, Portuguese and English. Created by the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico),
SciELO (scientific journals from Latin America, Spain, Portugal and South Africa),
arXiv (preprints in physics, mathematics, computer science, and quantitative biology),
Dialnet (scientific production Hispanoamerica, created by the University of La Rioja),
CORE (over 127 million scholarly articles),
Europe PMC (articles, books, patents and guides in life sciences),
Figshare (data, figures, datasets),
OpenAire (EU-funded research),
DOADJ (indexes and allows online access to peer-reviewed open access journals).

The most important proprietary repositories for the political operations of the neoliberal evaluative culture are:

Elsevier (collection of scientific journals in social sciences and humanities, medicine, engineering),
Springer Nature (natural sciences, medicine, engineering and humanities),
Wiley Online Library (books, journals and scientific databases),
JSTOR (humanities, social sciences and natural sciences),
Project MUSE (academic journals and scientific books published by university presses),
IEEE Xplore (Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) publications in engineering, technology, and computer science),
ScienceDirect (medical, social, engineering and other sciences),
Taylor & Francis Online (social sciences and humanities, natural sciences, medicine),
SAGE Journals (medicine, natural sciences, social sciences and humanities),
Cambridge Core (books and scientific journals in various disciplines),

Open and open digital repositories can serve for a large-scale democratization of knowledge and information. If the debate around them and the presentation of anti-system alternatives in this field are coordinated on a global scale, they may end up fracturing the dominant schemes of bibliometrics, accreditation and rankings, but this is a pending task.

World Higher Education Conferences

In the midst of the impact of the establishment of the neoliberal evaluative culture, an initiative emerged from Latin America and the Caribbean to think about the new with a critical sense and committed to social justice. In 1996, a group of university and academic rectors, meeting in Havana, raised the need to address the situation of the right to education, innovation, academic freedom and public financing on a global scale. An international movement began that was heard by UNESCO’s Higher Education Directorate and the multilateral organization ended up convening the First World Conference on Higher Education (WHEC, 1998) in 1998.

From October 5 to 9, 1998, the CMES was held – preceded by regional conferences in Havana (the aforementioned meeting), Dakar, Tokyo, Palermo and Beirut – with an agenda structured around five base documents:

World Declaration on Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century: Vision and Action (Universal Right to Higher Education, Non-Discrimination, Sustainable Development and Social Justice)
Priority framework for action for change and development in higher education (orientation of reforms in the sector, public financing open to other forms of obtaining resources, administration and management, international cooperation),
Higher Education in the XXI Century: Vision and Action. Summary (summary),
Towards an Agenda 21 for Higher Education (Long-Term Vision, Sustainable Development and Equity),
Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Working Papers (Guide to Parallel Discussions).

At the end of the event, although the principles of academic freedom, university autonomy, the right to education and public financing were ratified, UNESCO managed to install in the documents the five major evaluation categories: quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency that give normalized form to the operations of the neoliberal evaluation culture. In addition, the paradigm of meritocracy made its way, paving the way for new forms of commodification, competitiveness and hegemony of the logic of the market in HEIs.

The World Conference on Higher Education (1998) opened a new space of dispute for the orientation of educational standardization. By converging the academic world, the multilateral world, civil society financed by corporate philanthropy, development banks and corporate corporatism, in a space like this, the call for minimum consensus ended up opening the doors to the policies of capital in education. It is not a question of denying its importance, significance and relevance, but of raising the need for a politicized, profound and structural reading of the university change movement to avoid falling into the naivety of the agreements that end up legitimizing the orientation of capital for university policies.

In 2008, the Latin American university academy met again in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, from June 4 to 6, 2008, as a preamble to the second World Conference on Higher Education (WHEC, 2009). The basic documents of this meeting (CRES 2008) were:

Papers on trends in higher education (prepared by IESALC – UNESCO, focusing on quality, relevance, equity and institutional autonomy),
Conclusions of the preparatory forums (focusing on regional priorities),
CRES Follow-up Report 1996 (reference for assessing the state of higher education),
GCES-1998 documents (focusing on education as a human right and public good).

The CRES-2008 was more progressive than the CMES-1998 itself, as evidenced by its central conclusions:

Higher education as a public good and human right;
Need for regional integration (ENLACES is created: Latin American and Caribbean meeting space for higher education);
Social commitment and relevance (evidently there was talk of another relevance, not that of the World Bank, although the alternative did not always manage to impose itself, as there were paths that displaced the emphasis);
To vindicate the autonomy and legacy of the Córdoba Reform (university autonomy, co-government, universal access, social commitment);
Addressing global and local challenges (globalization, commodification of higher education, need for greater coverage and inclusion, quality and equity);
Consensus on the Plan of Action (strengthening of inclusive, equitable and quality public policies / recognition of studies and intra-regional mobility / innovation and educational quality based on institutional evaluation and accreditation to guarantee educational quality / strategic alliances with governments, the productive sector, civil society and institutions of higher education, science and technology, as well as strengthening academic networks to share resources and knowledge/ commitment to the World Conference on Higher Education 2009 / construction of LINKS)

Despite the important achievements in the declaration and discussions of the CRES-2008, in its contents and debates the hegemony that the neoliberal evaluative culture had built was shown by:

Assume as their own the categories quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency, as modelers of equity;
There was a dangerous approach to the World Bank’s concept of relevance (1974), which considers it relevant to the extent that it contributes to development, under economistic appeals to social and productive needs;
Although STEM is not mentioned, the emphasis on innovation, technology and quality brought its conclusions closer to this paradigm;
The foundations were created to strengthen classification systems in the region, through discourses of meritocracy and evaluation;
Accreditation and institutional evaluation operations are promoted, which concretize an important part of the capital-driven internationalization model;
The promotion of global citizenship, collaboration and social commitment (polysemic terms) bring them closer to the so-called soft skills promoted by the World Economic Forum

In short, the conclusions of the CRES-2008 were a mixture of what capital and the alternative forces wanted, it was like getting along with everyone, something that in the end would affect the resistance to the hegemonic model. The problems for the full development of ENLACES seem to have been an obstacle course, put in the way, to prevent the formation of a solid alternative pole to the university internationalization underway, while the hegemony of the model was consolidated.

This was evidenced at the II World Conference on Higher Education (WHEC, 2009) in which the progressive contributions of CRES-2008 were ignored and the event focused on the educational purposes of the status quo.

The Second World Conference on Higher Education (WHEC, 2009) was held in Paris, France, from 5 to 8 July 2009, with the Trends in World Higher Education Report (1998-2008), the 1998 declaration, global statistical data and some of the elements of the regional meetings (taken with a grain of salt).

The slogan The new dynamics of higher education and research for social change and development were constituted in the framework for the renewed promotion of hegemonic internationalization, with cosmetic allusions to some general principles. The CMES-2009 did not mean a significant variation with respect to the first.

The new setting for higher education discussions in Latin America and the Caribbean was the 2018 Regional Higher Education Conference, held June 11-14 in Córdoba, Argentina. On this occasion, IESALC coordinated the preparation of seven working documents for the same number of thematic axes:

Higher education as a public good (higher education as a universal human right and social public good, duty of the State, sustainable development, social justice);
Regional integration and cooperation (strengthening ENLACES, solidarity internationalization, confronting commodification and intellectual dependence);
Equity and inclusion (indigenous, Afro-descendants, women, vulnerable populations and combating xenophobia and racism in universities);
Quality and relevance (quality assurance systems that respect local contexts);
Digital technologies (caution towards distance education and ICTs, prioritizing face-to-face education, strict quality controls for virtual modalities);
Commitment to the reform of Córdoba (need to update the principles of autonomy, co-governance, universal access and social commitment to the challenges of the twenty-first century);
Sustainability and social challenges (higher education must contribute to the SDGs).

The debates and conclusions of the CRES-2018 were an important effort to advance with respect to what was agreed in 1996, 1998, 2008 and 2009, addressing the seriousness of the new threats that loomed over higher education. However, it made the same operational mistake as the CRES-2008, by incorporating progressive elements without erasing the substance of the neoliberal evaluative culture or the hegemonic model of university internationalization: it is impossible to serve two masters at the same time, says the wise popular adage.

The negative element of CRES-2018 was the installation of the conservative spirit in terms of digital, which does not allow it to be valued in its real lights and shadows, nor to advance in alternative proposals for design, implementation and use. In fact, despite the public criticisms that had been made about the risk of a Global Pedagogical Blackout (GPA), with the abrupt transition to virtuality to generate digital literacy, this issue was dismissed as a scenario in the short and medium term. The arrival of COVID-19 and the preventive quarantine, only one year after the CRES 2018, evidenced the error of not having addressed this discussion, opening the way to a new model of privatization and educational stratification that extends in the post-pandemic with hybrid models of teaching and the refusal of most governments to cover the costs of connection. Access to equipment and platforms.

Despite the good intentions of the regional academy, the CRES-2018 was not constituted as a forum capable of containing or confronting the models of university internationalization and neoliberal evaluative culture that capital had been imposing since the seventies of the twentieth century.

However, the importance of core aspects that were addressed in Córdoba that affected the rhythms of the models of privatization and commodification of education underway, apparently alerted UNESCO’s governance, which, unlike previous opportunities, decided to convene the Third World Conference on Higher Education (WHEC, 2022), without consensus with the regional academy.

The third edition of the CMES was held from May 18 to 20, 2022, with ten lines of work:

Impact of COVID-19 on higher education (learning losses, increased inequalities and virtual education);
SDG 4: inclusive and quality education (democratize access and equity);
Quality assurance (role of accreditation agencies in improving quality and relevance with an emphasis on cross-sectoral participation);
Internationalization and mobility (recognition of degrees, South-South cooperation);
Digital education and new technologies (digital tools for access, attention to the digital divide);
Financing of higher education (public financing in times of economic crisis);
Governance and public policies (strengthening higher education systems through inclusive standards and structures);
Research and innovation (generation of knowledge, global challenges);
Cultural diversity and inclusion (promotion of interculturality and respect for local identities);
Futures of work and skills (human right to lifelong education for employability, preparing students for the labour market, skills for automation and digitalisation, soft and technical skills).

This World Conference meant a 180-degree turn for UNESCO, taking on the system’s agenda for education head-on. To this end, he replaced the co-direction of the world academy in the organization and elaboration of its agenda, with an alliance with the Inter-American Development Bank, Santander Universities, the Ibero-American General Secretariat and the Organization of Ibero-American States.

The WHEC-2022 was an event to align government efforts, international cooperation and multilateralism, as well as Development Banks with the education agenda.

UNESCO over time has learned to build future agendas and action plans, which contain the axis of capital’s policies, maintaining some progressive narrative elements associated with education as a right, but as a cosmetic discursive figure. Some elements that confirm this address are:

strengthen the course of the so-called Digital Transformation of Education (TDE) by focusing efforts on quality assurance for access, as an alternative and lower-cost proposal to face-to-face learning,
concealment of the privatization and educational stratification of a new type that EDT has brought from COVID-19 (national states do not finance its direct implementation in the classroom, but cover it by students, teachers and families by paying for data plans, remote connection equipment and access to platforms),
aligning higher education efforts with the standardized goals of capitalist development contained in the SDGs,
ratification of the categories of the neoliberal evaluation culture: quality, relevance (as defined by the World Bank), impact, innovation and efficiency,
promotion of accreditation agencies for university educational quality, whose indicators and parameters are aligned with the models of university internationalization and neoliberal evaluation culture,
addressing academic and student mobility within the framework of the new international division of labour,
In the face of the ongoing economic crisis, the search for business entrepreneurship models and private sources of university co-financing,
development of the idea of models of university co-management between the public and private sectors,
orientation of university research to the STEM paradigm,
to focus the graduation profile of students on the employability of the twenty-first century.

An element that drew attention in this CMES-2022 were the multiple presentations that were given on micro credentials in training, legitimizing the discourses that promote the university to accredit as its own, training processes that are organized and carried out in companies. A complex system has been put in place, from the margins of university institutions, which aims to solve the problems that capital considers to be precarious in the incorporation of skills in vocational training for employability in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution. In reality, this initiative transcends the issue of employment, seeking to guarantee low labor conflict, reduction of collective organization processes in the world of work, self-management of achievement, empathy, resilience and the entire neoliberal narrative associated with entrepreneurship.

Among other reasons, this was one of the aspects for which sectors of the international pedagogical social movement autonomously organized the Campaign: UNESCO NOT LIKE THIS!!, which concluded in a protest rally in front of the place where he was deliberating in Barcelona, the CMES-2022. This campaign became a benchmark for anti-system voices, which resist the neoliberal evaluative culture and attempts to silence voices that question the hegemonic university internationalization aligned with the interests of capital.

However, the balance of the III CMES was not encouraging. Evidently, in the contents, agenda and documents of the same, it is evident that neoliberalism had managed to permeate and hegemonize UNESCO’s agenda in Higher Education.

Finally, between March 13 and 15, 2024, UNESCO together with the Ministry of Education of Brazil through the Secretariat of Higher Education (SESU) and CAPES^[111] of that country, convened the balance of CRES-2018, five years after its realization. The CRES+5 -as it was called- met at the International Convention Center of Brasilia, with the following thematic agenda:

Higher education as part of the education system in Latin America and the Caribbean (integration with other educational levels);
Higher education, cultural diversity and interculturality (indigenous, Afro-descendant and multicultural knowledge);
Higher education, internationalization and regional integration (promotion of mobility and cooperation);
The role of higher education in the face of social challenges (social justice, equity, democracy);
Scientific and technological research and innovation as drivers of development (rationality of knowledge);
The strategic role of higher education in sustainable development (alignment with the SDGs);
Decent work and living conditions of education actors (labour and student rights);
Impact of COVID-19 on higher education (lessons learned and adaptations to crisis situations);
Inclusion, diversity and the role of women in higher education (gender equity and access to vulnerable people);
Knowledge production (democratization and social relevance of knowledge);
Financing and governance of higher education (sustainable models and university autonomy to make decisions in this regard);
The Future of Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (Prospective).

In addition to the documents by thematic axis, the UNESCO Institute of Higher Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC) added the Follow-up Report to the Action Plan 2018-2028 and the Roadmap for Higher Education 2022-2030, in the latter introducing the substantive lines of the WHEC-2022.

Again, the debates in Latin America and the Caribbean were superior to those of the World Conferences, however, each regional meeting introduces – especially by UNESCO – with greater centrality the elements of hegemonic university internationalization and the neoliberal evaluative culture, that is, the agenda of capital for higher education.

At the Brasilia event, UNESCO’s differences – specifically IESALC – with the more progressive arguments and ideas that emerged at the event were made public and evident. This would seem to presage new tensions in the organization of the agenda and contents of the Fourth World Conference on Higher Education, if it is ever held.

However, the differences were fundamentally between the inalienable historical principles of higher education, defended by the progressive academy of the continent – public funding, universal access, academic freedom, among others – and the intention of IESALC – at least in the management that corresponded to the event – to impose the illiberalization of HEIs. However, an alternative model of university has not yet appeared, which would transcend the disciplinary paradigm beyond the enunciative and would be expressed in proposals for radical transformation for the design and organizational development of higher education institutions. This acquires special relevance, because educational normalization is being imposed, more by the emptiness of the alternative, than by resistance expressed in other possible ways of organizing and managing higher education.

Transforming Education Summit

The realization of this Summit by the Secretary General of the United Nations, and not under the leadership of UNESCO, seems to show that the capitalist center is impatient with the slowness of the concrete results in adapting the school and university systems to the last two industrial revolutions and the demands that they have generated on labor relations in the mode of production. This Summit was attended by 65 heads of State and Government, and the presence of all the official national representatives of the United Nations system.

The Transforming Education Summit, held in 2022, was an event to look at the education crisis and reimagine education systems in the twenty-first century.

The main conclusions and commitments relate to:

The presentation of 133 national declarations by Member States with the commitment to advance in the transformation of their education systems;
UN Secretary-General’s Vision Statement, which calls for a new social contract for education, strengthening quality education as a public good^{^[112]};
Launch of global initiatives on the learning crisis, education in crisis situations (migration and other topics), environmental education (ecological crisis), gender equality, public digital learning (new emphasis on the digital transformation of education and the predictive regime that we will discuss in chapter 11);
Call to action on financing (diversification of sources and more public budget);
Youth Declaration on Transforming Education;
Formation of a global commission on the teaching profession (new teaching know-how).

Faced with the precariousness of the results of the neoliberal evaluative culture, in terms of the coupling of HEIs to the productive world in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution, capital has promoted three complementary agendas. The Summit on the Transformation of Education highlighted the serious problem that the capitalist center has around educational change, which is why it sought to integrate the central demands of these three great operations of change underway. In effect, capitalism has three very specific interests of change for world education, which although they have interests shared by the dominant elites, they also contain each of these contradictions derived from the particular aspirations for profit. Let’s look briefly at each of these three operations.

The first is neoliberal university internationalization through the political operations contained in the neoliberal evaluative culture, which we have been analyzing in this text. This strategy was designed from the irruption of the third industrial revolution and focuses on measurement (standards), stratification (rankings), productivism (bibliometrics, collection of funds) and the institutionalization of change (accreditations). These operations of change of the dominant system have taken over the debates and reforms in the universities and have built hegemony. The problem – which we have tried to explain – lies in the fact that its results show failure, at least in terms of overcoming the epistemic gap and turning universities into a focus for accelerating innovation. On the other hand, along the way, the fourth industrial revolution began, which generates new demands on HEIs and makes some initiatives that had been launched obsolete. Its reproductive emphasis links elements of biopolitics (disciplinary control) with psychopolitics (neoliberalism).

The second is the operation of global standardization through the term educational quality that allows contingent inputs and outputs of educational policies, expressed in initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs/2000-2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs/2025-2030). This initiative tries to develop from the emphases of the neoliberal evaluative culture, assuming others that are its own in terms of flexibility and adaptation, evidenced from what has been happening since 2000. The reproductive emphasis of this initiative is on psychopolitics, which we will expand on later.

The third is associated with the Digital Transformation of Education, justifying its impulse by the arrival of the fourth industrial revolution and its impact on the mode of production, the world of work and learning. Its emphasis is on the predictive regime that we will analyze in future chapters.

This multiplication of centers and emphasis on global public policies adds chaos to the notion of educational crisis. Most ministries of education and bureaucracy, what they do is try to please everyone, opening doors to different exchange operations that do not always complement each other. And from the alternatives, everything seems to be seen as a single operation, which limits the effectiveness of resistance.

PART III

The financialisation of education

Neoliberal globalization opened a stage of special boom for financialization. In order to advance in the financialization of higher education, a set of narratives have been introduced since the seventies of the twentieth century that make it possible to build a common sense favorable to its implementation. Some of these discourses revolve around the systematization and promotion of good practices, private education as higher and with better results than public education, the diversification of sources of financing, the need to increase private investment in research, extension and teaching, considering the production of knowledge as a quantified commodity, to emphasize the supposed value added by the classifications, to accustom the population to education being listed on the stock exchange, to give a surname to the human right to education by relating it to employment (lifelong education for employability), among others.

Financialization is the preferred model of accumulation of the ruling classes in the era of neoliberal globalization. Financialization refers to the growing dominance of financial markets, financial institutions, and financial instruments in the global economy. Its logic focuses on speculation (nominal value in financial papers, higher than their real value), the maximization of short-term financial profits (taking the real value differential, above the artificially created surplus value), all through financial products instead of the production of goods and services. Financialization demands internationalization of higher education and is expressed in the following ways:

Commodification of education (education as a service, which evolves to be marketable. The General Agreement on Trade in Services [GATS] and the Trade in Services Agreement [TIZA] promoted by the World Trade Organization [WTO] consider the need to liberalize higher education from the public sphere);
Priority in employability (STEM paradigm) and return on investment (use of the Return on Investment Rate [ROI] that devalues humanistic and social careers);
Global rankings that assume the role of financial indicators (financialized metrics that establish value to universities through indicators of graduate employability, attraction of international students who can pay high tuition fees and the production of patents.
Promotion of competitive logic that gives priority to the accumulation of reputational and financial capital).
Alignment with the knowledge economy (intellectual property, patents, licenses, articles in high-demand systems, which can attract private investment, i.e. be monetized).
Creation of private foundations attached to public universities (they act as figures for the sale of services, monetization of knowledge and returnable investment).

The forms of value assigned to higher education, taking as a reference the works of Christopher Nerwfield (2016), Sheila Slaugther and Gary Rhoades (2004), Adrienne Eaton (2016), Susan Robertson and Janja Komljenovic (2021), can be identified in:

Value as an individual investment: graduation from ranked universities increases the chances of accessing well-paid jobs, student indebtedness, family cultural capital, students are consumers who must seek a high Rate of Return on Investment.
Value as an institutional financial asset: universities converted into financial institutions that manage endowments^[113] in the financial markets. Forbes (2019) notes that Harvard, Yale, and other universities earn additional income by investing in bonds, stocks, and hedge funds.
Value as a global commodity: commercialization of higher education, through figures such as international students. On the other hand, transnational private providers such as Laureate Education or Pearson operate with networks of for-profit universities that emphasize profitable programs associated with educational relevance from the logic of the World Bank.
Value as a generator of human capital: soft skills to generate human capital that contributes to the global economy; collaboration, creativity and critical thinking associated with the productive requirements of large transnationals and financial markets.

Financialization implies the dissolution of the principle of university autonomy because it places its strategic meaning in the hands of the market. This is especially evident with the so-called public-private partnerships (PPPs) that promote dependence on private, philanthropic or corporate funds to finance research and academic programs. The securitization of future enrollments, through bonds placed on stock exchanges such as Wall Street, make autonomy dependent on market variations, which is accelerating the displacement of the social sense of universities, favoring the reduction of the educational subject to the role of consumer and strengthening structural inequalities.

Problems of the university internationalization model based on the neoliberal evaluative culture

So far we have tried to address and explain the enormous institutional and paradigmatic framework involved in the model of university internationalization and its dynamics of educational normalization and cultural homogenization, which have been imposed since the seventies and are still in force. As we will explain in the next chapters, it is not a one-way model, but capital has been promoting, in parallel, other models of internationalization that intersect and enhance the one we are analyzing and, sometimes, we come to believe that it is the same. The course of these parallel projects, their fusion, integration or dissolution will be something that only time and the correlations of forces of the social classes will determine.

For now, we are interested in highlighting some elements that emerge from the overall analysis of university internationalization under the neoliberal aegis:

Ambiguity in the strategic orientation (or doubts): the internationalization that is currently being promoted in higher education institutions (HEIs) is not an autonomous or endogenous model, nor is it oriented to the transformation of local or national inequalities, it does correspond to the hegemonic development model of late capitalism. Its purposes and aims are disguised by the academic language that tries to hide the economic, ideological and technological imposition character that composes it;

The alternative is not to improve the components, but to overcome the model: an important part of the progressive and anti-system alternatives think that the solution lies in modifying some components of the university internationalization model to promote solidarity internationalization. The framework covered in the previous pages shows us how the spider’s web stresses to conduct processes for a single purpose, restricting tolerance for abnormalities. What can be subversive in epistemological terms is to use alternative proposals for classification, scientific evaluation, accreditation or any other, to show how we are facing a standardization of academic life, which is only useful to the productive chains of capital and leads the university to its own destruction as an institution for social justice. In that sense, without proposing to fit into a movement that we cannot control, the alternative effort is radical. This is what has been done in the field of taxonomies, conflicting their infallibility as a mechanism to undermine the very structures of hegemonic internationalization, not to make it up;

Speed of implementation: bibliometrics, accreditation and classification processes (rankings) today occupy more than 90% of the institutional effort for society. It has taken almost five decades to get to where the university is today as a result of that standardized and hegemonic model of internationalization. This happened because the institutional memory of decades of anti-system resistance work that had characterized the Latin American and Caribbean public university had to be dismantled.

The alternative is possible: in another dialectic of the local and the global, from the territories that goes to meet the peoples, and that can be done by recovering the sense of the university. Dismantling the competitive and competitive logic that neoliberalism has installed can be done more briefly, it is enough to go to the foundations of academic freedom and university autonomy;

Flexibility: capital has needed to make the entire logic of intellectual production, teaching, research and university extension more flexible to reach this moment, which is not yet a point of no return. This «openness to change can be used to promote the emergence of the new, as we propose in the appendix on the critique of the discourse of the new careers;

Possibilities for critical thinking in university management: radical change has to come from the university, from its key actors and in a proactive way. In this sense, it is urgent to foster an environment for critical thinking to flourish with three key premises to open the way to the new: total transparency in institutional administration using virtual and digital tools, management control through internal democratic mechanisms based on autonomy, rotation of responsibilities on a permanent basis (that no authority repeats a mandate) and participation of all actors in decision-making Momentous. A new university revolt is needed to open the way to a new form of institutionality;

It deterritorializes the university: hegemonic internationalization generates dynamics of increasing destructrritorialization, having to prioritize global trends over those of the locality. This is hidden with the vision of capitalist development, which shows that this synchrony with the global will sooner rather than later bring progress to the local. This must be evidenced and confronted;

It instrumentalizes change and consequently slows down university renewal: the university we have must change radically, that is what has been said for a long time before the arrival of neoliberal globalization. The French May, the university renewal movement in the 1970s and most of the demands of the student protests indicated this. But what capitalism does with the hegemonic university internationalization and the neoliberal evaluative culture is to instrumentalize those desires for transformation towards profit and accumulation;

It is a form of massive rupture of university autonomy: the place of enunciation of university internationalization is not the educational institutions but the market. We have come a long way in this work to show it. Autonomy cannot be reduced to the way we do what others design and implement, but to think about dialogue with the environment, the country and society as a whole, from the perspective of social justice.

Partial closure

So far we have shown – and we will continue to do so in the next chapters – how the hegemonic university internationalization that corrodes university life is an imposition of capital to align HEIs with their needs, aims and purposes. That does not deny or dismiss the possibilities of developing another model of internationalization, but to achieve this we must first be fully aware of the forms, mechanisms and subterfuges that have been used to impose the current model.

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CHAPTER 10: THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL QUALITY IN THE FRAMEWORK OF DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSES: FROM THE MDGS (2000-2015) TO SDG4 (2015 -2030)^{^[114]}

Luis Bonilla-Molina

We have been accustomed to thinking of capital’s logic of education as singular, unique and one-dimensional, forgetting that there are interests and contradictions in the field of the international and national bourgeoisie itself. The reality is that in most cases several educational and university internationalization projects coexist that run in parallel, regardless of whether one is hegemonic and the others complement it or try to pull the cart of domination in the other direction.

In the previous chapter, we exhaustively reviewed the shift in capitalist educational policies since the advent of the third industrial revolution, due to the change in the acceleration of innovation and what this implied in terms of impact on the mode of production, generating new demands for school systems and universities. We explain the ways in which university internationalization and the neoliberal evaluative culture intersected – and intersect – complement and hybridize to build the new emphases of knowledge management and the life of Higher Education Institutions. We emphasize the need for capitalism, as a world system of domination, to standardize educational policies to align all efforts for the creation of surplus value, profit and accumulation of wealth in favor of the bourgeoisie.

But it turns out that along the way, those who lead the projects of capital encounter resistance, new elements that need to be incorporated and sectoral adaptations that must be implemented. That is, capital projects adjust before contingencies, especially in the field of productivity, employment, consumption and income capture. On other occasions, the adaptations seek to make compatible initiatives that coincide in a conjunctural way, although they have a differentiated orientation in the educational market.

This is where educational quality comes in, as a polysemic narrative that allows consensus to be built for school and university reforms, making it possible to add associated conjunctural novelties, facilitating the elaboration of proposals for change in terms of pedagogical specificity, interoperability and minimum agreements. In the end, market interests are part of each of the projects of capital on education.

When teachers, students and the community are asked if they agree with improving the quality of education, without requiring further explanation, the answer is usually affirmative. That is the power of this term in order to build hegemony, which is why at different times we have raised the need to enter into the dispute over the meaning, content and expression of educational quality, in order to be able to do a counter-hegemonic work.

Educational quality serves as a wild card to operate in the fields of didactics, curriculum, evaluation, planning, management, but also for research, teaching, extension and intellectual production, as well as for accreditation – agencies for university quality assurance -, university internationalization, rankings or bibliometrics. Quality becomes the label that hides different and dissimilar business models around education.

In operational terms, the strategy of educational quality allows for complementary, open and flexible frameworks, which are intertwined with university internationalization and the neoliberal evaluative culture from different paths, allowing multilateralism to have a vertex that articulates the institutionalization of reforms.

That is why we affirm that the discourse of educational quality is the way in which the United Nations system – especially UNESCO – contributes to the alignment of school and university systems with the logic of capital.

Integrate higher education into the cycles of reforms implemented by capital

The term higher education constituted the idea of an autonomous system that built its own strategic orientation. In the previous chapters we have shown the error of this statement, because university internationalization, elaborated from the dominant economic and political centers, has been a constant over time.

However, it was often difficult to demonstrate the structural relationship between the reforms of the first levels and those of the university sector. For this reason, in the previous chapter we insisted on showing the coincidences between the policies associated with the neoliberal evaluation culture with the operations of transformation in each of the components of the educational system. But even so, capital needed – and continues to do – a greater systemic relationship in everything that is education, which seems to be facilitated by the way of educational quality as a denomination that makes it possible to interact and integrate the other components of the orientations for the promotion of change.

Convergences in the Agendas of the WSESC-1998 and the Jomtein Declaration (1990)

The World Conferences on Higher Education (WCES, 1998; 2009; 2022) and the processes of the Jomtein Conference (1990) accelerated, even separately, the convergence of standardized initiatives for all educational levels, generating a turn of the screw in homogenization through university internationalization. Let’s look at their coincidences and the «conceptual bridges» that were established to build a common framework:

Right to quality education as a hegemonic discursive principle used to facilitate consensus

A characteristic of the «discursive diplomacy» of multilateralism is that they act on the basis of what everyone accepts, to introduce what would otherwise generate resistance. For this reason, both the Jomtein Declaration (1990) and the CMES-1998 are based on the vindication of educational quality to guarantee the human right to education, although they later adjectivize it by adding «for employability» or «for sustainable development». Jomtein inscribes the guiding principle in the perspective of «Quality Education for All (EFA)» and the GCES-1998 as «Educational quality for equitable access and permanence«.

This seeks to unblock resistances that originated especially when the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the nineties intended that internationalization policies assume the precept of education as a commodity or a tradable good in the market.

For UNESCO, it seems that the definition is adjective and the substantive are educational policy initiatives that are aligned with the logic of the market, regardless of whether in the prologue they appeal to liberal rights. What UNESCO does do is link the right to education to educational quality, legitimizing that it is impossible to think of one category, if the other is not present. In this way, it is possible to align the measurement and classification efforts contained in the categories of the neoliberal evaluation culture (relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency), through the aircraft carrier of quality, concretizing its public expression in the corpus of standardized internationalization.

Educational quality as a control device:

Once quality is introduced as a synthesis category that instrumentalizes the policies of capital in education, the pragmatic conditions are created to justify the implementation and use of control devices.

In Jomtein (1990) quality appears as a principle that must respect cultural relevance (adaptability) and meaningful learning (innovation, impact, efficiency), while in the CMES-1998 quality becomes the backbone of the evaluation culture (relevance, impact, innovation, efficiency) and the Standardization through university internationalization.

To achieve this, quality is linked to managerialism that reduces education to measurable results, which promotes the homogenization and standardization of educational public policies on a planetary scale. The emancipatory, democratic and social aims of the educational process become rhetoric that adorns the documents, but they have limited capacities for concrete operability.

Consequently, we are moving towards the technocratic notion of educational quality, measured by indicators, external evaluations, accreditations and rankings as control devices. In the case of Jomtein, the devices are linked to the goals, measurable and quantifiable, while in the CMES it is expressed in the call for institutional evaluation.

Diversification of financing and commercialization of education for the assurance of educational quality

Both the Jomtein Conference (1990) and the CMES-1998 identify the growing scarcity of resources for education and postulate the need to diversify the sources of educational financing for the assurance of educational quality.

With this premise, they enable and legitimize the entry of private actors, the increase in student fees and the logic of self-financing in universities. This manages to happen with a certain impunity, with discourses coming from mercantile lodges such as businessmen for education, the business philanthropy that contributes to universities or the promotion of university foundations, initiatives that open the way to renewed forms of commodification and privatization, all of them covered as support for the achievement of educational quality.

Today, privatization and commodification are not limited to the administration of the educational business, but seek to determine the ultimate meaning and purpose of school systems and universities. That is to say, the principles, aims and objectives of education are privatized, through changes in the corporate name of educational institutions, incorporating tasks of productivism and profitability that were alien to them, such as managing «contributions» from the private sector, achieving «financing» of university projects or the business impulse of the HEI through the sale of services. knowledge, consultancies or patents, as well as the production of parts for business production chains or the design of prototypes that enter the market. All this is done in an approved way – although with local particularities – with dynamics associated with educational quality indicators, which are presented as university internationalization, accreditations, rankings, bibliometrics, academic mobility and agreements for the recognition of studies.

The process acquires the name of promotion, guarantee and assurance of educational quality. At the CMES-2022 this reached impressive dimensions, when it was no longer a strategic alliance with the private sector for curriculum development focused on productivity and employability, but went further, postulating that companies can contribute to tertiary vocational training. This was presented as part of the challenges to achieve quality of graduates, promoting the discourse of university micro-accreditation aimed at the recognition in the curriculum of studies of the learning acquired directly in the so-called productive sector. This has tremendous implications, because it could initiate cycles of transfer of public funds destined for HEIs, which could go directly to the companies in charge of these components of tertiary training: the business of the century, training only for productivism, avoiding the conflict derived from critical social thinking and receiving state funds for it.

On the other hand, from the debates on financing initiated in Jomtein (1990), Dakar (2000) and the CMES, the demand to seek to achieve a minimum floor of public investment in education was incorporated, something that is progressive. However, the goal of 6% of the national GDP as the basis for the educational budget, is seen by financial and commercial interests, as a market niche that allows them to offer products, services and merchandise that manage to capture the maximum percentage of this increase, under the discourse of quality and innovation. Where it has been achieved, it has not served to improve school infrastructure, the salaries of education workers, or to increase social programs for students and families, but has been oriented to endowment (almost always with overprices), purchase of products displayed in innovation catalogs and, for the outsourcing of updating , items that allow the private sector to capture enormous volumes of public budget, also motivating the increase of hidden forms of administrative corruption.

An important part of the discourse on the diversification of financing takes the form of «social commitment to education«, one of whose components seeks to get families and students to co-finance areas of educational investment that had been under the competence of the State, facilitating the reordering of budget items towards activities that allow entrepreneurs to increase the capture of money destined for school systems and universities. Thus, they install the idea that the maintenance of infrastructure or inclusion are promoted through the volunteering of families and the increase in enrollments, dynamics that fall on citizens. This allows more funds to be allocated to the segments in which entrepreneurs have the greatest capacity to capture public money. All this under the protection of educational quality as co-responsibility.

The diversification of funding sources created governance mechanisms between multilateralism and sectors of nations (entrepreneurs for education), which guide research, extension, training programs and actions of the social movement towards the frameworks of agreements such as Jomtein-1990, Dakar-2000 or CMES-1998. This constitutes a loss of national sovereignty that is then introduced as strategies that are part of university internationalization.

If non-governmental organizations and the pedagogical social movement want to have resources for their activities, they must be limited to the referential frameworks of these international meetings – which are usually presented as belonging to the assurance of educational quality – which becomes an incredible alignment of movements of resistance to the ends of capital.

In short, the diversification of funds for education operates as a device for educational privatization and the co-optation of the pedagogical social movement, protected by the discourse of educational quality. In the end, even if we talk about the guiding principle of the right to education, it becomes a commodity, subject to the laws of supply and demand.

Relevance: between quality, equity and systemic functionality

The relevance of educational quality introduces university knowledge as the way to solve people’s problems, but by circumscribing solutions to multilateral consensus, this «modality» of relevance is functional to the logic of the market and capital.

The graduate profile and the labor market appear as institutional referents -devices- that guide the quality orientation in university internationalization. To concretize this reconceptualization of relevance – which uses quality and equity as wild cards for instrumentalization – higher education institutions are oriented to concentrate an important part of their effort on the needs of the labor market, promoting utilitarian education, devoid of criticism, and focused on the formation of flexible and competitive human capital (graduation profile).

International cooperation and public-private partnerships: solidarity or dependence?

The asymmetry of the actors involved in international cooperation, which operate around the denomination of aid to achieve educational quality, generates imbalances that affect the aims and purposes of school and university systems. In these cases, international cooperation is expressed in financing, technical advice and the sharing of information – associated with its meaning and orientation – from Development Banks (World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Andean Development Corporation, OECD, among others), the United Nations system, business philanthropy and other actors linked to global governance.

UNESCO, being part of the United Nations system, has an enormous dependence on the opinions and guidelines of the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) – especially since its most recent crisis due to the suspension of membership quotas by the United States and Israel – which influences the direction of the strategic orientations that the organization develops for educational policies.

The lack of an international educational forum for low- and middle-income countries, which autonomously poses educational challenges, makes international cooperation a straitjacket that forces us to move towards the purposes of the world-system. This does not deny the uneven development in the construction of hegemony between the different instances of the multilateral system, but it underlines the purpose of dependence that these mechanisms generate. All this is sought to be hidden by the calls for the assurance of educational quality.

Educational quality as a synthesis of international cooperation is instrumentalized through university internationalization and the devices of the neoliberal evaluation culture. Let’s look at each of them.

The «active» subject and the narrative of self-learning, self-management of life and entrepreneurship:

One of the discursive axes of the Jomtein Conferences (1990) and CMES-1998 was the promotion of the active role of the individual in the management of his or her educational process; lifelong learning (Jomtein) and the formation of critical and autonomous citizens (CMES, 1998) express this. This is correct in principle, but if we link it to the different edges of the hegemonic internationalization strategy, the matter takes on a different aspect.

Above all, because the discourse of educational self-help constructs a rhetoric of self-management of responsibility in which the educational subject has to assume his or her «responsibility» for school success or failure, without questioning the structural causes of exclusion. Education is depoliticized, hiding the causes of structural inequality and its impact on learning.

In the case of higher education, this takes on forms of productivism and meritocracy, which must be self-managed by educational actors. In the end, the quality of learning and the achievements that can be shown in the career – students and teachers – is attributed to personal effort and not a consequence of institutional policies and structural causes. This has a direct impact on the forms of valuation that educational quality acquires as a conceptual umbrella of university internationalization.

Quality and expansion of coverage without questioning the segmentation of education systems:

Although Khoynin (1990), Dakar (2000) and the CMES (1998) advocated the expansion and massification of education, this occurred without delving into the contexts of institutional segmentation, territorial inequality and differentiation by social origin.

The purposes of expansion and massification were promoted under the false idea that the private is better than the public, hiding the fact that disinvestment contributed to the problems of public education. Inclusion was promoted – and is promoted – in public schools and universities, without sufficiently questioning the frameworks of institutional precariousness on which they want to encourage inclusion with quality. The expansion and massification of public education was promoted without financial and technical investment in the improvement of pedagogical aspects (curriculum, didactics, evaluation, planning, management), teacher salaries or investment in infrastructure. These omissions are usually detected when university internationalization programs are analyzed.

Overall, the dynamics implemented ended up being functional to the growing stratification of higher education, especially between public and private HEIs. The glamorous aesthetics of the private hides and often multiplies the problems of the public, even if it ends up building a biased -ideologized- notion of educational quality, which is functional for attacks on the public.

This dynamic was accompanied by the adaptability of some quality indicators in accreditation, rankings, mobility and bibliometrics, thus making it possible to show «better results of continuous improvement» of the private sector, which ended up being benchmarks of quality in university internationalization. It is more expeditious and possible to install a computer laboratory in a private university than in a public one.

Finally, Jomtein (1990) and CMES (1998) installed the idea of international reference to assess the meaning and results of educational internationalization in general, and university internationalization in particular, based on educational quality as a synthesis category, which includes the other central indicators of the neoliberal evaluation culture (relevance, impact, innovation and efficiency).

The MDGs (2000-2015) and education policies

The arrival of a new millennium was propitious for the United Nations to promote processes to concentrate and standardize the development agenda, which would guide the new stage of internationalization of educational policies (including university). It was not a question of overcoming the agendas of Jomtein (1990) – which was ratified that year with the Dakar Declaration (2000) – or of the World Conferences on Higher Education (WHEC), but of establishing another epicentre to boost alignment, homogenisation and common indicators of achievement for internationalisation on a global scale.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) covered 8 areas of public policy. Goal two focused on the educational agenda, ensuring that all children in the world completed at least a full cycle of primary education by 2015, without making explicit inclusion goals for the university sector, although appealing to the need for continuous improvement in the quality of education.

At first glance, it could be inferred that MDG 2 was more directly related to the purposes of Jomtein (1990) and Dakar (2000), but in reality what was evident was an escalation of hidden differences between the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Development Banks and UNESCO, since the former seemed to question the slowness of consensus and the achievement of results by the third. while the latter shows more and more openly its intention to control the educational agenda. The United Nations system has been ceding space – including UNESCO – to the World Bank with regard to strategic aspects of higher education, to such an extent that it is possible to point out that at present the World Bank is the one that defines the orientation of matters in the field of university internationalization and UNESCO «translates», adapts and disseminates.

The UNDP’s position goes beyond the growing scarcity of financial resources for multilateral work, and expresses the growing pressure from the United States for the United Nations system as a whole, and especially in education, to show concrete results and not settle for «well-intentioned» statements. The United States increasingly insists that the plans and strategies of the United Nations system must really contribute to meeting the demands of the capitalist mode of production in the current conjuncture, leaving aside the liberal perspective of the past.

A quick reading of MDG2 shows that it is designed to contribute to achieving related goals such as economic growth, poverty reduction, prevention of social conflict, labor inclusion in increasingly technologized jobs, among others.

MDG2 uses the strategy of the synthesis efficiency category as a conceptual framework that makes it possible to measure and quantify educational quality, precisely what the United States requires. In this sense, MDG2 seems to associate educational quality with measurable results, which in HEIs refers to graduation rates, productivism, rankings, progress in accreditation indicators and bibliometrics; curricular standardization in the form of recognition of studies and degrees, academic and student mobility, and an approach to instrumental competencies.

This implied, as Apple (2000) points out, a stripping away of any possibility of the ethical, political and cultural dimension of educational quality. And this is important to point out, because in critical pedagogies there is no consensus regarding the importance or not of entering into the dispute of the term quality and its alternative possibilities, that is, intervening to try to give another ethical, political and cultural meaning to the definition of educational quality; In our case, we consider the conceptual and pragmatic dispute to be important.

Although university internationalization is not explicitly stated in MDG 2, what happens in the period of its validity (2000-2015) is an unusual promotion of global rankings, the consensus on international standards of accreditation and university quality assurance, the promotion of the mobility of a privileged segment of academia, the concealment of the economic, political and social causes of skilled migration and an important part of student mobility, the vertical transfer of taxonomic curricular and management models, as well as a shift from the notion of social commitment to that of productivity and commitment to business development. So, quality in higher education institutions (HEIs) is increasingly referring to doing these things well in a framework of convergence through university internationalization.

This consolidates a model of neocolonial internationalization, which operates as a mechanism for aligning the periphery to the dictates and needs of the capitalist center. The reforms derived from MDG2 refer to efficiency, employability, expansion of private tertiary education, the real loss of autonomy, the promotion of standardized assessment of productivism and financing conditional on the relationship between quality-business relevance-efficiency-innovation-impact.

Finally, productivism and efficiency, immersed in the proposal of hegemonic neoliberal university internationalization, promote individualism and prevent the construction of collective subjects, community and communality.

Without a critical and synthetic official assessment of the achievements and limitations of the MDGs in general and MDG2 in particular, they would pave the way for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A tradition was invented according to which multilateralism establishes the orientation of global education in general and university internationalization in particular.

Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2017), scaling up the standardization of public policies for educational quality

Between July 2014 and April 2015, UNESCO held a series of forums and meetings to finalize the international policy of Education for All (EFA), which had been defined in Jomtein (1990) and ratified in Dakar (2000). The closing of EPT was carried out with more sorrow than glory, due to the precarious results obtained. In the case of university education, between 1998-2015 two World Conferences on Higher Education had been held (1998; 2009), complementary to the MDGs.

From 19 to 22 May 2015, UNESCO convened the World Education Forum (WEF) in Incheon, South Korea, to launch the new policy initiative for educational internationalization called Quality Education. The purpose was to propose to the United Nations that educational quality be included as one of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) that would be defined in September of that year. The request was based on UNESCO’s capacity accumulated over more than three decades in the normalization, standardization and homogenization of education on a global scale. SDG 4: educational quality acquired this name as an expression of the educational agenda in the set of internationalized public policies that were launched for the period 2015-2030.

Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality of Education seeks to «ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education, promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all». SDG4 is made up of 7 main targets and 3 instrumental targets, each with specific indicators to measure its progress. The main goals are structured as follows:

4.1. primary and secondary education where all school-age children complete education at these levels in a relevant and effective manner , through free, equitable and quality school systems;
4.2. pre-school education with access for all to quality initial education;
4.3. quality technical, vocational and higher education;
4.4. technical and vocational skills, built on training for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship carried out by HEIs;
4.5. gender equality and for vulnerable groups, expanding the ranges of inclusion;
4.6. literacy and numeracy as a minimum floor to promote STEM;
4.7. Education for sustainable development, as an expression of developmentalism in this stage of capitalism;

The instrumental goals are:

4.8. Educational infrastructure (safe, inclusive and effective facilities);
4.9. Promotion of a greater number of scholarships for higher education (for low- and middle-income countries, in disciplines such as ICT, engineering and sciences, i.e., for the development of the STEM paradigm);
Increase the number of teachers (rural, vulnerable and hard-to-reach areas, expand the presence of universities);

In higher education, these goals have led to an increase in global enrollment with disinvestment in other areas, especially in percentages of salary increases against inflation and teacher refresher programs.

On the other hand, scholarships for the sector have increased, with the Erasmus+ Programmes (funded by the European Union), those granted by the Chinese government (China Scholarships Council), DAAD Scholarships (Germany), Agbar’s Young Talents Programme (Spain), among others, which facilitate cultural recolonisation because they are not designed for development based on territories, but the model of sustainability of current capitalism. These initiatives seek to ensure the quality of education.

Based on SDG4 quality of education, efforts have multiplied to link lifelong education to employability, productivism and development from a market approach.

Assurance of university quality through accreditation, bibliometrics, mobility and rankings

In higher education, the goals and indicators of SDG4 aim to strengthen accreditation for the assurance of educational quality, the rankings expressed in the rankings and bibliometrics, which both include academic and student mobility, as a joint effort linked to the productivity of educational actors.

What SDG4 does is to strengthen the model of university internationalization based on the neoliberal evaluation culture, with the addition that it leaves open 16 links with the other standardized policies that together constitute the basis for reforms in the sector.

In higher education, the term educational quality is not only confirmed polysemic, but also acquires the necessary operational plasticity to serve as a label for the set of change operations that are promoted in the period. Educational quality is the seal that unifies the operations of university internationalization and the neoliberal evaluation culture for higher education institutions, enabling their link with the so-called Digital Transformation of Education (TDE).

References

Apple, M. W. (2000). Education and power. Paidós, Barcelona, Spain.

Global Education Monitoring Report [GEM]. (2023). Global Education Monitoring Report. UNESCO Publishing.

United Nations [UN]. (2015). 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. UN Publishing, United States.

Torres, C. A. (2009). Education and neoliberal globalization. Routledge.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics [UIS]. (n.d.). International Data Report [UNESCO Database]. https://uis.unesco.org

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO]. (2015). Marco de la educación 2030. Ediciones UNESCO.

CHAPTER 11: INTERNATIONALIZATION IN THE ERA OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF EDUCATION (2011 – 2030)^{^[115]}

Luis Bonilla-Molina

World Economic Forum: A New Perspective on University Internationalization

As we have been explaining, the third industrial revolution implied a schism in the way of understanding the world and education. In addition to the course that university internationalization was taking in terms of neoliberal evaluative culture (explained at length in chapter 9) and quality as a synthesis category (chapter 10), other sectors of international capital decided to promote an educational change and model of university internationalization based on technological development, with a place of enunciation on the margins of the multilateralism that emerged at the end of the Second World War.

In 1971, Klaus Schwab and a sector of capital decided to create the European Management Forum, which from 1987 would be called the World Economic Forum (WEF), as a global space to improve business management, promote dialogue between sectors linked to production and foster a new spirit of international cooperation, using scientific and technological innovation as a dynamic element.

In this dynamic, training for employability, the need to transcend the paradigm of transdisciplinarity, the STEM proposal and the need to rethink professions, acquired new formats and contours that would impact university internationalization current. Progressively, this initiative was linked and synergized with others that were developed in Silicon Valley, such as the University of the Singularity. Today, the World Economic Forum is one of the most active propagandists of the Digital Transformation of Education.

Since 2011, the World Economic Forum has become the epicenter of public policymaking linked to the fourth industrial revolution. From this space, the differences between the third and fourth industrial revolutions and their impact on multiple agendas, including education, have been insisted on.

Fourth Industrial Revolution

In 2011 at the Hannover Fair, Germany, Klaus Schwab presented the concept of factories 4.0, which will express the impact of the fourth industrial revolution on the capitalist mode of production. Factories 4.0 are the integration of digital technologies, robotics, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and big data into factory production. In practical terms, this tends to imagine the possibility of reducing to zero human employment for the production of goods and machines made by machines. This dynamic is called the fourth industrial revolution.

The apologists of the fourth industrial revolution argued that one of the fields that could be most affected would be education, not only because of the Copernican turn in the generation and management of scientific and technological knowledge that underlies these innovations, but also because of the breakdown of the training model for employability developed within the framework of the three previous industrial revolutions. although, as we have analyzed, the third implied significant variations in the mission of the HEIs.

The fourth industrial revolution has not been fully implemented on a planetary scale, although the technological elements that distinguish it are already in full development. This delay is due to the fact that the 4.0 factories must previously resolve issues of flow of the production chains, technical-operational infrastructure, social reengineering and training for employability, very important aspects to guarantee the governability of the system and mode of production itself. One of the key elements is the university transformation, through internationally approved policies, which allow training for other jobs that enable the relationship of exploitation wages-surplus value in the fourth industrial revolution, generating goods and services that can circulate without atrophying profits and capitalist accumulation.

The fourth industrial revolution has an impact on the capitalist mode of production in terms of the productive forces, the relations of production, the way in which constant and variable capital, fictitious capital, financialization and monopolies are expressed, as well as on the contradictions that are immanent in it. In the productive forces, science and technology tend to become the main immediate productive force, advancing cognitive automation (not only in manual work but also in intellectual and service work) and life itself becomes the object of direct valorization (personal data, genetic engineering). In the relations of production, the subordination of labor to capital is deepened through algorithmic controls, digital surveillance, and the platformization of employment; precariousness becomes structural with economic gid, microtasks, and fragmented digital work; entrepreneurship falsely makes the worker appear to be responsible for his or her own exploitation. With respect to constant capital, its weight becomes more decisive due not only to investments in digital infrastructure and automation, but fundamentally due to the shortening of innovation cycles; while variable capital is reduced in a relative way, by virtue of the fact that living work is less central, although more exploited with teleworking. digital control and intensification, increasing in Marxist terms the contradiction, since when less living labor occurs, the source of surplus value decreases, aggravating the crisis of valuation. As for the relationship between fictitious capital and monopolies, digital financialization grows (cryptocurrencies, Fintech, venture capital in startups, speculation on data), global monopolies are consolidated (Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba, among others), and surplus value capture occurs through intellectual property and the data monopoly.

As for employment, capitalism now requires another type of professional training on a smaller scale than that imposed on it by the third industrial revolution. This has a direct impact on universities, which maintain the rates of supply of graduates typical of the third industrial revolution, without taking into account the drop in demand in the fourth industrial revolution. An important part of the employment that will emerge in the fourth industrial revolution will be that of an operator, rather than that of a creator or intellectual worker, which is why micro-credentials become an alternative path to the unrequired professionalization.

The contradiction in the capitalist mode of production intensifies, due to the fact that the more technology the greater the fall in industrial and service employment (problems for the capture of surplus value), exacerbating the tensions between social knowledge and private appropriation due to the increase in importance of patents, algorithms and data generated on the platforms. This increases the distance between the north and the south, with the particularity that countries of the south that were once weak are now approaching the capitalist center as a result of the closure of technological innovation, as is the case of China and India.

The fourth industrial revolution implies from the economic and cultural point of view for universities:

Conception of knowledge as a commodity, consolidating the notion of cognitive capitalism;
Pedagogical and curricular transformation oriented to STEM, digital skills, innovation, entrepreneurship, data analytics, intensive uses of generative AI, cybersecurity and virtual-digital surplus value;
Growing digitalisation of university campuses, with a trend towards a decrease in face-to-face attendance;
The analogue is assumed to be obsolete, to open up relevant space for the digital-virtual;
Administrative automation, which includes the use of generative AI for processes such as student selection, teacher competitions, and other areas;
Datafication of knowledge, which implies that whoever has access to data, metrics and digital traceability will have the rank granted in the past to the expert;
Open science for the capture of innovation produced in universities, while corporations maintain the patent system;
Tendency towards the concentration of scientific capital, through private corporations that manage the dynamics of bibliometrics, university accreditation, classifications or rankings, processes of recognition of academic mobility and recognition of studies;
Development of research niches based on artificial intelligence, through data mining, automation of bibliographic reviews, the generation of articles and content in various formats with AI, among others;
Large corporations assume themselves as administrators and owners of the intellectual property that is socially constructed in the networks;
Exponential increase in the need for corporate financing or generation of resources through financialization;
universities are beginning to multiply experiences to create spin-offs to commercialize innovations, integrating themselves into the logic of capitalist accumulation, especially strengthening the development of startups;
development of digital platforms as commodities;
data capitalism (exploitation of captured data and free work by university actors to generate that data);
precariousness and flexibility of academic work, initially through hybrid teaching models and then scaling to spaces such as the metaverse;
citizenship aligned by incessant connection and data productivism;
ideology of innovation;
trend towards total automation of teaching and learning.

The emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially from 2025 onwards, has further energized these processes.

OECD and the Digital Transformation of Education

In 1998, the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) defined the ICT (information and communication technologies) sector as a combination of manufacturing and service industries that collect, transmit and display data and information electronically.

In 2004, OECD published Innovation in the Knowledge Economy: implications for educational and learning , which raised the need to work in school systems and universities, science-based innovation, collaboration between users and practitioners, to apply flexible structures for the organisation of teaching and the use of digital tools to improve teaching and learning. This document would influence OECD definitions for decades to come.

In 2010, the OECD published the work Education Today: The OECD Perspective, which identifies four «bombs» that are not being used by education to produce the reforms that school systems and universities need to adapt to current social development:

The bomb of information and communication technologies: the use of ICT in educational institutions is insufficient, because those in charge of administration are resistant to the change that this implies;
The bombshell of scientific innovation: «education has not made use of the knowledge of [recent] research and there is often a cultural resistance to doing so» (p.120);
The innovation bomb of horizontal organization: there is enormous potential for the use of the experience and pedagogical results of colleagues in networks, but the structure of the system – we would say the structure of faculties, curricular and the role of curricular administrators in which teachers have been turned – prevents it. The OECD postulates the need for flexible models of teaching know-how, typical of the knowledge management model in the technology industry;
The bombshell of modular structures: «it is customary to work education by modules, but … the [teachers] … operate separately from each other», appealing to transdisciplinarity as a requirement of the capitalist system for the new stage of the mode of production.

The strategy proposed by the OECD to defuse these bombs is to use the Digital Transformation of Education (TDE) as an accelerator of educational innovation linked to quality, relevance, impact and efficiency.

Between 2019 and 2023, the OECD increased the intensity of its demands regarding the EDT, as shown by some of its documents. In How to Measure Digital Transformation: Roadmap (2019) he shows the new perspectives on the state of EDT, outlining the need to have measurable indicators for the assessment and classification of graduates for employability purposes. In other words, they consider cutting-edge digital skills to be an expected component of tertiary training (data science, AI and blockchain management, use of programming tools and potential of algorithms). In Educational Responses to COVID-19: Embracing Digital Learning and Online Collaboration (2020), the OECD argues that the leap that occurred in the pandemic should be used to energize EDT as a key element in sustaining the pedagogical link. Subsequently, in Digital Education Outlook 2021: pushing the frontiers with Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Robots (2021), the OECD explores how artificial intelligence, data blocks and robotics are – and are – impacting the classroom.

Shaping digital education: enabling factors for Quality, Equity and Efficiency (2023) is a document in which it outlines the policy strategies, pedagogical approaches, digital infrastructures and development of skills necessary to make a leap in the Digital Transformation of Education, which in 2025, is complemented when the OECD published the education sector working paper 328, entitled Policies for the digital transformation of school educattion: evidence from the policy survey on school education in the digital age. In this document, the OECD analyzes the global context of digital transformation in education, the main national plans and policies adopted, the experiences of coordination between levels of government, the necessary infrastructure and connectivity (access to devices and connectivity in schools, initiatives to reduce digital divides), teacher training and educational leadership, pedagogical innovation and the digital curriculum (new approaches to teaching and learning, digital competencies in curricula), evaluation and measurement of digital impact (monitoring and evaluation of digital policies, challenges of data collection and impact metrics), as well as the future challenges of EDT.

The OECD gives more and more centrality to the Digital Transformation of Education due to its long-term potential in saving resources and investment in education, trying to draw a map of actors that enable its development in the short and medium term, guided by criteria of commodification.

World Bank: Sharing the Education Agenda

Although the Development Banks seem to have divided the educational spheres^[116] of influence, it is obvious that their premises, starting points and suggestions for educational policies have the same orientation. This can be verified in the World Bank’s Education Overview (2023) in which it specifies the purposes of the education agency:

Strengthen the relevance of the market and the development of the teaching and research activities of HEIs (public and private) oriented to the imperatives of the labor market. Encourage the linkage of HEIs with companies;
Support for STEM in higher education research and teaching activities;
Rethinking the sources of financing, opening them to other actors besides governments;
Strengthen post-secondary institutions such as community colleges, polytechnic institutions, and technical training institutions, to reduce the training pressure of universities in these intermediate fields;
Support the capture and availability of data on academic program performance, including graduation and employability outcomes;
Work to ensure educational quality and relevance

In the case of HEIs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the World Bank (WB) focuses on diagnosis and reform agendas that guide policies on quality, financing, regulation, and information for decision-making; loans and technical assistance for quality assurance, evaluating internationally comparable standards and evaluation mechanisms; building regional capacities by promoting networks and frameworks for educational quality assurance, through joint initiatives with UNESCO, as was the case with GIQAC^[117] that supports RIACES,^[118] INQAAHE^[119], the Central American Accreditation Council (CCA)^[120], and the Experimental Mechanism for the Accreditation of Careers (MEXA)^[121] of MERCOSUR;^[122] strengthening the strategic orientation of regional HEIs towards world-class universities based on performance metrics and global visibility. Among these initiatives is the effort to contribute to the Digital Transformation of Higher Education (TDE).

The World Bank’s TDE policies focus on the adoption of a global conceptual and strategic framework, the global EdTch approach, regionalized intervention, and the strengthening of neoliberal evaluative culture policies. The WB strategy consists of three phases: discovering innovations that have an empirical basis, deploying scalable solutions, and disseminating capabilities.

In the presentation of the event Digital Pathways for Education: enabling greater impact for all (2025), the WB promotes the development of integrated and coherent digital hubs that overcome the practices of adopting isolated tools, through a systemic and contextualized approach focused on educational quality. The key principles that guide its approach to educational technology are purposes that respond to clearly defined pedagogical objectives, scalability and inclusion, teacher empowerment, public-private partnership, and evidence-based decision-making.

In LAC, it coordinates with the Inter-American Development Bank the strategy for the implementation of the EDT, contributing more than 512 million dollars and committing 400 million more for the coming years. In the case of HEIs, initiatives and projects such as the Digital for Teartiary Education Program (D4TEP) stand out, as well as various efforts for technical training and institutional strengthening.

A study commissioned by the World Bank from Molina, Cobo, Pineda, and Rovner (2024) specifies the implications of the AI revolution on educational policies: lesson plans and other AI-based content, automated routines, tutors with artificial intelligence, uses of AI in homework, AI assistant, early warning systems, resource allocation, mentoring with AI, and AI-based feedback.

Based on these incidents, nine educational innovations in AI are defined aimed at:

attraction and retention,
professional development,
teaching
Routines
personalized learning (author’s bold),
new assignment models,
rationalization of teaching and research processes,
proactive detection and
proposals to optimize the allocation of resources.

All these initiatives are interconnected with university internationalization. To promote bibliometrics, the WB promotes the use of evidence and metrics with practical implications at the national level, especially through evaluation systems that allow the quality and impact of publications to be evaluated, facilitating the efficiency of returns, through accreditation standards, which is made possible by the adoption of panels^[123] and KPIs^[124] aligned with the purposes of hegemonic university internationalization. Regarding accreditation for educational quality assurance, it seeks to strengthen the agencies in charge of managing standards and institutional mechanisms for convergence with international best practices. The idea of «world class» points to the homogenization of the model of excellence developed by the book by Altbach and Salmi (2011) that normalizes the use of comparative international classifications. For its part, the World Bank document entitled Higher Education in Latin America: the international dimension (Wit, 2006) specifies that academic and student mobility is the axis of the «circulation of brains» in the region. To strengthen policies for the recognition of studies and degrees, it favors the financing of procedural reforms and the digitization of processes. In addition, through RIACES it cooperates with the mechanisms for the recognition of cross-border tertiary education.

In summary, the World Bank promotes rigorous measurement and results-based financing as a focus of EDT, within the framework of the neoliberal evaluative culture typical of university internationalization.

Singularity University

In 2005, the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near, a text in which he postulated that in the near horizon – now there is talk of around 2045 – technological and scientific development will be able to promote an evolutionary leap of humanity, with the fusion between biological life and technological inventiveness, giving rise to a new hybrid species: The singularity.

Consequently, it proposes the beginning of a period of cultural and civilizational transition (2005-2045), which should have a special chapter on education in general and university training -professions- in particular. This idea is complemented by that of Peter H. Diamandis, creator of the X Price Foundation, which awards prizes for disruptive technological innovation, who works on a model of «abundance», later developed in his book Abundance: the future is Better than You Think (2012), which considers university education to play a central role in the construction of futurelability.

This convergence of perspectives gives rise to one of the most groundbreaking projects of higher education and institutional design, from the logic of capital in recent centuries, conceived not only for a transition to the fourth industrial revolution, but also to what they call the era of singularity.

The University of the Singularity (SU). It is not a formally established university, because it assumes a functional structure different from the classic HEIs, a fact that surely does not allow its formal accreditation, although they advance in micro-accreditation. It has an organizational design of a research center that complements training.

Created in 2008 by Ray Kurzweil – the guru of transhumanism and director of engineering at Google – and Peter Diamandis, its core activity is not Oriented to the general public but to the Decision makers national and international. They start from the premise that one of the problems that it prevented the evolution from the disciplinary paradigm to the transdisciplinary one, transforming the organizational chart centered on faculties and the culture of compartmentalization of knowledge, was due to the inability of the leadership to understand the dimensions, scope and meaning of the proposed change. By showing that the turn of the fourth industrial revolution is going to be much more drastic, they emphasize high-level training. Its students are ministers, directors of departments, heads of political organizations, techno-politicians in general. Currently its activity covers more than 70 countries.

The antecedents that led to justify the creation of the University of the Singularity are the Exponential technological change (acceleration rates that defy university frameworks), Need for adaptive leadership (gap between slow leaders trained in disciplinary paradigms versus disruptive, agile and collaborative thinking), Inspiration in technological uniqueness (point of transformation of the human concept) and Silicon Valley model (entrepreneurship, rapid innovation, global impact, breakdown of rigid educational structures).

Consequently, they seek educate and inspire the Leaders, entrepreneurs and organizations, addressing global challenges, Fostering collaborative ecosystems and Replace disciplinary archetypes for the generation of innovation. In their vision of creative work, teaching and learning, they postulate a transdisciplinary and convergent matrix, Systemic and heuristic for the construction of knowledge associated with creation.

In other words, Singularity University (SU) is a capital project to guarantee adequate, timely and efficient change management in general and university in particular. This is complemented by other grassroots workforce entrepreneurship training initiatives.

SU operates in Silicon Valley for the purpose of:

to train leaders with the ability to make use of exponential technologies (AI, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, blockchain, among others) to solve humanity’s great problems and to set new challenges,
accelerate innovations that impact one billion people in 10 years (10^9+). In this effort, it has received significant funding from large corporations such as Google, Autodesk, Cisco, Nasa and has progressively linked up with the World Economic Forum. In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this alliance became notorious when Ray Kurzweil was a special guest at the presentation of Schwab and Millaret’s book «Covid-19: The Great Reset».

The activities of 2025 and those planned for the coming years by Singularity University (SU) show the course they support:

in-person executive programs: immersive five-day experiences held in Mountain View, California, designed to transform mindsets and gain an in-depth understanding of the technologies shaping the future,
specialized thematic programs: such as the Future of the Program and the Future of Biotech,
global summits: meetings in Latin America, Europe and Asia focused on organizational transformation, leadership in the digital age, impact of exponential technologies on industries, scaling startups and entrepreneurship,
Online courses and digital resources: corporate innovation through platforms such as Class Central^[125],
Global community and impact networks (its model of university internationalization): it currently has a presence in 30 countries and 250,000 members aligned with its purposes.

In fact, in this last aspect, we are increasingly seeing how participation in innovation networks is a more valued element in university rankings, university accreditation and the productions of academic bibliometrics, evidencing its influence on the course of university internationalization.

Singularity University (SU) believes that in the near future, university degrees that permanently qualify for the exercise of a profession will be absolutely useless and obsolete, which is why it is necessary to move to models of training and work based on permanent updating, transdisciplinarity and the implementation of projects that allow the cultural and civilizational leap to be made. Its emphasis is on incubators of disruptive projects.

For this reason, for SU, the debate on the new professions and the reconfiguration of the role of universities is at the center of the debates (see appendix to this book). For them, the Digital Transformation of Education (TDE) allows us to build a new route of university internationalization that opens the way to the impact of the acceleration of innovation in education.

SU’s approach to EDT is aimed at creating a global community, especially of political, economic and social leaders that works on the empowerment and institutional adoption of disruptive technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, data blocks. To this end, they are betting on an exponential change in the mentality of their members, which allows them to act creatively in the face of the growing speed of scientific and technological innovation.

Some of its most widespread programs are the Leading Digital Transformation, which proposes a systemic directionality of technological disruption, the Short Topic Programs, which works on the future of AI, Singularuty Summits, which are conferences where technology is linked to entrepreneurship and the market, as well as Abundance 360 for CEO founders. Singularuty University has been creating a global ecosystem that works with and associates promising innovation initiatives with private and select communities that enable networking and access to exclusive content associated with the TDE.

In Latin America, they have expanded to Brazil since 2019, with a headquarters in Sao Paulo, which works with leaders in the areas of education, in addition to establishing an alliance with Adtalem and Ibmec for the distribution of their courses in Portuguese referred to Foundations of Exponential Thinking, Practicing Exponential Foresight and Impact Lab. More recently, the implementation of Singularuty University Mexico is underway, with the so-called Jalisco Digital Series. In each of the cases, SU works on the transition between the third and fourth industrial revolutions, on the route to the era of the Singularity.

These supranational initiatives show a significant transformation in the mechanisms and tools of cultural and educational reproduction of capitalism.

Reproduction, biopolitics and psychopolitics as expressions of domination in the first three industrial revolutions. The contours of university internationalization in this context

The capitalist system had used universities as part of the ideological and cultural infrastructure for its material and symbolic reproduction. In summary, we could point out – in the perspective that Deleuze and Guattari worked on – that industrial capitalism understands life – including social life – as a machine and, consequently, university education is a component of it.

On the other hand, capitalism as a world system of domination and production, needed – and continues to require – to develop on a planetary scale, for which university internationalization allows it to expand the standards, principles, protocols and practices of this functional homogenization to the mechanical logic.

However, as has been shown in the previous chapters, the third industrial revolution implied a shift in the way of managing knowledge, innovation and vocational training linked to the mode of production. University internationalization initially required that all universities and higher education institutions align themselves with the same practices and purposes and carry them out simultaneously to give greater dynamism to the system.

Biopower and Biopolitics

This reinforced dynamics that came from the origins of capitalism and that had taken the form of biopower, extensively worked on by Foucault in the history of sexuality and biopolitics. Biopolitics is the regime of reproduction in the first two industrial revolutions – and until the arrival of neoliberalism – a fact that for Foucault constitutes the government of existence itself because:

The life of the populations is managed in terms of health, reproduction, food, productivity, longevity and of course education;
Techniques for regulating bodies and behaviors, both individual and collective, are guided, favoring a dominated collective corpus;
Power, in trying to make the behaviors of individuals uniform, focuses on the control and domination of populations through statistics, censuses, health policies, urban planning, birth control, what must be taught and learned, the ways of circulating knowledge, the criteria for the validity of knowledge and knowledge, the profiles of professional graduation, etc. among others;
It assumes itself – biopolitics – as a positive power that not only represses, but also produces – the axis of capitalism is production – behaviors, normalized bodies and ways of life.
The different or singular takes the form of an abnormality that must be subdued, subjected or isolated. For this reason, the process and product of education is sought to be the same in all places and the categories failed, suspended, excluded, without quota are created, categories that are sought to be standardized in meaning and application in all territories.

Foucault distinguishes differences between anatomopolitics (disciplining, monitoring and training individual bodies) and biopolitics (regulation and control of the life of entire populations). Anatonopolitics is characterized by the microphysics of power, the production of subjects, and the body-power relationship), while biopolitics is life as an object of government, its use as a tool of power, normalization as a mechanism of control (see educational normalization in Chapter 9), the population as an object of study, the regulation of life, control and surveillance, the manipulation of life, the relationship between politics and life, in short, the relationship between power and government.

Biopolitics is expressed in normalization education (normality mediated by rules, evaluations, certifications, and measurements), management of the school population (organizing individuals by age, literacy rate, academic performance, school dropout), and the production of useful subjectivities (individuals who respond to the needs of the market and the State: obedient, adapted, productive, healthy, nationalized). Education is not limited to teaching but to constructing the forms of being (corporalities and mentalities functional to the social order). We saw this intention to produce subjectivities clearly expressed in the previous chapters.

Biopolitics in university education focuses on constant evaluation (rankings, academic productivity metrics, number of publications, accreditations), impact statistics (results-based management, graduation rate, job placement, economic impact of graduates), internationalization of talent (flows of students and academics as part of mobility policies, brain drain, skilled migration, recognition of degrees, curricular homologation) and the control of bodies and life trajectories (the university as an organizer of the times of youth, professional training, integration into the logics of the market and the reward systems for productivism that create the hegemonic notion of success). Biopolitics represses what is not normalized, it considers singularity destructive.

The biopolitics of university internationalization consists of the governance of knowledge flows (scholarships, exchanges, mobility and international academic migration), selection (productive and globally competitive subjects, relationships that are functional are rewarded), global cultural normalization (standardization of quality, relevance, innovation, impact, efficiency, employability, productivism), commodification of academic life (diplomas and competencies with the rank of economic assets, market of supply and demand of knowledge). In this sense, internationalization based on the neoliberal evaluative culture is a global biopolitical strategy. But this began to mutate with the arrival of neoliberalism.

Psychopolitics

The changes in the capitalist economy that took place after the third industrial revolution imposed degrees of freedom for the development of financial speculation (financialization) and neoliberalism. This implied reducing the size and powers of the state mechanisms of control, surveillance, and government. Neoliberalism drove the reduction of the size of the state and began to rely more and more on scientific and technological innovation devices to occupy roles of domination that were previously exclusive to governments.

This neoliberal flexibilization was expressed in entrepreneurship and self-management of life, ensuring that they did not exceed the framework built with biopolitics. It was the emergence of psychopolitics (Chul-Han, 2020) and infocracy (Chul-Han, 2021). From that moment on, freedom becomes a device of submission, now not of repetition, but of castrated creation of anti-system rebellion.

Psychopolitics (Chul-Han) is a new form of domination that arises in the neoliberal aegis. Power is no longer exercised mainly externally, as prohibition or repression (disciplining), but now operates from within the subjects themselves, who assume it as the enjoyment of freedom.

In psychopolitics, as a regime of capitalist control and domination, power governs through the mind, emotions and self-perception. The idea of freedom and people‘s self-demand is used to the maximum to encourage the subjects themselves to voluntarily exploit themselves.

Control does not require violent imposition, since people control themselves, seeking through entrepreneurship to be more productive, successful, efficient and positive.

Psychopolitics is constructed through the following:

Digital technologies: social networks, big data, productivity apps and well-being through continuous self-optimization, which stimulates incessantly showing oneself, measuring oneself, evaluating oneself and improving oneself;
Narratives of freedom: installing the idea that you can achieve any goal, if you decide you will achieve it, you can be the best version of yourself if you self-agency, undertake your success;
Internalization of norms: the need for visible control (biopolitics) disappears, because each person internalizes social expectations of success, beauty, health, efficacy, submitting to these standards as if they were their own;
Attention economy: by capturing attention through digital platforms, a dynamic of constant self-exposure is produced, which allows greater plasticity and modeling of emotions, thoughts and actions.

The central characteristics of psychopolitics are:

Self-exploitation: personal fulfillment is the mechanism that conceals the exploitation of mind and body itself;
Permanent self-optimization: the increase in personal productivity, image and skills becomes a constant in time and spaces;
Individualized guilt: mistakes and problems are not the result of social inequalities or power relations imposed by the ruling classes, but failure has personal causes;
Affective and emotional control: the self-repression of emotions, desires and perceptions becomes the preferred form of domination management;
Instrumentalized freedom: one freely «chooses» to assume as one’s own the logics of performance, classification and competition.

In education, psychopolitics takes on various forms and contours:

A culture of self-evaluation – even hetero-evaluation and co-evaluation appear aligned – oriented to comparison with parameters of success and failure;
Education as self-entrepreneurship: for investment in human capital, decoupled from social growth. Education based on individualism and personal effort;
Permanent motivation: emotional education seeks to ensure that each student generates and manages their resilience, entrepreneurship, proactivity and passion for measurable achievement;
Individualization of success or failure: the student is responsible for school results, not the material or pedagogical conditions in which learning is worked.

In higher education, this is complemented by self-management of learning, emotional competencies as a learning objective, success conditioned by self-entrepreneurship, internalization and naturalization of performance devices (rankings, bibliometrics, accreditation), as well as the commodification of dreams and affections (creation of business subjectivity in academic and student mobility).

Here it is worth noting that self-learning, which at one time was a radical slogan to escape curricular reification, is today used as a tool for entrepreneurship, self-management of life and reduction of costs of the system.

Psychopolitics has energized, reoriented, and given a new meaning to the devices of the neoliberal evaluative culture. Now it is not the evaluators who most promote and control bibliometrics, the development of rankings and the dynamics of accreditation for university quality, but it is the educational actors themselves (teachers and students) who promote it and consider it a fundamental part of the centrality of academics.

Psychopolitics has managed to ensure that not only bibliometrics and rankings are naturalized, but even progressive students and professors demand their implementation and highlight the benefits of these devices.

Psychopolitics does not imply an immediate dissolution of biopolitics, but a subordination of the second to the first, opening the box of repetitions so that the greatest number of singularities emerge within the same reproductive ideological framework. Abnormality is now represented by those who want to stick to incessant repetition.

Psychopolitics is the regime of domination in the neoliberal era and the period of transition from the third to the fourth industrial revolution. In education, it has a special chapter in the so-called Digital Transformation of Education (TDE), which generates the conditions of possibility so that in family homes, educational institutions and society in general, the devices that make it possible to materialize (internet, computers, platforms, social networks, remote connection equipment, meta-discourses of entrepreneurship and success) are present.

In fact, universities experienced a wave of incorporation of the internet, computers and digital content from the nineties of the twentieth century, but also the culture of online registration of productivism, entrepreneurship and academic success, features of the university internationalization of this period, which opened channels for psychopolitics.

Other authors who work on complementary issues to psychopolitics are Paulo Virno (2002) with his grammar of the multitude who argues that while capitalism exploits the affective, linguistic and communicative capacities of individuals, the education of the period molds flexible, communicative and emotionally available subjects for the market; Mauricio Lazzarato with the revolutions of capitalism (2014) and the factory of the indebted man (2013) who explains the formation of emotional debtors trapped in the idea of success; Franco «Bifo» Berardi in the Factory of Unhappiness (2003) and the Uprising (2012) addresses how schools and universities teach students to be emotional commodities, which is the cause of affective diseases such as depression, anxiety, burnout syndrome, among others; Pierre Dardoy and Christian Laval in The New Reason of the World (2009) explain how the capitalist economy and education construct the rationality of «self-enterprise» as a way of life.

On the other hand, Infocracy (Chul-Han, 2022) is the process by which excess power (not biopolitical censorship) contributes to the capitalist power regime that controls with «freedom», directs life with self-management and manipulates people with entrepreneurship. Capitalism floods the individual with an unmanageable amount of information and data, achieving the loss of a sense of wholeness and directionality.

Critical thinking and collective action are neutralized by the confusion, disorientation, and political demobilization generated by the excess of information. This opens paths to move from psychopolitics to the predictive regime.

The basic components of infocracy are: overabundance of information, erosion of truth (there is talk of post-truth, empire of fake news), digital acceleration (it prevents leisurely reflection and in-depth debates), progress towards algorithmic governance models (filtering and prioritizing information with criteria of attention, not truth), crisis of democracy (citizens trapped in digital echoes), compulsive communication (need to constantly produce information, without the capacity to produce transformation in the social relations of production). This neutralizes political action, fragments public space, turns citizens into consumers of content, government through overload, distraction and communicative hyperactivity.

In education, this has generated a hyper-growth of the curriculum, which makes it disjointed, but constantly increasing due to the imperative of updating content in a framework of unprecedented acceleration of innovation. This update of innovation does not guarantee that the inability of curriculum administrators to give priority to what is really new can be avoided; therefore, for the system, self-management of knowledge can be more easily associated with the idea of knowledge useful for employability.

Information is fragmented and decontextualized, critical thinking processes disappear and are replaced by criticism to improve productive processes, information stimuli are saturated, generating disorientation and less capacity for understanding. Micro learning, or short courses «that get to the point» are a good expression of adaptation to this new orientation.

In university education, superficial academicism has increased exponentially (papers and research to confirm book content, reality must fit what the books propose), pressure for digital visibility (visibility metrics from citations, publications in academic networks, H index^[126], which prioritize quantity), student disorientation (difficulty in building solid learning paths in the midst of the superabundance of information), formation of hyper-active subjectivities (academic tweets, posts, dissemination videos, which replace analytical depth).

This impacts university internationalization in

Commodification of university information: competition for educational marketing through rankings, social networks, digital campaigns;
Strategic disinformation: excess of promotional information that hides the real academic, social and labor conditions of universities;
Cultural uniformity with the feeling of uniqueness due to the loss of contact with the totality: internationalization based on stereotypes of success, competitiveness and classification, which displace knowledge, creativity and critical thinking;
Crisis of international critical thinking: express networks, which contribute to classifications, are privileged rather than networks for the construction of in-depth knowledge.

In addition to the neoliberal evaluative culture (quality, relevance, efficiency, impact and innovation), the discursive synthesis behind educational quality policies, the global standardization of educational policies and the digital transformation of education, there is also the chaos caused by the so-called infocracy.

Predictive regime, education and university internationalization

At the World Education Forum (2015), held in Incheon, South Korea, in addition to building the conditions of possibility for the definition and implementation of the goal of sustainable development quality of education (September 2015), the CEOs of large technology corporations announced that within a decade (2015-2025) the digital transformation of education (EDT) was going to be at the center of education policies in general. thus impacting university internationalization in particular.

If we review some background, we find that in the eighties, the IBM PC (1981) and the Apple Macintosh (1984) managed to make the desktop computer have the possibility of reaching offices and family homes. Although its operating systems were not as versatile as the current ones and its interfaces focused on text, that implied a qualitative leap compared to its predecessors typewriters. By placing the Compaq SLT/286 (1988) and the IBM thinkPad (1992) on the market, laptops, this meant an unusual flexibility, necessary for the massification of the consumption of digital products and the production of data.

The commercialization of the internet would be a reality at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties of the twentieth century. In 1989, the first commercial internet service providers (ISPs) were announced, redimensioning the role of computers that became nodes of a new form of communication, creation (data) and sociability.

With the design of the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee in 1989) and the release of the Mosaic browser (1993), a popularization of the transition from the third to the fourth industrial revolution began. In Latin America and the Caribbean, commercial Internet access arrived in Brazil and Mexico in 1994-1995.

The internet brings with it a new form of control and monitoring of individuals and communities: data. With the creation of ARPANET^[127] , data traffic between computers had already begun to be monitored, a process that would evolve with the creation in the 70s of relational database systems by IBM and Oracle, which allowed detecting, storing, querying and processing structured data; however, the scope was limited. User interfaces in terminals allowed manual data to be entered that was then processed in an integrated manner, but this dynamic was limited by the precarious expansion of the internet.

The World Wide Web (1989) and the Mosaic browser (1993) were a turning point in data capture through:

cookies^{^[128]} that allow tracking of users’ activity on websites (pages visited, preferences),
web forms that allow data to be collected online on an individual basis (when you fill out a subscription),
server logs that record IP addresses visited, browsing time, and sequences between sites.

Data storage and mining became a source of strategic information for e-commerce, advertising and the determination of macro trends.

With the implementation of Web 2.0, there was an explosion of data that allowed its use to be scaled up for security, control and prevention purposes. Data from the university world (professors, students, academic community) began to show a niche of information that could be used for the purposes of the classification of the neoliberal evaluation culture.

This enhanced the work that Web Science (1997) had begun in terms of statistical data on citations, something that would later be amplified by Google and other digital corporations. The data became an evaluative component of university internationalization.

Social networks escalated the processes of capturing, storing, and using data for various purposes, beginning to break the logic of uniformity that had characterized analog cultural domination.

University internationalization now had clearer tools (data) to evaluate, classify and reward not only institutions, but also individual productivity and uniqueness in the creation of content.

This increased academic entrepreneurship, but it also began to identify patterns that posed – and now more than ever – predictive possibilities of data. The problem that arose for prospective analyses – based on data – was that to the extent that we all did many similar things at the same time, this introduced significant errors when forecasting.

Consequently, it was necessary to expand the degrees of freedom, that is, to promote forms of curricular and pedagogical flexibility in general (within the control frameworks) in order to enhance the detailed use of increasingly individualized data.

The data accumulated in social networks showed social interactions, interests and behaviors, while sensors and devices (especially from smartphones from the iPhone 2007 onwards) captured geolocation information and individualized temporalities in the use of applications, while programming interfaces (APIs) collected data automatically to then be classified and structured in an increasingly referred to individuals.

The term BigData with technologies such as Hadoop (2006) and NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra) made it possible to handle large volumes of unstructured data, enabling the development of the cloud. Anyone who uses a social network, fills out online forms, uses smart smartphones has a unique set of data in the cloud.

The Observatory of Supervised Education (2023) points out that in South America, 79% of 448 public universities use emails managed by GAFAMs (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft), which allows these corporations to know and process individualized institutional information, aimed at university internationalization, both of current processes and of possibilities for new lines of work.

Advertising and targeted content was one of the initial and most obvious effects of the use of Big Data on a large scale. In the case of university internationalization, BigData began to feed rankings, bibliometrics and provided support for accreditation for quality assurance, through information on the behavior of educational markets.

Since 2010, the era of generative artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things has deepened this trend. Now, the Internet of Things with smart thermostats, wearables^[129] and new generation appliances made it possible to capture data from each individual and send it to storage centers for structuring and immediate use.

Biometric data (facial and voice recognition, thermal fingerprints) made it possible to advance in the design of university management models that used individual data for decision-making, from the very moment of their generation. In 2019 at the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence (WAIC) organized in^[130] Shanghai, China proposed a control and decision-making model based on this technology, for internationalization and its indicators of neoliberal evaluative culture (quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency).

At the event in China, it was shown how some universities in the Asian country used the emerging data from each classroom session to make contingent decisions, and the accumulated data to decide on enrollment maintenance, content readjustment or strategic investment.

On the other hand, the so-called advanced tracking with technologies such as tracking pixels and application SDKs (Software Development Kit) were shown to be able to collect detailed data on online behavior.

It quickly went from data lakes (raw data available in massive repositories for later analysis) to cloud computing that allowed storage and processing in an interactive dynamic. But it would be with machine learning that AI algorithms would be able to analyze data in order to formulate automated and personalized predictions, opening the possibilities for a new regime of control and reproduction: the predictive regime.

Multimodal AI (such as ChatGpt, Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini 2.0) made it possible to combine the use of data from text, image, voice and geolocation, making the model more versatile, scaling the prediction possibilities.

Web 3.0, especially with blockchain, with its revolutionary capacity to capture and process data, made the data used for decision-making suggestions more reliable, verifiable and accurate, but also for use in prospective analysis and diagnosis of expected behaviors.

Edge computing, with the autonomy of the cloud generated by the integration of IoT (Internet of Things) devices, allows the situated use of data, also enabling the development of synthetic data, which allows the use of AI to be optimized.

Today, hybrid data infrastructure allows the combined use of the cloud, the Edge and on-premises servers to optimize results, accompanied by real-time AI that processes data instantaneously for simultaneous decision-making to those that occur in real life, not only for use in cars, infrastructure and military equipment. but to influence individual courses of action.

5G and 6G networks (under testing) allow data to be captured and processed, with scenario inference dynamics, unprecedented in human history.

Consequences, the hyper-personalization of the market, control and reproduction, as well as sustainability due to the permanent downward trend of costs and zero probability of errors. This poses an unusual challenge to capitalism in terms of production (material and immaterial), consumption, capture of surplus value and speculative rent, control and domination of the subordinate classes.

As Klaus Schwab (2011) pointed out, this has a direct impact on education. Since university internationalization is the central political operation of capital in recent decades, this dynamic has an impact – and will do so more and more clearly – on the ways in which teaching and learning are homogenized.

The evolution of the notion of the human body as a Deleuzian machine has taken an impressive leap forward with the development of neuroscience that considers the human mind and brain as predictable and routine components in its functioning and production. This has led to the revitalization of the paradigm of knowledge transfer and individualized learning.

In this logic, face-to-face teaching, which establishes common patterns that can be repeated by the majority, becomes an obstacle to the predictive regime. For the new mode of reproduction, control and production (material and symbolic), individualized education is a necessity to exploit singularities to the fullest, capturing and using those unique and unrepeatable data of each individual to take control to its smallest detail.

This is expressed in university internationalization, in the call for educational flexibility and the replacement of the teacher by avatars. But as we will show in the following pages, a series of limitations and obstacles must first be overcome. This opens a time of transition, which opens up renewed possibilities for alternative resistances to build other ways of subverting what the system intends to do through the updated recombination of operations typical of university internationalization.

The predictive regime uses elements of biopolitics, psychopolitics and infocracy, reorienting them towards a disruptive goal: the progressive dissolution of face-to-face education, which implies thinking about school and university systems mediated by virtual and digital developments.

Global quarantine and scaling up the predictive regime: university internationalization focused on the digital and virtual

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a qualitative leap in the construction of school architecture, logistical infrastructure, and educational culture for the advancement of the predictive regime in school systems and higher education institutions. We can point out without reservation that 2020-2021 were the years of university internationalization focused on the Digital Transformation of Education (TDE), within the framework of the expansion of the predictive regime of control, production (virtual goods and subjectivities) and capitalist reproduction.

Until then, the transition to teaching models with virtual platforms and digital content, in the short term, seemed unlikely. That is why this scenario appears so diffuse – if not non-existent – in the debates and documents of the Regional Conference on Higher Education (CRES-2018), held only two years earlier in Córdoba, Argentina. The arrival of COVID-19 concretized what the regional academy did not have the capacity to anticipate, mainly due to its precarious study of the evolution of the logics of capital in education.

Until then, the TDE even had the form of institutional updating with equipment and internet connection. Technology corporations had managed to impose the paradigm of the enlightened worker in academia, which did not place as a priority the debate on the epistemology of the virtual-digital, its ways of organizing communication, teaching and learning processes, much less with respect to autonomy in terms of platforms and data capture. What was done was to buy software, hardware and cognitive paradigms, without really understanding the impact that this would have on pedagogy and andragogy.

From that moment on, university internationalization homogenized and normalized the use of platforms built outside university campuses, producing an unprecedented outsourcing in the orientation of academic daily life. Some of the consequences of this dynamic of university internationalization were:

The use of communication platforms (for meetings) was accepted as typical of teaching and extension, as well as potential use for research (in the latter case the negative impact has been less);
Psychological techniques of curricular organization, especially Bloom’s taxonomy – functional to the capitalist metric for education – have been transferred to the sequences and interfaces of the new platforms for education that were built in the post-pandemic era;
The unequivocal presence of the frontal model of teaching in universities was internationalized , on one side were the teachers and on the other the students, almost always the former with the screen on, while the latter generally kept it off;
There was no pedagogical discussion – and there still is not – about the differences in pedagogical times between face-to-face and virtual classrooms. On the contrary, a mechanical transfer of the duration of the class hour in the classroom and desk was made, to which we remain in front of a video camera, without there being any pedagogical theory that supports this fact;
No controls were established for the capture, analysis and use of the billions of data that emerged from the university world. Universities have become one of the most important sources of data production for the predictive regime;
The privatization model prevailing in the pandemic was naturalized, based on the abandonment of most national states of their obligation to guarantee minimum learning conditions, because it was families, students and education workers who had to cover the costs of connection, data plans, use of remote connection platforms and equipment in order to develop virtuality.

From 2020 onwards, the Digital Transformation of Education (TDE) component present in university internationalisation actions increased and became constant, although it is difficult to understand what is behind this operation. The mistake is of such magnitude that even progressive or leftist governments promote social programs to bring computers to students’ homes, without universities having the capacity to connect, which facilitates the attempts that would begin to be launched to accelerate the transition from face-to-face to virtual.

Hybrid teaching models: Where are they headed?

What technology corporations and their great godfather the World Economic Forum (WEF) seem to be promoting is the soft landing of university education in virtuality, not the other way around. In fact, today almost all universities are in the process of agreeing on the distribution of face-to-face and virtual (hybrid) percentages of teaching. This is absolutely functional to the development of the predictive regime.

In this case, a novelty or anomaly arises, the transition to the hybrid occurs in a decentralized way, from the bottom up, which shows the rise of entrepreneurship, aligned with the purposes of the system, as part of its reproductive metabolism . It is teachers and students who are increasingly requesting the transition to hybridity, from various arguments. This inaugurates dynamics of university internationalization that will take shape «from below» while expressing itself in the «above», complementing and updating at a more dynamic speed the operations of educational transformation that capital requires and that are made possible through university internationalization itself.

The different face-to-face/virtual percentage agreements that have been implemented (40-60, 50-50, 70-30) seem to be in the comfort zone of an important part of academia, since now a sector of the teaching work is carried out from home. However, this is only the beginning of a more far-reaching attempt, in which a sector of capital considers that with the predictive regime and the current technological development it is possible to dissolve face-to-face education and with it, the capture of enormous volumes of public budget destined for face-to-face university education. that could go into the coffers of technology corporations.

The university internationalization associated with the Digital Transformation of Education (TDE) must be analyzed with special care, overcoming the simplistic analyses that seek to frame it as a matter of endowment and updating. In fact, there are already initiatives to transcend the virtual work of teaching and learning, in ways that reduce the role and activities of education workers to a minimum.

The prohibition of cell phones in the classroom

In recent years, the crusade against the cell phone in the classroom, which we had already known in 2019 and which was diluted during the pandemic in the face of the desperate call to use them, to sustain the pedagogical bond, has been revived. These new initiatives have three main sources of origin. The first, the conservative spirit of tradition that feels threatened by its educational performance, inherited from the first two industrial revolutions; As this conservatism cannot be exposed as it is, it hides behind arguments of attention deficit, distraction or banality, when in reality it reflects limitations to integrate tradition with innovation. The second, encouraged by those who want to destroy face-to-face education, because this in the end will make educational institutions appear outdated, outdated, a prerequisite to advance in the hegemony of virtuality. Third, the pedagogical problems (didactic, curricular, evaluative, planning and classroom management) that are evident in the transition, making the lack of scientific answers unmanageable the new situation; Efforts to integrate the analogue and the virtual have been mediated more by the market than by pedagogy.

We are not saying that the cell phone, imposing itself in the daily life of life and classrooms, without any orientation or directionality, does not have negative effects. Even the differences in cultural capital when using it make it more dramatic, because digital consumerism is stronger in the poorest social sectors. What we emphasize is that the cell phone is a reality, which demands a critical and creative reading of its insertion in the social and school reality, proposing alternatives not only in terms of use but also in design. The most dangerous thing, which is the capture of data and its unauthorized use, does not appear clearly in the debate about cell phones in the classroom. This discussion must be used constructively to explain the current capitalist domination and the colonization of the mind within the framework of the predictive regime, that is the real problem.

The metaverse and the dissolution of the teaching role

In 1984 William Gibson would publish Neuromancer exploring the idea of cyberspace, in which people interacted digitally. But it would be Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash – a virus that affects human and digital organisms – who would coin the term metaverse, in which there was a virtual space accessible through virtual reality devices, with 3D avatars, its own rules and internal economy.

In the 90’s, the first early virtual worlds emerged, precursors of the current idea of the metaverse, including Active Worlds that allowed users to create and explore virtual worlds in 3D. But it would be with Second Life (2003) that the metaverse would assume many of the current contours, since in addition to building spaces and interacting socially in virtuality, economic transactions were carried out with virtual currencies (linden Dollars), allowing attendance at unprecedented cultural and educational events.

With the development of multiplayer video games, in the style of World of Warcraft (2004) and EverQuest (1999), persistent worlds are introduced in which thousands of players can interact simultaneously, creating the concept of virtual community.

From the second decade of the 21st century, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) make the possibilities of immersion in video games more accessible, where the PlayStation VR console stands out. The evolution towards social platforms and immersive games such as Roblox (2006/2010) and Fortnite (2017), allows the idea of the metaverse to begin to expand beyond video games, with concerts such as Travis Scott (2020) in which millions of users participated.

In 2003 Stanford University (USA) had already created the Virtual Human Interaction Lab, to study the effects of virtual reality on human behavior, and in 2007 some initiatives were carried out at the University of Malaga (radiology classes), which would continue to expand at Harvard University and the Open University with virtual experiences in Second Life. at the same time as personalized educational environments were created. Not only did students participate in classes through avatars, but they also witnessed and interacted in conferences with audiences, multi-located in territorial terms. However, in 2025 immersion is not yet a generalized operation of university internationalization, especially due to the technological gap in many HEIs, but everything indicates that this will be a new element of innovation to be incorporated and taken into account in the short term in terms of classifications in the sector.

In 2021, Meta (formerly Facebook) announced its intention to develop the metaverse from platforms such as Horizon Worlds, while Microsoft (Microsoft Mesh), NVIDIA, Epic Games (creators of Fortine) are focusing a significant part of their research and budget on the development of the metaverse.

Immaterial production, trade and finance in the metaverse seek to be an alternative source of surplus value generation, which also solves the problems of wage income of workers who will be displaced by factories 4.0 and the fourth industrial revolution. Now they would have to learn to work in virtual environments and live an economic duality (the real and the virtual), generating levels of alienation not imagined just decades ago.

To develop the metaverse, an infrastructure of social appropriation is required, in an unprecedented short time, which constitutes the greatest limitation for its implementation. Let’s look at a preliminary balance of the technological state, adoption, and usage, as well as the most recent trends in the metaverse.

Regarding the technological status, it can be pointed out that necessary hardware such as immersive glasses and updated versions of Meta Quest have been developed, but their cost is still high, which limits their mass adoption.

The current development of AI is boosting advances in metaverses, as well as the expansion of blockchain and virtual economies with platforms such as Decentraland and The Sandbox that allow assets in NFT format to circulate. However, interoperability between platforms has not yet been achieved, something that has already been warned by the Metaverse Standard Forum (2022).

As for its adoption and use, until now the largest field of development has been entertainment, through video games. This seems to be building a culture of immersive work among children and young people for their potential development in university spaces in the short term, although it is necessary to specify that many adults, teachers and university students are already using it outside institutional environments. The growing use for work meetings, on platforms such as Microsoft Mesh is popularizing the versatility of its uses. The biggest challenge is the digital divide, concerns about privacy and data use, as well as the mental health effects caused by this technology.

The trends that arose in 2025 were further expansion in Asia, such as the case of Metaverse Soul (2023), the development of general and specific regulations for education, and the urgency of solving sustainability due to the gigantic consumption of energy and natural resources such as water for cooling.

For the purposes of this book, we are interested in highlighting the link between the metaverse and higher education and university internationalization, based on the presentations made by large technology corporations, because the pedagogical social movement has not yet placed a clear position on the matter. These possibilities would be:

Virtual mobility: now, multilateral organizations and development banks are beginning to talk about student and faculty exchange without the need to physically travel, as well as the shared use of virtual libraries, laboratories, repositories, and documentary sources;
Access to global resources: mainly through participation in international conferences and events without travel and shared research work;
International academic collaborations: collaborations between universities from different countries without having to travel in person. An example of this is the Erasmus + Virtual Exchange initiative. Also, working in shared virtual labs, as has been happening with Microsoft Mesh;
Promotion of cultural diversity: possibilities to experience different cultures without traveling. For example, the University of Tokyo created a space in the metaverse to explore Japanese culture, along with engineering training. In addition, the metaverse integrates language interfaces that allow students of different languages and cultures to dialogue;
International marketing and recruitment: virtual campuses to attract international students that improve rankings in university rankings and accreditations. The University of Bristol (United Kingdom) is an example of institutional promotion through the metaverse. Other initiatives, such as QS World University Rankings, organize virtual university fairs that allow connection with other international students.

This poses enormous challenges for university internationalization, if it decides to incorporate the use of the metaverse into the short and medium term goals for HEIs, but it shows possibilities of hegemony for the predictive regime. Here are some of these challenges:

Inequality of access: many universities still do not have an internet connection for their entire community, much less are they able to achieve an adequate endowment soon to guarantee equity in access. For this reason, what seems to be underway is a process of neo-privatization of education, in which technological updating is increasingly financed by citizens, teachers and students than by the State itself;
Lack of interoperability: the adoption of the metaverse in the current state would limit collaboration between universities that move on platforms other than those adopted by an institution. In addition, investment in what is now a tower of babel in terms of standardization would force HEIs to finance research that makes it possible to standardize protocols that facilitate interoperability, increasing the transfer of public funds to the private sector.
Lack of international regulation: the uneven development of legislation for the educational use of the metaverse portends obstacles in its implementation in the short term.

The Digital Transformation of Education (EDT) is entering with greater speed and ease through the Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG 4 quality of education and SDG 17 partnerships for the achievement of the goals, making the predictive regime a reality in the process of being generalized.

Year 2030: Bursting the educational bubble?

What we have tried to show is that the Digital Transformation of Education (EDT) is an initiative that goes from the edges to the center of other university internationalization actions. The acceleration of innovation and the productions associated with the TDE make any formal definition very volatile, so it is necessary to follow it up through the forms that are expressed in the other operations of university internationalization.

What is evident in the coincidence of the analyses made from the neoliberal evaluative culture, hegemonic internationalization, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Digital Transformation of Education (TDE), is that around 2030 an educational turning point in general and higher education in particular is expected. In this context, the defense of face-to-face, meeting and the shared construction of knowledge is a mode of resistance that should unify anti-capitalist alternatives in education.

The question that arises is, are we prepared for that moment of rupture?

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Chapter 12: From the disciplinary paradigm to heuristic convergence in the fourth industrial revolution: an unclosed crack in university epistemology

When common sense is scarce, the problems increase: who is favored by the deception about the supposed overcoming of the disciplinary paradigm by the university?

Luis Bonilla-Molina

Luz Palomino^[131]

Let’s be realistic: let’s ask for the impossible

The university, historically speaking, has been the privileged space for critical thinking committed to social justice, economic equality and inclusion. At different times it has been the space that has guided important conquests of society. Unfortunately, in recent decades, the offensive of capital on higher education institutions (HEIs) turned out to be of such magnitude that it has made many of these struggles invisible and even generated setbacks that were unthinkable 100 years ago.

In the anti-colonial resistance, the processes of independence, the construction of Republics, the emergence of national states, the development of democracy and the rise of the progressivity of rights, the university played a stellar role. The Cuban revolution with the broad participation of university students, the revolts of ’68, the anti-neoliberal battles of the last four decades, it is evident that rebellion is still present. Although we inscribe this work in that perspective, we will continue to concentrate on showing other edges of the architecture of the capitalist offensive on university education, especially around the attempts to overcome the paradigm of knowledge construction and management (disciplinary/transdisciplinary), science and technology.

The three moments of industrial capitalism in terms of university policies

Capitalism in its relationship with the construction of knowledge has three paradigmatic moments. First, of character discipline typical of the first two industrial revolutions, second, of transdisciplinary requirement from the third industrial revolution and the third, in which he aspires to achieve Heuristic convergence in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution.

If we analyse educational policies, with 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 expressed its full potential in the capitalist mode of production – we can have a more precise understanding of the rationality of capitalism’s proposals for the development of the world. university sector.

This is due to the epistemology of industrial capitalism, for which there is an immanent relationship between knowledge and scientific-technological innovation. This acquires full meaning to the extent that it contributes to the symbolic and material reproduction of the logic of production-market-profit. Consequently When there is a turn in the spiral of innovation, 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, meaning and directionality events such as the reform of Córdoba (1918), the cycles and location of the recent university expansion -especially after the Second World War- and the institutional evaluation culture (from 1961 onwards), enhanced from the neoliberal aegis (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, model of academic-student mobility and purpose of the recognition of degrees and studies through the international scale), the STEM paradigm, the Bologna agreements and the contours that university internationalization has taken.

One of the central elements of the tensions installed 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 transdisciplinary and now into heuristic convergence.

In the first case – transdisciplinary demand – since 1961 it has generated a Paradigmatic fissure which was not – and is not – taken advantage of by the anti-capitalist sectors critical of disciplinarity, to make way for another possible university. Consequently, a anomaly unprecedented, typical of the existence of a Epistemic Gap: Although capitalism and anti-capitalism criticize the disciplinary paradigm in unison, the transdisciplinary school and university has not been able to be born, during the long period of sixty years that this crack has remained open.

Paraphrasing Gramsci, with respect to the pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will (2011), we would say that the progressive and anti-capitalist sectors have counted on the Overflowing optimism of the will to confront the policies of capital around higher education in the framework of the third industrial revolution, but it has The force of intellectual pessimism has failed when it comes to understanding the dimension of the tasks to be undertaken to defeat it. As we have been pointing out, one of the causes of this vacuum is due to the precarious analytical link between industrial revolutions and university policies. That is the reason why we make the effort to find interpretative keys that contribute to getting out of the stagnation of the intellect, an initiative that cannot be confused with an apology for despair, on the contrary, it is a triumph of the conscious will, a tribute to the utopia of another possible university, from the force of the deconstruction of domination.

Disciplinary Approach: Nostalgia for What Was Successful

As we have pointed out, for the industrial capitalism of the first two industrial revolutions, the knowledge acquires characteristics of a dynamic element of the earnings, especially when it relates to innovation technological to be used in the optimization of the times and results of the production of goods, as well as the extraction of Surplus. In this sense, capital seeks improvement, not the irruption of a new productive model, and this «optimization» was seen in its beginnings as a process that went from «the parts to the whole». Abrupt changes called for prudence, progressive changes were evaluated in their performance to avoid breaks in production chains.

In the context of the first two industrial revolutions, when unusual «leaps» in the rhythm of creativity occurred, this demanded the elaboration of prototypes and Limited trials, so that its implementation and effects could be scaled, based on the demonstration of its effectiveness in improving production. Only then could innovation be generalized. Consequently, the progressive improvement of the parts was more reliable, to prevent possible damage to the whole.

The specialization it becomes the preferred paradigm of capital in the period of the first two industrial revolutions. The need to encourage innovation and its transfer to the mode of production can be explained initially by the proximity to the breakdown of the feudal model of accumulation, later by the incessant aspiration to expand profit margins.

The specialization implies a Machine vision of innovation, in which the object of study must be seen as an artifact, to be approached by delimiting a specific work area, in order to improve the totality of its functioning. In this sense, the Division of fields of knowledge as disciplines It was especially useful.

A redesigned screw, made of a lighter but doubly strong material, could prevent machine misalignments. The task, as an example, is entrusted separately to different disciplines to build viability and reliability to the improvement, reducing the implementation error to its minimum expression, even if experimental error was inevitable. For the location of the new materials and their extraction processes, geology is commissioned, their combination and alloys are commissioned to chemical engineering, the required quality of materials to industrial engineering, the redesign of the machine for the new coupling to specialized mechanics, the adjustment of human processes of commodity production to the sciences of organizational development and the sociology of work. It was in turn a question of the control of the fragmented parts, the compartmentalization of their assembly.

Every discipline was building his stamp of identity «corporate» expressed in Theoretical paradigms, methods, languages and validation criteria which also allowed the systematic and coherent accumulation of knowledge.

This logic also extended to the social structure, with a Machine Epistemology of the human and societal relations, deepening the human-centrism that subordinated animal life and nature, to the improvement of machinery divided into social classes.

To ward off the risk of creating a «tower of babel» in the field of innovation, academic hegemony was built for the Standardization of a unified communication method for the processes of research, experimentation and presentation of results, which is what we know today as 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 creativity is a chaotic process invaded by error, in which success is the new included, a dynamic to which theoretical and procedural justification is sought, establishing protocols to replicate achievements. Everything is presented in reverse, as if the theory knew in advance the results of experimentation or prospective analysis to the concrete facts of a specific social conjuncture. Everything was reversed, but it was not good academic manners to raise one’s voice about it. The scientific method is more of a route for communicating results than for disruptive creation.

In addition, in the first two revolutions the Innovation cycles they had particularities that favored the disciplinary approach. The Long wave theory of innovation (Kondratieff, 1984) proposes a duration of 60-65 years for the cycles of the two industrial revolutions. Among them, Carlota Pérez (2003) distinguishes the cycle speculative or installation of innovation (20-30 years), and the deployment or stabilization (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 from case to case. The trend in the first two industrial revolutions was to introduce small leaps of innovation within each cycle, which appeared every 15-20 years.

In this sense, the knowledge that was learned at university, could be used for long periods in society and workplaces, the management of which was prestigious, as it enjoyed 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 innovation. State-of-the-art knowledge. These rhythms of permanence were expressed in institutional protocols and processes.

This facilitated the adoption of the Organizational Design (structure, functioning, institutional evaluation) that today we consider as proper and immovable of universities, when in reality there was greater variability in this regard, before the emergence of industrial capitalism. The universities naturalized the Model of organization by faculties, schools, departments, research centers, observatories and lines of research that favored the disciplinary approach to work, building an idea of University tradition -making an analogy with the ideas of Hobsbawn, 1983- who was actually a inventionfor institutionalizing the disciplinary paradigm.

This approach, which had been useful in previous experiences of the hegemony achieved in capitalism by the first two industrial revolutions, had been possible in relatively small universities, if we consider the current standards of the number of students and professors per HEI. The massification of universities and university enrollment, which occurred in the liberal period of the first two industrial revolutions, ended up calcifying the Disciplinary paradigm as a structuring factor of institutional management, making unthinkable a university organizational model different from that of faculties, schools, departments, centers, observatories and lines of research. The popular adage goes «if you want to create a problem, found a department».

In summary, 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 formulation and management of both knowledge and innovation, but also made it possible to structure a university organizational development that was complementary. This functional structure would paradoxically become the greatest obstacle to being able to meet the demands of capital, especially in terms of the renewal of the knowledge paradigm.

The transdisciplinary: lying to the mirror?

The arrival of the third industrial revolution (1961) made the matter more complex, for five basic reasons. First, the Incorporating Virtual Programming and Robotics into Industrial Production, a fact that implied an expansion of the Newtonian mechanical paradigm typical of the first two industrial revolutions; This entailed tightening the limits of the old disciplines and hybridizing fields that had remained stagnant. The fusion between robotics, programming, process engineering, innovation dynamics and reordering of know-how for the generation of goods, required increasingly complex processes of disciplinary integration. For example, a video game (commodity) demands the integrated work of psychology, programming, graphic design, anthropology, calculus, algorithm science, legislation, management, neuroscience, among other fields, not only in its production but also to promote the innovations that sustain the accumulation of capital (profits).

Second, los Innovation cycles Within each industrial revolution, they began to shortening the times of the creative spiral, going from 20 to 15-10 years, then to 6, and now there is talk in many fields of knowledge, of turns of 1 to 3 years. The generation that has worked in universities for the last fifty years has known the acceleration of innovation in a unique 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, there was a rapid shift from 8-inch floppy disks with a capacity of 80 KB (1971), to 5-1/2 diskettes with a capacity between 110 KB and 1.2 MB (1976), to portable memories of several TB and cloud storage, jumping from the fixed device to the analog mobile, and from this to the digital cell phone, then to the first devices with text messaging, social networks, to generative Artificial Intelligence in devices such as Alexa.

Third, the Business management models, implemented in the first two industrial revolutions (Taylorism-Fayolism, Fordism) were obsolete to expeditiously incorporate the products of the unusual acceleration of innovation in the continuous improvement of commodity production. The Post-Fordist models began to express the loss of interest in degrees and the Disciplinary Approaches, because the novelties in 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 arises to Transdisciplinary knowledge management, as manifested at the International Conference on the World Crisis in Education (1967), where capitalism makes public and notorious the demand for another way of constructing knowledge, which transcends disciplinary protocols.

The pressure on academia began to become increasingly evident, as demonstrated by the Faure Report (1973) generated by UNESCO and widely referenced in this book. This began the collective cognitive drama of academics, who should overcome the disciplinary approach to the management of knowledge generation and innovation processes, but the problem now was how to do it? The decades of the seventies and eighties marked the search for ways, ways, and ways to achieve this, but all the reform initiatives clashed with the formalized institutional structures for the management of teaching and learning. UNESCO promoted the so-called complex thinking (Morín, 1990) to try to unblock the game, but changing the functional architecture, which 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 names or the addition of other instances – and assume the responsibility of the organization. Transdisciplinarity as a «transversal axis» for the production of knowledge; a beautiful name, but with serious problems for its concrete operability in the logic demanded by the capitalist mode of production of the third industrial revolution.

Many of the progressive and anti-system intellectuals gave themselves over to this magic solution, which ended up being a capitulation of critical thinking, with no possible practical effects. Paradoxically, the educational left that advocated the overcoming of the disciplinary perspective, ended up prisoner of the university functional paradigm that prevented him from building an alternative anti-system proposal; The solutions did not seek to escape the influence of the model of disciplinary faculties and schools.

The neoliberalism of the eighties and nineties found a practical solution to the gridlock, privatize university research and extract an important part of the laboratories and research centers of the university environment, now passing them to the tutelage and business financing. More than professional training, what neoliberal capitalism was interested in was the acceleration of innovation, the control of its transfer and its implementation in the most efficient way under approaches that transcended disciplinarity. Everything seems to indicate that in empirical terms, capital developed inter- and multidisciplinary pragmatic forms 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 trying to promote the transition from the disciplinary to the transdisciplinary paradigm, capitalism seems to have lost hope in the self-reforming capacity of the university. Although in the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century, most HEIs began a process of updating their vision and mission, contemplating transdisciplinarity as an emerging paradigm, the reality was that the distance between saying and doing was – and is – huge.

It is not possible to pretend to soar through the skies with the «feathers and beeswax of Icarus», an adequate infrastructure is required for this, and the university organizational model hegemonized in the first two industrial revolutions (faculties, schools, departments, etc.) made it impossible for the university to escape from the disciplinary island of «Crete». While the «sun» of the acceleration of innovation melted the wings of Icarus, making evident the falsification of the paradigm shift, the capitalist «minotaur» chose to promote the externalization of the dynamics it required, leaving the academy a prisoner of Daedalus’ attempt.

Fifth, the companies in the technology area, which even became 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 the degree, the Skills and competencies to work in inter/multi/trans disciplinary teams that built pragmatic dynamics that enhanced the generation of knowledge that contributed to the acceleration of innovation. When it was necessary to strengthen the capacities for action, advanced training in business spaces, away from the noise and academic tumult, was enough. Of course, in all the teams there were qualified professionals, but the preeminence of this criterion for selection began to seem overestimated. From the explosion of post-Fordist managerialism in the seventies, eighties and nineties, there was a decline of managers as a tribe specialized in management, emerging a stage in which the creators and owners, not only of the Start-up but of the large corporations, they became their own managers. The trend was for CEO-owners to now lead creative teams.

From the business world, the university acquired a New centrality in the reproduction of the system, the Dissemination of news for the orientation of consumption (profit + income), through the dynamics inherent in the Neoliberal evaluative culture (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, academic mobility and recognition of studies). This shift would facilitate the adoption of what is now promoted as the Great news for higher education institutions: Micro Credentials or the Micro Accreditation.

By not being able to Breaking the university with the weight of the invented tradition of the disciplinary paradigm, a dangerous period of structural instability of its entire institutional apparatus begins. Even the Edgar Morín Real-World Multidiversity University, so promoted as the genesis of new functional archetypes, did not manage to transcend or become a prototype of the new university to emerge. In that long period of emptying of the university’s reforming potential (1961-2011), a new turn of the screw in the industrial revolutions is evident. The arrival of the fourth industrial revolution finds the university with a debt balance (transdisciplinary paradigm) and now it is required to New paradigmatic shift.

Heuristic convergence: if we don’t talk about it, won’t it happen?

The announcement made in 2011 in Hanover, Germany, about the imminent landing of the fourth industrial revolution (Schwab, 2016), meant a starting point. The planned horizon of change contemplated twenty years, that is, its full deployment is expected around 2030. It was not a simple concentric turn, but now the spiral distanced itself from transdisciplinarity to demand New forms of convergence between fields of knowledge. Its spokespeople – the fourth industrial revolution – spoke of new ways of thinking and the generation of required knowledge, but they did not finish – nor do they yet – give conceptual form to that requirement, communicating only its operational expressions.

The academy, in a reckless way, seems to have left empty and inert the terrain of this call to think about a new paradigm of knowledge. It is like a collective drive to escape, which seems to express the cognitive syndrome that, if it is not talked about, the event will not occur. Since in love and politics – in this case education – there is no empty space and this is usually filled by other actors, ideas and desires, it is development banks, multilateralism, technology corporations and corporate consultants who are beginning to tear the veil of the emerging. In this sense, we invite you to get out of inertia and retake the initiative.

Heuristic convergence

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

Although, the Heuristic convergence It is not a normalized, standardized term or yet incorporated into the educational thesaurus, it serves us to try to express the growing demand to transcend the limits of transdisciplinarity. The Heuristic convergence It has two basic components, the first being the convergence that it is not summation but integration, fusion and complementarity as the case may be; the second, the heuristic understood as a strategy of discovery and construction of meaning.

Consequently, the Heuristic convergence can be interpreted as a Emerging concept, associated with the integration of various heuristics – methods or strategies based on experience or practical reasoning – with the aim of achieving a Much more accurate solution, efficient, robust, suede Complex problems arising from accelerating innovation. It appears as a new cognitive, pedagogical and epistemic paradigm, which transcends by integrating disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, to respond to the demands of soft skills, creative critical thinking and contingent approach to the problems of the knowledge-technology-production relationship.

Heuristic convergence Preservation of the disciplinary paradigm analytical rigor and methodological depth, transcending it of its epistemological enclosure, its compartmentalization of knowledge, Preserving the coexistence between multiple forms of knowledge of the multidisciplinarity, expanding beyond its limits by making it possible to Real dialogue between knowledges, maintaining the articulation between disciplines typical of interdisciplinarity, overcoming dependence on formal academic frameworks; Finally, it is called to summon and contain the Extra-academic knowledge that entail the Transdisciplinarity.

The heuristic foundation of paradigmatic convergence is far from being understood as an addition of parts, it is rather a dynamic and changing integration, which seeks to Addressing uncertainty without the need for absolute certainties, facilitates the establishment of Multiple inputs and points of contact Inter paradigmatic, postulates the Learning from Error, experimentation, dialogue and intuition, favoring processes of Emerging Thinking, typical of the activation of the Lateral thinking and divergent.

The Heuristic convergence seems to be a path for the development of the calls Soft skills, by facilitating Critical thinking (not only functional, pragmatic or consensual, but built from the contrast of different perspectives), the creativity (unusual connection of ideas), Effective communication (translation and mediation between disciplinary and experiential languages), collaboration (negotiating meanings and goals), Complex problem solving (address real situations from multiple approaches), adaptability (learning in non-linear and changing environments) and empathy (integrate community knowledge). Its approach from an emancipatory perspective seeks to be an antidote to the instrumentalism of economistic productivism. Heuristic convergence calls for the development of new scientific paradigms (in the plural), as well as experimentation and communication of results.

In Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) we talk about Heuristic algorithms (genetic algorithms^[132], taboo search^[133] or simulated annealing^[134]) and Hybrid Metaheuristics, Heuristic rules for decision-making, common truth (multiple perspectives grouped around a consensus). How much of this can be useful to undertake the pending task?

The central question is not to wait for capital’s definition of heuristic convergence or the name it assigns to its demand, but to seek its own elaboration from the alternative field, transcending the defensive and reactive character. We are facing the imminent opening of a new paradigmatic rift, something that is urgent to take advantage of. We cannot repeat the experience of the past, where we do not use the opportunity to advance in the field of empirical, conceptual, operational and organizational architecture when it is called to build transdisciplinary institutionality. In this case, we have a brief space for it, since the fourth industrial revolution has the format of factories 4.0 and these have not yet turned on the switch that will mark their full start. In the accelerated transition between the third and fourth industrial revolutions, we are forced to think of the alternative in terms of those at the bottom.

To speak of the beginning of a fifth or sixth industrial revolution, as if it were a process that is objectively being built at the moment, is a technologicalist view and disconnected from the relationship between innovation and mode of production (commodities, profits, governability, reproduction). Immaterial production is still marginal, its production chains are still closely associated with the materiality of production and the mechanisms for the generation of additional surplus value are in most cases experimental or unstable. What besieges the university at present is not the imminent landing of the fourth industrial revolution in the programmed production of commodities and profits on a global scale^[135], but its impact on the way knowledge is produced and managed.

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 appearing. One of the most interesting debates is the one they are having about Technofeudalism and critique of the digital economy, between Cédric Duran (2025) and Evnegy Morozov (2025). Basically, Durand argues that the digital economy is a regression to the mode of accumulation prior to capitalism, in which the profits of large technology corporations are fundamentally marked by the extraction of the income of connected users and small businesses in the virtual field, while Morozov points out that the Digital corporations operate in the logic of the capitalist market, investing in innovation, competing for markets and making profits (not just rent); Durand considers that the owners of corporations act with the logic of landowners, taking over territories, and instead of promoting innovation they prioritize the control of data and platforms, generating an economy based on dependence, while Morozov responds that technology companies are classic capitalist actors, which express an evolution of capitalism towards hyper-concentration and financialization. that has innovation as one of its central components, and, he says, we are not facing a return to the past.

This debate is not alien to university policies in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution, much less to the University internationalization. In Morozov’s logic, in order to maintain the Pace of innovationthe Digital capitalism requires increasing volumes of investment which are even surpassing the capacity of financial speculation, which is why, based on what the Belarusian intellectual has put forward, capital turns its gaze to public funds, especially those allocated to the education sector. Virtuality, hybrid teaching models and the metaverse are 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 innovation is creating a horizon of Risk for university face-to-face educationthe Teaching stability and the Return to the Instructional Paradigm (in this case remote).

From our point of view, Morozov is right in defining that the owners of corporations do not want to have any relationship of vassalage that means dependence, but rather bet on the fiercest competitiveness in the social sphere, from which they can set in motion the machinery of profit absorption with parameters that include income from the data, especially through the predictive regime.

In any case, whether Durand or Morozov are right, what can be derived from the reading of their proposals is that a tsunami on university institutions and the internationalization of the sector, which express the open confrontation between the liberal, progressive and socialist ideas of Progressivity of rights, in universities and, the illiberal purposes who see the Face-to-face as an obstacle. For this reason, hybrid models, as they are increasingly being structured in everyday university life, are a dangerous concession to digital capitalism that puts the university as we know it at risk. The abstract shows itself in the concrete, debates about the current nature of capitalism in the superstructure have a correlation in structure.

This is not an academic abstraction, which is waiting for the university’s will to change. On the contrary, a set of initiatives have been launched whose epistemology could be summed up in the phrase «The university is transforming quickly or it is going to disappear due to social obsolescence”. Let’s see below, some of these proposals that try to make transfer from the economic-political to the academic level, which are developed at the superstructural, structural and concrete level: university crisis, STEM and STEM+A paradigm, calls for the reduction of degrees, micro-credentials, Generative Artificial Intelligence to overcome routine thinking styles, training from companies, 180-degree turn in organizational development, dismantling of Fordist models of social security. .

The stable and the changing: technology is innovating day by day

Eric Sadín (2022) lucidly explains the impact of the acceleration of innovation on its Directional turn of the technique. From humans’ disturbing passion for creating doubles of themselves (IAGs), to the idea of technologies of perfection, to landing on ergonomic interfaces (technology such as human prosthetics) and to externalizing the regime of truth, everything seeks Integrate innovation acceleration 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 is occurring more clearly in the new generations. The adaptation of the university world to the system, the perfect fit to the neoliberal evaluation culture (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, neoliberal schemes of academic mobility and protocols for the recognition of degrees) is making academics Lose all epic reference before young people, and becomes exclusively a space for formation. This capitulation of the university world with respect to utopiaparadoxically Break the bonds of affection with the new generations -encapsulated rebellion- and Face-to-face classes empty 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. In other words, the university, as a result of the impact of digital culture in the context of the acceleration of innovation, is being besieged in a liquidationist manner by technological corporatism and sectors of the population, which once considered it something unique. As incredible as it may seem, the logic of the market and profits is pushing the university to virtuality with all the consequences that this brings.

Crisis of the university to provide, foresee and update itself

As we have insisted in this book, 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 faced by the 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 herein within the framework of the acceleration of innovation and have difficulties in socializing state-of-the-art knowledge in a prudently rapid time.

This synthesis of the Faure Report, revised fifty years later, forcefully expresses the logic of capital on the notion of educational crisis. The reports «Education holds a treasure» (1996) de Delors, «Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Common Good?” (2015), “Reimagine our futures together. A new social pact for education» (2021) express attempts to update these elements of the lack of synchrony in the sphere of innovation, of education with the capitalist mode of production.

This has meant that not only companies, but even powerful governments such as the United States, have entered into open conflict with UNESCO. The «political reason» of the Trump administration for withdrawing from the multilateral organization (2025) is justified with the argument that it is not in the national interest, especially because its focus is on aspects such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but in reality it has to do with the times required by multilateralism to disseminate strategic orientations of the capitalist center. something that happens more to the rhythms and speeds of the first two industrial revolutions than to those imposed by the present of globalizing financialization and the gringo imperial repositioning. This is complemented by its policies on the local university sector, which refers to a structural policy aimed at rethinking the role of vocational training in the economy. This «schism» should be a wake-up call, overcoming the superficial reading that presents it as Trumpian tremendisms.

Paradigmatic synthesis: STEM – STEM+A

The STEM paradigm that was built in the United States, in the context of the Cold War dispute, especially in the sixties when the Impact of the Third Industrial Revolution on the Capitalist Mode of Production. But it would be in the 1990s of the twentieth century, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) coined the acronym STEM as a new training paradigm, which seeks to focus the work of school systems and HEIs on the promotion of the acceleration and dissemination of scientific and technological innovation, associated with the generation of surplus value and profits. Then came STEM+A, which incorporates the arts (design) as a complement.

The STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as educational priorities, summarizes the New demands of capital in the field economic and technological (computer science, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, among others), Growing international competitiveness (USA, China, Southeast Asia, European Union), as well as the Skills gaps for employment (especially in technical areas), the exhaustion of the Transdisciplinary paradigm and emerge from the Heuristic convergence As a requirement for the production of knowledge and technology (integrating science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the Repositioning critical thinking (applicability-oriented) and the Pragmatic approaches in the relationship with the social sciences (interoperability, governance, social reengineering).

By promoting call training 21st century skillsthe Promotion of technological innovationthe Redesign of job trainingthe Renewed interest in «useful» science for the mode of production and the promotion of New social relations From the introduction of inclusion issues, this has a concrete expression in the policies for the university sector. Initially this was expressed in the Curricular reforms (90s and 21st century), the Funding of research agendas focused on STEM (especially through national science bodies), promoting the Internationalization of Higher Education Institutions (through bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, new models of academic mobility and recognition of studies) but then it has been taking shape with the Mechanisms outsourced Micro Learning and Micro Accreditation. All this was enhanced by the renewed impetus of the intra- and inter-institutional competitive spirit that was aligning university policies on a global scale.

STEM is measured with indicators of quality, impact, relevance, innovation and efficiency, joining the orientations of the neoliberal evaluation culture.

Academic and student mobility model

The University internationalization as a constant in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, it has counted on academic and student mobility as a dynamic that has been its own. However, with the arrival of neoliberal globalization, this process is reconfigured and expanded, among other reasons due to:

The need for capitalism to deterritorialize vocational training, in a context of unusual acceleration of innovation. Thus, it tries to transcend the catastrophic gap between the needs of the mode of production in general and the training for innovation that runs in universities. The ideas of transformation proposed by the system through university internationalization have been affected in their expected achievements, due to the solidification of the organizational structures called upon to do so and the slowness of institutional changes;
The scaling up of academic mobility, unprecedented in active institutional development compared to previous periods, aimed -and continues to do so- to provide a less disciplinary training, much more multi and interdisciplinary, which would make it possible to think and build new protocols that would open the way to post-disciplinary organizational developments. Academic mobility is assumed as a catalyst for interdisciplinarity;
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. In addition, the idea of this paradigmatic change occurred in the center-periphery logic, initially within the United States, 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 evaluative culture. Thus, academic mobility is expressed and impacts the other components of the measurement and hierarchy that gives identity to the stage of university internationalization: accreditation, bibliometrics, rankings and recognition of studies;
Using technological development, the impact is amplified by combining face-to-face, hybrid, and virtual academic mobility models. In the latter cases, it was possible to scale up the experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic, diversifying and expanding mobility;
Another model of fragmentation and modularity is established that seeks to open the way to transdisciplinarity, through micro-credentials and micro-learning, normative instruments (Lisbon Convention -1997; Bologna Process -1999; Erasmus+ -2014- EU Council Recommendation on micro credentials -2022-; Europass and EUDIW), evaluation 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 hegemonic model of academic mobility today is part of the initiatives to produce a paradigmatic break in the university, although the institution continues to think that this is inscribed in the historical prestige of professional 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 at a planetary level. His antecedents were the Sorbonne Declaration^{^[136]} (1998), the Erasmus^{^[137]} (1987), the European Credit Transfer System -ECTS- (1989), the requirements of the Neoliberal globalization and the Cultural globalization capitalist. In particular, the Sorbonne Declaration served as inspiration for the creation of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESCG), the Supplement to the University Degree, the tendency to Credit standardization by vocational training cycles (undergraduate, master’s, doctorate), and micro-accreditation.

The Bologna Process will be very important to impose the model of Academic mobility (teachers, students and other sectors) that has become central within the Neoliberal evaluative culture. It is from Bologna that academic mobility manages to build the performance and characteristics that allow it to be coupled with university accreditation, rankings, bibliometrics and standards for the recognition of studies and professional degrees.

The improvement of the employability is one of the central reasons for this process, seeking to align higher education with the requirements of the labour market. The greatest challenge in this sense is to break with the disciplinary matrix, something that runs the risk of being blurred in the procedural tangle.

In this sense, the Bologna Process also takes the approach of Education MarketLooking Capture the demand for training of students from Asia, the United States and Latin America. This implies turning the EHEA into an attractive place to learn and graduate in a context of accelerating innovation, the demands of breaking with the disciplinary matrix and the hegemony of the STEM paradigm. For this reason, the Bologna process goes 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 acquires the contours of business demands and the tools of the neoliberal evaluative culture.

The scope of the Bologna Process involves more than 4,000 higher education institutions, reaching more than 38 million students directly, but marking the horizon for reforms in the sector on a global scale, through the promotion of a comparable system of degrees, the adoption of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS), student mobility agreements that involve more and more higher education institutions (HEIs) and the recognition of qualifications.

Its implementation takes place 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 programmes, especially for academic mobility and specific projects such as MICROBOL^[138], CertiDigital and DC4EU. Currently, the central focus of the Bologna Process is Digitalization and micro-credentials^[139], strengthening the associated dynamics and supporting emerging projects such as the Plan Microcreds^[140] (which involved 41 universities participating in 2024).

On the basis of the migratory and humanitarian crises caused by wars, the Bologna Process has developed agreements and normative instruments such as the Communication from Tirana (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 processes of recognition of degrees and micro-credentials in the EHEA. The United Kingdom’s exit (Brexit) has so far not meant a break with Bologna’s initiatives.

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

Micro-learning, micro-accreditation and micro-credentials

The Micro Credentials have become fashionable in recent years, but the fragmented and super-specialized view, typical of the disciplinary paradigm, limits the possibilities of understanding it within the framework of an integrated strategy of reorientation of vocational and labor training in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution.

Micro-credentials, micro-accreditation and micro-learning are the denominations that have been adopted, standardized and are intended to be standardized for the digital certification processes associated with the Knowledge validation, Training Skills, Acquired skills through experiences delimited by their pragmatic utility, which are carried out in the academic, business or extra-institutional sphere.

One of the most complete processes in this orientation is the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), which is constituted on the basis of the recognition of a certain number of working hours^[141], as an educational credit. The ECTS created in 1989 – in the midst of neoliberalism – has been part of the Program Erasmus of the European Union (EU) to strengthen the student mobility model in that region. The purpose is to build flexible mechanisms of formative recognition, due to the rigidity and slowness of some school systems and university subsystems to produce 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.

ECTS establishes parameters of measurement, comparison and recognition of the Inter- and extra-university academic work. Within the framework of the Bologna Process (1999) would evolve a Integrated accumulation and transfer system, which would be the basis for the promotion of the radical outsourcing of vocational training (2021). The results of the training processes under this scheme, which on average weigh one credit in 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^[142]the Course Catalogue^{^[143]}, Learning Agreement^{^[144]}, Diploma Supplement^{^[145]} and the Transcript of Records^{^[146]}. One of the undeclared purposes of the system is to broaden the disciplinary base of training, opening up to inter, multi and transdisciplinary models, an aspect that has cost so much to develop in each university, due to the weight of the false academic tradition, governance relations and the microphysics of power for the construction of knowledge, among other elements inherited from the first two industrial revolutions.

Between 2020-2022, the project of Micro-credentials linked to the Bologna Key Commitments (MICROBOL), with funding from Erasmus+KA3 to improve the accuracy of the Bologna Process tools, on the basis of which the ECTS systemthe Qualifications Frameworks (QF-EHEA^[147] and EQF) and the Quality Assurance Mechanisms (ESG), concluding the need for greater flexibility, especially to include non-formal learning.

ECTS has a great geographical reach, especially in the 48 countries that are 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 professional training (undergraduate), master’s and doctorates, as well as complete and modular micro-learning programs. From 2025, CertiDigital^{^[148]} and DC4EU^[149] that facilitate digital ECTS certifications.

Like any process in the logic of capital that tends towards international homogenization, the European University Association (USA) and the Group^{^[150]} Crue^{^[151]}-RUEPEP^{^[152]} of Spain are advancing in the regulations for the standardization of micro-accreditation processes, something that would facilitate their 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 emphases. The impact of this initiative, as part of the configuration of a new educational market, is something pending to be assessed.

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

It breaks the schemes of university autonomy that were based on the paradigm of change formulated from within. That is, they outsource the decision-making processes, clothed with the apparent autonomy of the university sector, when in reality their place of enunciation is the field of economy, production and generation of profits, in the dynamics of transition from the third to the fourth industrial revolution;
Advances are 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 different institutional frameworks that guide learning and their recognition, overcoming the institutional bureaucratic obstacles of organizational models based on faculties, schools, departments, typical of the disciplinary paradigm for the construction of knowledge. A new supranational institutionality emerges that transcends the instituted organizational charts, with frameworks that allow evolution from inter- and multi-disciplinarity;
They enable the assembly of learning experiences that dilute the barriers of disciplinary fields, which makes possible decentralized curricular reengineering, typical of the paradigm of heuristic convergence;

However, the risk is that:

As 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 turn towards the business employability model and its corporate financing logics, which means that processes of homogenization of the STEM paradigm are increasingly materializing, 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;
It favors the view of university internationalization as part of the educational business, by encouraging the circulation of capital – essentially public – around micro-credentials and micro-accreditation;
Since the participation of grassroots teachers’ organizations, unions and unions of education workers, student organizations and the pedagogical social movement in the processes of construction of proposals is precarious or non-existent – because they are called upon in some cases to legitimize them – this can end up increasing the distance of the university from citizen requirements that exceed employability;

Employability as a surname of the human right to education

At the third World Conference on Higher Education (WHEC, 2022), the restrictive supplement for the Right to education. The international pedagogical social movement had managed to position the paradigm of the Human right to education throughout life, which entailed the requirement that national states guarantee timely access to school and university systems at all times. This implied access to any age – even if there were modalities for it – regardless of social origin, religious or political belief, skin color and even if they were national, migrant or refugee. Education was – from these principles – a tool for the construction of critical citizenship at any stage of life.

At CMES 2022, the Human right to education throughout life for employability, opening up dangerously to economic reason. The ultimate expression of this variant would be that The right to be educated is guaranteed as long as you prove that what you have learned will help you to access a workplace. This perspective is the one that underlies Google’s job training initiative and that Meta and other companies are already beginning to consider. The way in which this path of thorns without roses builds hegemony is micro-accreditation.

The way in which economic rationality takes shape in the right to education has its maximum expression in the demands of the Comptroller General of the Republic of Panama (2025), when he proposed to the University of Panama (UP) to revise – or exclude? – The cases of students over 30 years of age who study at this institution, because this – in the opinion of the comptroller – constitutes a waste of public resources or a sign of inefficient use. Of course, this occurs in the context of a generalized social conflict, in which university students had a special role in the defense of sovereignty and solidarity social security regimes.

Sometimes, aggregates limit and do not expand rights, we should be clear about that when it comes to disputes from the perspective of the excluded, poor and the subordinate classes. The human right to education must be throughout life for critical integral citizenship, the aggregate for employability subtracts more than adds.

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 – for business purposes – is causing corporate workforce training initiatives to multiply.

On July 17, 2025, Forbes magazine published a paper by Jason Wingard on Google’s promise to create a higher education workforce. In this article he points out that «Big Tech is not waiting for higher education: they are replacing it». Just two days earlier, Google had announced the initiative in the framework of the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, with the slogan «AI Works for America», which is scheduled to take place in the fifty states of the union. The author wonders What happens when companies like Google stop running 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 the key points are the Culture of innovationthe Strategic recruitment 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 Collegiate 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 that the company had in locating professionals with adaptive, creative capacity and that would accompany internal evolution. The key for Schmidt is the Culture of innovation, something that he sees as increasingly distant in classical university education and is linked to what we have called Heuristic convergence.

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

It is necessary to break with a certain conceptual hypocrisy that Use social when you want to appear progressive, while advancing in the transformation of extension as a window to obtain financing through the sale of services, leaving aside each time the energy and focus that social transformation requires. As we have pointed out, elements of the neoliberal evaluation culture (bibliometrics, accreditation, ranking, academic mobility model, and degree recognition policies) are increasingly producing a greater alignment of higher education institutions with the demands of the market and not of the citizenry. Of course, there is resistance, voices of denunciation, significant milestones of protests in the face of this dynamic, but the trend has not been reversed.

Wingard (2025) states that Google seeks to give its students a real opportunity for employment and professional development, something that university systems do not offer today, specifying that «It’s not altruism, it’s market domination”. The position of this business analyst summarizes the logic of an important part of today’s business management, especially in the technological field.

The vocational training that today is developed from the universities, is formally designed for the employability, but in reality it does so from the principles, schemes and stereotypes of the public administration and the Government Job Design, which is not wrong per se. The problem is that the axis of the State reforms which promoted since the eighties of the twentieth century the neoliberalism, led to the shrinking of the State, highlighting the potential of entrepreneurship and self-management of life, as well as the dynamic and changing nature of jobs in the private sector of the economy. The tensions that this generated led to a scheme of adaptability of HEIs, trying to achieve an intermediate point 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.

In addition, despite the fashion of Managerial training In the universities that we knew in the 70s, 80s and 90s, in the last two decades the Data managementthe Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Open management models have brought about a substantive change in the classical notion of management, something that the university does not seem to have taken due note of.

What we see today, expressed in Google’s initiative in Pittsburgh, seems to be a movement that tends to expand, clearly opening a new escalating phase of professional training in the companies themselves. If it was just a reckless group of corporate CEOs who were driving this movement, we might not have so much to worry about. But this is a discourse that has permeated instances such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), as evidenced in the interview that Juan David Olmos did with the education specialist of that organization Mercedes Mateo (2019), which he heads with the phrase «The university diploma is becoming obsolete”. Mateo points out that unlike in the past when stability in a job was part of the work culture, today a university graduate can have an average of «15 different jobs in your life… That means that every three or four years, more or less, it must invent itself, update its skills and adapt to the demands of a changing world» (Semana Magazine, 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 that indicated that 50% of companies do not find the personnel they require, despite having professionals who should have them.

Matthew’s ideas suggest several things. First, the willingness of large companies to assume the design and costs of the training in competencies and skills that universities do not teach, which encourages the temptation of companies to take the reins of the professional and qualified training they require.

Second, the demand for competencies and skills is changing, which implies the redesign of continuous training and the implementation of degree validation processes every 3 to 6 years; this update has been intended to be promoted in HEIs with the format of Bibliometrics, but as we commented in previous chapters, this has not been achieved.

Third, in the transition from the current professional model in charge of the university sector to the one self-managed by companies, micro-accreditation and micro-credentials appear as the interface, which can not only pivot the problem but also transfer the place of execution of training for employment.

Fourth, the political and social impact of this is tremendous, which is why it requires the emergence of new political actors to set it in motion, that is, a neoconservative, illiberal wave that dispels any feature in the social DNA associated with the Keynesian Welfare State. The latter is embodied by the rise of the far right, with governments such as that of Milei and Trump that dissolve and reconfigure the Ministry of Education or the Department of Education, breaking with more than 100 years of tradition since the state bodies that drive the educational agenda began to be constituted and expanded in the region. as an expression – in different measures and with uneven developments – 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 of enunciation of professional training.

Fifth, the role of the university is being transformed from a place for teaching, research and university to a site for the validation of micro-learning obtained outside its sphere; it is not the same to accredit what has been part of the training as to grant micro credentials to processes that are not even carried out in universities; Although today the percentage of micro loans is low, there is a risk of expanding the band.

Sixth, all of this requires an externalization of the validation mechanisms of micro-accreditation, making them look like university students, when in fact they are located outside their sphere.

These new logics, which are presented as a sectoral requirement, tend to transform university ontology and epistemology, opening the way to new paradigms of professional training that can radically change what we know today as university.

Renewal of organizational development and new know-how for employability

In 1961, the social recognition of teachers was higher than today, although salaries have always been low for the dignified task they perform. In the last six decades, subjects have been added, others have been eliminated or merged, going from the blackboard to work with chalk, to acrylic with markers, dynamic projections and now applications with artificial intelligence. The school bell continues to ring with the same tone and the school uniforms have not changed much, the time blocks are not very different from those of the past and inexplicably there is still the disciplinary commission.

Those of us who entered primary education as students in 1967 remember the institutional organizational chart, hung in the principal’s office, which is still the same today, although from that moment to the present, several of these educational managers have died. The subjects, as yesterday, continue to be organized and facilitated by disciplines, the solar system sheet did not know the period in which Pluto was downgraded to a planetoid, textbooks say little about phytoplankton, leaving all the task of preserving oxygen to trees.

Some of us who were students in the sixties, in the eighties entered to train in pedagogy, where the disciplinary paradigm had escalated to the point of fragmenting pedagogy. Didactics was taught separately from the curriculum, classroom management evaluation and planning was normative. Innovation was approached as instructional resources and the curricular nature of training left little room for integration and creation, despite the fact that the correlation of objectives, transversality and comprehensiveness was fashionable. The impact of business management models on teaching was not critically taught, although later in the master’s degree in management we studied Goleman, Peter Senge and total quality management. In undergraduate, master’s and doctoral studies, thinking about alternative school and university systems seemed nonsense, but everyone tried to be an informed teacher.

From this routine, a massive escape from the disciplinary matrix began to occur with the covid-19 pandemic, although the role of department coordinators supervising compliance (compliance and lying) of schedules through screens was pathetic, as if face-to-face and virtual had the same rhythms and work methods. Of course, the pandemic shook universities, but as often happens after an earthquake, what is involved is damage control, rebuilding to return to what is known.

Unfortunately, the business sector, development banks, large technology corporations and spaces such as the WEF were the ones who began to talk about a new pedagogical performance, a new teaching know-how. Again, the demands of transformation implied a transfer from the political-economic to the educational.

The most requested graduate profiles from the logic of capital, for the teaching know-how of the twenty-first century are Integrated and critical digital skills (in a pedagogical sense); with sufficient management of platforms that integrate generative artificial intelligence, big data, augmented reality, algorithmic biases and educational cyberactivism; the Systems and Heuristic Thinking, as a tool to transcend the disciplinary paradigm and achieve an open and complex understanding of reality; Lifelong learning (lifelong learning), where continuous training really occurs on a daily basis and teaching knowledge is open to innovations, without concluding statements, making creative management of uncertainty; Synchronous and asynchronous collaboration capability, 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 management of error in experimentation; Knowledge management and collective creation to overcome the logic of consumption of ideas, knowledge and paradigms; Multi-channel and multi-modal communication capability to diversify interaction with students, among others.

When we do the work of recovering expectations of labor know-how, we clearly realize that these exceed the institutional capacities of the average university, for reasons ranging from government disinvestment to routines as an expression of what to do.

Of course, in the logic of capital, social commitment does not appear, nor does the university’s struggle for social justice, ecology and gender equality. It is as if HEIs were simple extensions of the factory, company or office of technology CEOs. Capital knows that as the dynamics of the neoliberal evaluation culture advance (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, academic mobility model and recognition of degrees) it will be much easier to suppress anti-system critical thinking. The problem is that by this way we can reach the delete of the face-to-face university itself.

The university would like to «crouch» in this situation, like the student who did not study and tries to make himself invisible so that he is not questioned in the interrogation and be affected in the grade, or the child who plays hide-and-seek covering his face with his small hand, thinking that everything is hidden, or even worse resembling the mentalists of the new age. who think that, if the issue is not talked about … this will not happen.

Of course, it is possible to radically transform universities with a social sense, but this requires a creative balance between will and knowledge. Paradoxically, the university seems to contain more wills than expertise, with respect to how to produce a break with the logics of disciplinary production and reproduction.

Precisely, for different reasons, from the business point of view but also from the popular and class perspective, disciplinarity is something that had to be overcome, as is now the expansion of the transdisciplinary paradigm to give way to heuristic convergence. The problem is that in order to move forward we have to think about the university «upside down» leaving the comfort of the known. Do we dare?

List of references

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Faure, E., et al. (1973). Learning to be: the world of education today. UNESCO Publishing.

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Hobsbawm, E. (1986) The Invention of Tradition. Ediciones Crítica. Mexico.

Kondratieff, N. (1984). The long wave cycle. Richardson & Snyder.

Mandel, E. (2023). Late capitalism. Sylone Editions.

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

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

Morozov, E (2025) Does digital take us back to the Middle Ages? Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2025.

Novack, G. (1965). Uneven and combined development in history. Pioneer Publishers.

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Scwab (2016) Fourth Industrial Revolution. Debates Collection. Spain.

Schmidt, E., & Rosenberg, J. (2015). How Google works. Editorial Aguilar.

Sadin, E (2020) Artificial intelligence or the challenge of the century. Anatomy of a radical antihumanism. Caja Negra Editores. Argentina.

Schumpeter. J. A. (1939) Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process. MacGraw-Hill Book Company. EEUU.

Wingard, J. (2022). The college devaluation crisis: Market disruption, diminishing role, and an alternative future of learning. Stanford Business Books.

Wingard, J. (2025, 17 de julio). Google building the workforce higher ed promised – but never delivered. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com

EPILOGUE

What is behind the discourse of the reduction of university professions and degrees?: the new wave of university internationalization to come?

Luis Bonilla-Molina

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been insisting on its Future of Jobs Report About the Obsolescence of qualifications (projects that 39% of current skills will be obsolete by 2030), the need to strengthen the Competency Focus in permanent updating, go beyond the Transdisciplinarity as a paradigm for learning (heuristic convergence), knowledge production and technology generation, as well as a New model of public-private collaboration (curricula associated with market requirements, rationalization of the degrees offered).

In the case of competitions, the WEF postulates that replace specific qualifications with training systems based on micro-credentialsthe Retraining (reskilling) and the Skill Enhancement (upskilling), looking there Continuous workforce adaptation, without having to go through long titling processes, which also involve significant expenditures from the public budget.

This implies a Frontal criticism to three aspects: a) the Disciplinary model that has not been changed in almost sixty years (1967- ) of initiatives led by the system itself, b) the problems arising from petrified functional structures for vocational training (faculties, schools, departments), (c) 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 has to be ambiguous, because although what is happening is a form of resistance to the hegemony of business economism in HEIs, resistance that allows the children of the working class and popular sectors to still have the possibility of attending face-to-face public university, it is also true that the conservative spirit that usually accompanies these resistances – by using tradition as a brake on innovation – contributes increasingly less to emancipatory projects, because it limits the possibilities for the poor to have expeditious access to emerging knowledge.

Based on the debates promoted by the World Economic Forum (WEF), – which have been assumed as their own by the Development Banks (World Bank, OECD, IDB), multilateralism (UNESCO) and many governments – it seems imminent that around 2030 the bursting of the «educational bubble» or a «school crash» may occur, if universities and ministries of education do not work in the direction of redefining professional fields.

The insistence of the discourse has not yet materialized in a proposal that models university internationalization. However, as we saw when we addressed the epistemic frameworks of Digital Transformation in Education (DTE), this seems to be beginning to take shape through various initiatives. However, academia has avoided this discussion and preferred to assume the behavior of the ostrich in the face of the problems in the making.

Capital insists, arguing that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Digital Transformation of Education (TDE) can accelerate the unification of professional fields, to make them correspond to the new jobs that are going to be generated.

Klaus Schwab (2016) has announced that in the short term the first humanitarian labor crisis in Europe is looming, when factories 4.0 are turned on, which would leave at least six million people unemployed in that area, managing to recover in the medium term only 4 million jobs, but to do things that humanity had never done, trades linked to virtual-digital, metadata and generative artificial intelligence.

We are certainly facing a major paradigmatic disruption, but its effects will depend on how we approach the transformation of the associated paradigms. And education, school systems and the university have a lot to do with this.

Will we be able to get out of the disciplinary paradigm, going through the failed attempt to build transdisciplinary institutions and ways of learning?

This is the fundamental debate that has been trying to be institutionalized for more than sixty years, at least since the International Conference on the Global Education Crisis (1967), convened by US President Lyndon Johnson, and the Faure Report (1973) prepared by the UNESCO group of experts. The capitalist mode of production, in the third industrial revolution, showed from that moment that it demanded not only the development of transdisciplinary teaching and learning models, but also the creation of a transdisciplinary institutionality. Despite the fact that this element was mentioned in all university internationalization operations, academia used to turn its gaze in another direction, ignoring structural change. It was not a matter of obeying capital, but of taking advantage of the request to promote another model of university that transcended disciplinarity. That was not done either.

It was that moving towards transdisciplinarity, as a model of management and construction of knowledge, implied breaking with centuries of disciplinary epistemic burdens, but above all with the status of professional degrees, in academia and outside it, with power clans nucleated in faculties, departments and schools.

The educational authorities tried to «get rid of the wrinkle», talking about the change, but without it happening. All universities adopted transdisciplinarity in their vision or mission. We are not deceiving anyone, least of all capital, who chose to create their own research and training centers, with the necessary flexibility so that the new (in the sense of its usefulness for the mode of production) would be born by transdisciplinary work.

Theoretical-experiential convergence as a paradigm for teaching and learning

There is no waiting time, the delay affects the concrete possibilities of defending face-to-face public education.

What the fourth industrial revolution heralds is a new paradigm of knowledge, beyond the frontier of transdisciplinarity: theoretical-experiential convergence or heuristic convergence.

But how can we get there, if we don’t stay anchored in the disciplinary paradigm and not immerse ourselves in transdisciplinarity?

It is the theoretical-experiential convergence or heuristic convergence, as a paradigm for the construction and management of knowledge, especially in the work that arises in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution, which leads the Davos Forum and its partners to consider that around 2030 many professions should be reconfigured, integrated, revalued. Where are we discussing this with the required seriousness and depth? Will the issue be sold to us as another form of university internationalization?

We continue to cling to our models of universities made up of faculties and schools, disciplinary, and it is difficult for us to even do the exercise of what an inclusive university would be like with another organizational development, more comprehensive training fields and a solidarity perspective, outside the logic of the market.

As if we were in front of the board of a new game, we intend to ask about the rules of the game, ignoring that these rules must be a collective construction, but for transformation.

The questions that are usually asked when talking about integrating fields for vocational training that are even separated by disciplines are: Where am I? What will be my academic field of work? But if I am a sociologist, how do I fit into a career that integrates anthropology, political science, education, social work, psychology, law, communication and graphic design? As in the popular expression «there is no bed for so many people», fear besieges us and conservatism prevails. We better stay as we are, seems to be the undeclared collective response.

All theories of organizational development, which study resistance to change, fall short in this case, because it is not a university reform, manageable, smooth and that does not break the established comforts, but a paradigmatic tsunami that requires formatting our way of understanding teaching and learning.

Only if we dare to explore its depths will we be able to be part of the future from a working class perspective, otherwise we run the risk of falling into the planned obsolescence that is established by the logic of capital for universities.

For those of us who defend the public university, this is the most important debate of the moment. We are not saying that there have to be 30, 50 or 100 degrees left, but it is clear that something is changing in society as a result of the technological shock, the acceleration of innovation and paradigmatic disruption. Either we respond to these issues to defend the face-to-face public university and prevent it from being razed by the devastating logic of capital with social consensus, or, we are going to witness the moment in which the torches hover over the hope for the poor that the university has been. We change or we make mistakes, Simón Rodríguez would say.

Operational Critical Thinking

For centuries, critical thinking was the oxygen of universities, especially public and autonomous ones. And critical thinking was aimed at questioning the status quo, the legitimization of class division and what it entails, differentiated access to science, technology and integral human development. In this book we have seen how the modalities of university internationalization that have capital as their epicenter have ended up curtailing and cornering critical thinking.

We taught in computer science how the software we were using or producing, helped or not to promote a change in the user’s environment, how medicine did not become a commodity but a human right, we problematized the prototype that was being designed and how it could be used by the poorest, generating the least possible transfer of resources to large corporations. That critical thinking, of which we have been proud, was in essence anti-capitalist or at least promoted economic democracy, which is another form of anti-capitalism. But now it is being replaced by the empty productivism of bibliometrics and classification systems.

Now, capital is using the issue of technological innovation to:

To hide the forms and implications of the paradigmatic change. It is as if they were saying, «if you don’t realize it better, so we can limit and eliminate public investment in universities, with greater social legitimacy,
Digital-virtual technology has become a black box for the academic world, where we are assigned the role of learning to use it, not to understand its structure, much less to create it. They install the idea that this is a matter for technologists and the academic comfort zone has passively accepted it,
They promote the logic of the enlightened operator in universities, which is limited to learning how to turn on, use and turn off hardware, software or AI development, without questioning how we can create that «miracle».
They are legitimizing the logic of the educated believer, who assumes that technology is neutral and that our relationship with it is functional, not one of possible alienation.

Based on these premises, they have installed the notion of «operational critical thinking«, that is, that we do not think about the impact of technological innovation on power relations and class structures, but rather on the «failures» or «gaps» that arise when operating it.

They turn critical thinking into a facet of the continuous improvement of the commodity, typical of post-Fordist models of production.

Now, educational programs criticize the «old critical thinking» as «politics that had been introduced into education,» and reaffirm the new «operational critical thinking» as the ideal neutrality, which must be acquired in order to obtain employment.

But what we do not fully understand is that this is a transition operation, to the destruction of face-to-face education. If we all limit it to the operational, we will soon have to accept that it is more viable to learn behind a screen, with content developed and supervised by companies, oriented to the world of work.

«Operational critical thinking» promotes curricular developments that give viability to professional integration, to new professions of theoretical-experiential convergence, especially through micro-accreditations. You have to learn what you need and the processes of «micro learning», of situated knowledge, what they do is teach skills that integrate techniques and knowledge of old watertight disciplines.

By letting go, what capitalism wants will not stop happening.

The Long March: Competing to Survive

The icing on the cake is entrepreneurship, the self-management of life and knowledge, which has been imposed by neoliberalism and its psychopolitics (Chul-Han, 2021). Since we all have to be competitive, what we have to do is acquire skills, not knowing which paradigm they correspond to. The more «skills» you have, whether old or new, the more competitive you will be and the more chances you will have of having a job and «success» at work.

Universities have entered this logic with bibliometrics, which teaches students and professors to be competitive with publication, now it is complemented by calls to learn AI and data management.

Of course, these learnings are necessary, but in a different epistemological framework.

Although many, in order to avoid committing themselves, see the issue of the class perspective as something old, today more than ever the contradictions between capital and labor are expressed in the university world and the construction of knowledge. Avoiding them is a form of complacency that we cannot afford.

What to do?

No one has all the answers today. There is no personal genius that can face such a radical transformation project from the perspective of the human right to education. Only collective intelligence can save us.

But the collective cannot continue to be a rhetorical act in forums, seminars, congresses, papers and talks. We need spaces for thinking-convincing-doing to multiply that open the way to change and radical transformation.

On this path, we need to renew the alliance between academics, researchers, students, families and education workers’ unions. Neoliberalism achieved what seemed impossible, demonizing the organizational forms that had a class tradition and that today take on special validity. That has to change.

We will only be able to think-convince-do to defend the public university by TRANSFORMING it, if we manage to build a powerful social muscle of thought and action. We need the groups of university rectors, academic networks and unions to build a unified front to act in the short term. Procrastination at this time is equivalent to writing the obituary of the public university. Let’s think about the internationalization of solidarity universities.

The next step

Once the unfinished effort has been made to understand the logic of capital in university internationalization, it is time to study the alternative institutional initiatives, the examples in progress of solidarity internationalization and associated with community and popular projects. The strength to resist must be found in the experiences of resistance. That must be our next step.

The authors

Luis Bonilla-Molina, visiting professor at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS) in Brazil within the framework of the CAPES Solidaridade Program. Pedagogue (UPEL – Venezuela), PhD in Pedagogical Sciences (Cuba), specialist in educational policy formulation (Argentina), Master in Educational Management, Postdoctoral Degree in Critical Pedagogies and Popular Education (Mexico). He has worked at universities in Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia and Brazil. He was president of the Governing Council of IESALC UNESCO and a member of the Steering Committee of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). She is currently part of the International Research Center Other Voices in Education, the World Congress against Educational Neoliberalism and the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education. Active researcher at GEPPIP. He is the author of about twenty books.

Allisson Goes, Professor at the Federal Institute of Sergipe (IFS). PhD and Master’s degree in Sociology from the Federal University of Sergipe. Researcher of the Study and Research Group on Identity and Power Processes, with special interest in migration, mobility, identities and power relations. She carried out a postdoctoral stay within the framework of the CAPES/Brazil Academic Solidarity Program (2023-2024) within the project «International mobility, human rights and higher education» (CAPES/UFS/PPGS/PRODIR/GEPPIP).

Luz Palomino, Master’s Degree in Counseling and Human Development from the Simón Rodríguez National Experimental University (UNESR – Venezuela), Specialist in Care Policies with a Gender Perspective (CLACSO), Specialist in Management of Educational Processes (UNESR), Bachelor’s Degree in Social Communication from the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), Senior Technician in Audiovisual Media Production (UBV), culminating second master’s degree in Audiovisual Digital Communication in the University of Quilmes (Argentina) and a PhD candidate. Director of the International Research Center Other Voices in Education (CII-OVE) and member of GEPPIP.

Bruno Menezes, PhD candidate in Sociology (2025). Master’s degree in Sociology with a Bachelor’s degree (2021) and a Bachelor’s degree (2025) in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS). Member of the research group Identity Processes and Power (GEPPIP).

Izabela Gomes, PhD in Geography from the Federal University of Ceará, Master in Geography graduated from the Federal University of Pernambuco – She is currently a substitute professor in the Department of Teaching and Curriculum of the Federal University of Pernambuco. Researcher of the GEPPIP study group.

[1] Ernesto Mandel considera que la tercera revolución industrial inicia en la década de los cincuenta del siglo XX, con la incorporación de la emergente tecnología informática al aparato gubernamental norteamericano y de los países altamente desarrollados.

[2] Luis Bonilla-Molina señala que a los efectos del estudio del impacto de la tercera revolución industrial en la educación resulta más útil fechar la tercera revolución industrial en la década de los sesenta del siglo XX, cuando la robótica se incorpora a la industria automotriz y surgen nuevas demandas educativas para la formación profesional y la construcción de conocimiento. En este sentido, plantea que es mejor ubicar sus inicios en el periodo 50s-60s.

[3] En la singularidad está cerca (2005) Ray Kurzweil postula que es previsible en el corto plazo, un momento en el cual la inteligencia artificial -llamada ahora IA generativa- supera a la inteligencia humana, produciéndose un quiebre civilizatorio. El núcleo de su idea es la Ley de los rendimientos acelerados que postula que la innovación ha comenzado a darse no de forma lineal, sino exponencial. Esta nueva fase implica una reformulación de la producción y gestión del conocimiento, con impacto directo sobre la forma que hoy conocemos como universidad. Las etapas previas a la singularidad serían la física y química (inicio del universo), la biológica (vida hasta lograr el surgimiento del ADN), aparición del ser humano (neo corteza cerebral, pulgar flexible, cultura humana), el desarrollo de la innovación y tecnología informática (actualidad), la fusión hombre-máquinas (próximas generaciones, punto de inflexión 2042), la singularidad, aproximadamente a partir de 2045 (integración de mente humana e inteligencia artificial) y finalmente la expansión de la inteligencia por el universo. Todo ello plantea desafíos para la educación, ciencia, tecnología y paradigmas de construcción de conocimiento.

[4] El transhumanismo postula la superación de las limitaciones biológicas de la especie humana (incluyendo el envejecimiento y la muerte) mediante la mejora de capacidades físicas, cognitivas y emocionales mediante la aplicación te biotecnología, nanotecnología, inteligencia artificial, neurociencia y robótica. Sus orígenes pueden ser rastreados en los trabajos de Haldane quien plantea rediseñar la biología humana con ciencia, el genetista Bernal quien ve la posibilidad de avanzar hacia humanos cibernéticos para potenciar la colonización espacial y Julian Huxley quien acuña el término transhumanismo; precisamente Julian Huxley sería el redactor del documento fundacional de UNESCO.

[5] Inicia con la independencia de Haití en 1804

[6] Historiadores como Margarita Durán Estragó atribuyen razones económicas (desarrollo de infraestructura económica del Paraguay) más avanzada.

[7] Creada por iniciativa de Porfirio Díaz y bajo la dirección de Justo Sierra, quien era el ministro de Instrucción Pública, como parte del esfuerzo por modernizar y centralizar la educación superior en México. Solo en 1929 adquirió el estatus de autónoma, pasando a llamarse Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

[8] La UMSNH asumió un modelo de autonomía universitaria que le permitía diseñar su propio plan de estudio, elegir a sus autoridades y administrar sus recursos. Su autonomía reivindicaba los ideales de modernización de la revolución mexicana y la educación libre de injerencias del poder político. Además, la UMSNH integró al Colegio d San Nicolás de Hidalgo, las Escuelas de Artes y Oficios, la industrial y comercial para señoritas, la Superior de Comercio y Administración, las Normales para Profesoras y Profesores, Medicina, Jurisprudencia, la Biblioteca Pública, el Museo Michoacano, el Museo de la Independencia y el Observatorio Meteorológico, afianzando la idea de universidad popular.

[9] Este texto forma parte del libro colectivo que escribo con Allisson Goes, Izabela Gomes y Bruno Menezes

[10] Universidades que seguían siendo controladas por élites políticas y eclesiásticas, poco abiertas a la renovación académica, currículos rígidos, centrados en muchos casos en derecho y medicina, con precaria investigación científica, elección de autoridades sin participación estudiantil y catedráticos vitalicios.

[11] Crecimiento urbano e industrial incipiente, migración europea masiva a países como Argentina, Uruguay y Brasil, el surgimiento de una nueva clase media ilustrada que demandaba mayor ingreso a las universidades e incidencia en la toma de decisiones, expansión de la educación primaria y secundaria.

[12] Circulación de las ideas socialistas, marxistas, anarquistas y del liberalismo radical en centros urbanos, sindicatos, mutuales y cooperativas, influencia de la revolución mexicana, expansión de la prensa estudiantil, círculos literarios y científicos.

[13] Luego se conocerían otras publicaciones como las revistas Juventud (1911-1951) y Claridad (1920-1932).

[14] Militantes del talante de José Domingo Gómez Rojas, poeta y anarquista, serían dirigentes de la FECh, defendiendo la educación popular. El asesinato de Gómez en 1920, luego del asalto a la sede de la FECc marcaría un parte de aguas en la radicalización del movimiento estudiantil chileno. El Partido Comunista (PC) se fundaría en 1922, aunque ya existía la presencia del socialismo obrero de Luis Emilio Recabarren.

[15] El Partido Comunista del Perú se fundaría solo a finales de la década de los veinte del siglo XX.

[16] Emerge en la transición entre el gobierno de Abelardo L. Rodríguez y Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), que modifica el artículo 3 de la Constitución, declarando a la educación además de laica, gratuita y obligatoria, de carácter socialista, orientada a superar prejuicios religiosos y el fomento de la conciencia de solidaridad de clase. La crisis económica de 1929 y su impacto negativo en las condiciones materiales de vida de los campesinos, trabajadores y pueblos originarios, hace que se radicalicen las demandas populares, además de la naturaleza de izquierda del cardenismo dentro del periodo posrevolucionario. En esta etapa coinciden las ideas del desarrollismo propio del capitalismo tardío en la periferia con la idea soviética y de la III Internacional Comunista del desarrollo de las fuerzas productivas en el tránsito al socialismo; esto favoreció el policlasismo, frenando el auge revolucionario de los de abajo. Algunos de los actores que promovieron este giro de la educación socialista para el desarrollo nacional fueron Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), Vicente Lombardo Toledano (marxista), Narciso Bassols (secretario de educación en el periodo 1931-1934), las experiencias activas de misiones culturales y de educación rural. Su auge fue principalmente durante el sexenio de Cárdenas, creándose escuelas rurales y urbanas socialistas orientadas al fomento de derechos laborales y cooperativismo, la organización campesina y la lucha de clases, recibiendo resistencia frontal de la iglesia católica. Su proyección continental se expresó en países como Chile, Brasil y Cuba en la década de 1930-1940.

[17] Para profundizar en la revolución mexicana y sus contradicciones, el libro de Adolfo Gilly La revolución interrumpida

[18] La FUBA fue fundada en 1908 en la Universidad de Buenos Aires en un marco de críticas al modelo académico rígido, elitista e influenciado por el positivismo. Desde la realización del Primer Congreso Internacional de Estudiantes Americanos se incentivó la creación de federaciones que unificaran a los centros de estudiantes y otras formas de organización estudiantil y la FUBA fue el resultado de esta dinámica. Era la etapa previa al voto universal masculino contemplado en la Ley Sáenz Peña (1912). Algunas figuras destacadas en este proceso fueron Deodoro Roca y Gabriel del Mazo. La FUBA promovió la autonomía universitaria, el co-gobierno y la democratización del acceso, parte de las demandas liberales más importantes.

[19] Presidente de México entre 1930-1932

[20] Luego iniciaría el Fordismo (1930-1970) y el giro posfordista a partir de 1970. Para profundizar en el tema pueden leer Bonilla-Molina (2022) Los modelos de administración educativa y su relación con las formas de gestión capitalista. Ediciones desde abajo. Colombia

[21] En 1897 por primera vez en historia de Ecuador se consagra en la Constitución uno de los elementos de la autonomía: la libertad de cátedra.

[22] Lanzado en la Asamblea General de la ONU del 8 de diciembre de 1953 tenía como orientación estratégica la diplomacia geopolítica (Estados Unidos al servicio de la humanidad, para borra los efectos de promoción de la destrucción como resultado del uso militar de las bombas atómicas), alinear los laboratorios y universidades que trabajaban con la energía nuclear (desarrollo de reactores experimentales en países aliados, aparentemente con fines no militares), monitorear la formación universitaria para la formación en física, ingeniería y medicina nuclear)

[23] Capacidad de influir en países y actores internacionales claves sin el uso de métodos de coerción explícitos, como la cultura, valores, ideología, diplomacia y el atractivo de un modelo de vida centrado en el éxito como consumo. Se expande después de la segunda guerra mundial, pero sus orígenes se pueden rastrear en la propia fundación de la nación norteamericana. Las fuentes culturales e ideológicas del soft power son la cultura popular (Hollywood, música, moda, marcas icónicas como Coca-Cola, el cine al estilo Disney, es decir todo lo que proyecte el “American way of life”), los valores de la democracia liberal burguesa, el modelo de estudios universitarios (Harvard, MIT) y parques tecnológicos (como sería luego el Sillicon Valley) que refuerzan la idea de supremacía. Para el soft power Estados Unidos creó agencias especializadas como la United States Information Agency (USIA), la voz de América, el propio programa Fulbright, organizaciones como Peace Corps y agendas de ayuda humanitaria.

[24] Blackrock viene apareciendo cada vez de manera más nítida desde 2019 en el fomento de la educación transfronteriza. Entre 2018-2023 aumentó su participación en empresas como Grand Canyon Education, universidades en línea con enfoque transfronterizo, así como engagement con compañías para promover los derechos humanos. En 2020 Blackrock Foundation realizó inversiones millonarias en Dallas para mejorar la accesibilidad universitaria, mientras que en 2021 invirtió alrededor de 160 millones de dólares con la Universidad de Illinois para promover una perspectiva global de la sostenibilidad; ya en 2019 había creado el proyecto Blackrock for University (BLK4U) para la construcción de portafolios estudiantiles centrados en gestión de inversiones, talleres, hackathons y entrenamiento con herramientas como Aladdin, un software privativo de la financiera global.

JP Morgan Chase ha trabajado en compromisos filantrópicos en educación (2019-2023), bridging industry and academy (2020-2023), promoviendo la banca global y facilitando que su Development Finance Institution (DFI) movilice fondos para la educación superior, especialmente mediante los llamados partnerships público-privado.

El trabajo de Vanguard State Street se ha focalizado en la financialización de la educación.

[25] El informe Developing capacity for research and advanced scientific training: lessons from world Bank de 1995 (autores varios), incluye el alcance no solo en LAC, sino también en África y Asia entre 1962-1975.

[26] En 1969 la Agencia de los Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo Internacional (USAID en sus siglas en inglés), desarrolló el llamado marco lógico para la planificación. El marco lógico fue implementado inicialmente en los programas de desarrollo financiados por las bancas de desarrollo, especialmente el Banco Mundial, Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID) , la Agencia Alemana de Cooperación (GTZ), pro también por organismos como la Organización de Estado Americanos. El marco lógico, junto a las taxonomías curriculares comenzaron a ser transferidos a la planificación educativa, enseñanza y proyectos de I+D.

[27] Al existir una creciente distancia entre lo que se enseña y el conocimiento de punta en materia de innovación científica-tecnológica se produce no solo un desfase o atraso en la circulación de contenidos, sino que se genera una fisura paradigmática. En este caso, fue precaria la comprensión entre la diferencia entre los paradigmas disciplinar y transdisciplinario a la hora de producir y gestionar el conocimiento. No se puede enseñar de manera disciplinar y esperar que lo nuevo surja institucionalmente de manera transdisciplinaria.

[28] CLACSO recibió desde 1968 apoyos puntuales de UNESCO, y de fundaciones privadas, entre ellas las Fundaciones Ford y Rockefeller

[29] Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

[30] Laboratorios de ideas que suelen ser financiados por la filantropía empresarial y la convergencia de fuentes público-privadas, nacionales y trasnacionales.

[31] Qualis (Brasil), también conocido como Qualis-Periódicos o Qualis/CAPES es un sistema brasileño gestionado por la Coordinación de Perfeccionamiento de Personal de Educación Superior (CAPES).

[32] Publindex (Colombia) es un índice bibliográfico nacional, con sistema de indexación y clasificación de revistas científicas colombianas especializadas en ciencia, tecnología e innovación, el cuál es gestionado por Minciencias (anterior Colciencias).

[33] Esta relación de poder y complementariedad, entre UNESCO y los estados nacionales, fue haciéndose más estrecha en la medida que se fueron haciendo las cinco reformas en la Constitución de la UNESCO, siendo la última (1994) un acople total entre ambos. En la medida que la mayoría de gobiernos del planeta son neoliberales, esto marca la orientación del Comité Directivo y las políticas del órgano multilateral. Esto no elimina eventuales diferencias de formas, pero en el fondo hay un alineamiento total, más aún desde la aprobación del ODS4.

[34] Bonilla (2024) identifica proyectos económicos del capital agrupados en Tendencia Reformadora Internacional, Iniciativas de Estandarización Multilateral, Transformación Digital de la Educación, Proyectos Neo Conservadores, la Filantropía como forma de incidencia y control de las agendas educativas, el empresariado alrededor de la cultura evaluativa neoliberal.

[35] STEM acrónimo de las palabras Science, Technology, Engineering y Mathematics, en inglés.

[36] Contenido de grafitis en las paredes de París que se multiplicaron por todo el mundo

[37] Existe complementariedad y no diferencia con los énfasis asumidos por las fundaciones de filantropía, quienes privilegian las ciencias sociales, pero orientadas a crear otro estilo de generación y gestión del conocimiento -transdisciplinario- que potenciaría las “ciencias prácticas” y los nuevos requerimientos de gobernanza capitalista a partir de la tercera revolución industrial. Es tal la complementariedad que el memorándum del Banco Mundial surge en una reunión de trabajo compartida con la Fundación Rockefeller.

[38] Facultad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Ciencias Sociales, creada en 1957 con el apoyo de UNESCO

[39] La idea de modelo se usa como una metáfora literaria, no como paradigma

[40] Este texto forma parte del libro colectivo que escribo con Allisson Goes, Izabela Gomes y Bruno Menezes.

[41] En 1990 la National Science Foundation (NSF) de los Estados Unidos, acuña el término STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), iniclamente llamado SMET, pero a partir de 2001 se reorganizas sus iniciales como las conocemos hoy (STEM). La idea era impulsar el enfoque transdiciplinario para una economía globalizada que cada vez era más orientada por la aceleración de la innovación y los desarrollos tecnológicos

[42] La interculturalidad se constituyó en el modelo más impulsado de mundialización cultural. Pero esta interculturalidad no se deja al libre albedrío a la humanidad, sino que adquiere contornos de ciudadanía planetaria, es decir como reglas mínimas para la convivencia en la sociedad capitalista globalizada. Transdisciplinariedad (o su variante de pensamiento complejo), ciudadanía planetaria y reproducción simbólico-material del sistema capitalista eran -y son- los contornos de esa operación política, social, cultural y económica.

[43] Primer Estudio Regional Comparativo en Educación

[44] Segundo Estudio Regional Comparativo en Educación

[45] Tercer Estudios Regional Comparativo en Educación

[46] Estudio Regional Comparativo en educación

[47] Léase modo de producción capitalista

[48] Disponible en https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/614321627059462966/pdf/AIMM-General-Guidance-Note-Project-Assessment-and-Scoring-Guidance-Note.pdf

[49] Disponible en https://agenciadenoticias.bndes.gov.br/blogdodesenvolvimento/detalhe/Mensuracao-de-impacto-os-casos-do-Banco-Mundial-e-do-BNDES/

[50] La bibliometría ha banalizado y generado una pérdida de profundidad en la comunicación de resultados de investigación. La hegemonía del utilitarismo de los resultados de estas investigaciones y de las reflexiones que de ellas se derivan como resultado de la bibliometría, ha promovido el vaciamiento teórico, conceptual y de producción de pensamiento crítico universitario. Hoy la producción académica más relevante suele hacerse al margen de las dinámicas de la bibliometría, razón por la cual coloco a la producción intelectual como otra función de la universidad, separada de lo que acontece en la investigación, docencia y extensión, aunque debe tributar a cada una de ellas para romper el estancamiento actual.

[51] Organización para el Desarrollo Económico

[52] Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning

[53] IoT está referida a la interconexión de dispositivos físicos y objetos cotidianos a través de la internet. Forma parte de la dinámica de recopilación de datos que será fundamental para el régimen predictivo que analizaremos más adelante.

[54] Lenguaje de programación de alto nivel, utilizado en aplicaciones como desarrollo web, análisis de datos, inteligencia artificial y automatización. Python será fundamental en la estrategia de transformación digital de la educación

[55] CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) es la validación de habilidades en la instalación, configuración y resolución de problemas en redes, routing, switching y seguridad, así como en protocolos (TCP/IP, OSPF, EIGRP, STP), dispositivos (routers, firewalls, otros)

[56]CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professsional) certifica diseño de redes, implementación de redes, resolución de problemas para personal de alto nivel.

[57] Certifica habilidades y conocimientos en seguridad de redes y operaciones de seguridad informática (monitoreo, respuesta a incidentes).

[58] Valida los conocimientos y habilidades en el desarrollo de software para redes y dispositivos, especialmente en programación (Python, JavaScript), desarrollo de aplicaciones y diseño de APIs.

[59] LARA (Latin American Research Awards) es un programa creado por Google en el marco de Google Research y que operaría hasta 2021. Operaba como un concurso anual de proyectos que permitía el financiamiento, recursos para becas, equipos, viajes a conferencias y encuentros con ingenieros de Google. . Al cerrarlo Google anunció que continuaría en Latinoamérica mediante los Google PhD Fellowships, el Research Scholar Program y el Conference Sponsorship Program.

[60] Este documento es un marco general estratégico en el cual se definen las directrices, mecanismos y criterios de gestión en materia de alianzas globales con la diversidad de socios y partes interesadas en la internacionalización universitaria y la educación en general. Se basa en principios comunes en materia de igualdad, transparencia, acountability y sostenibilidad, además de las categorías que servirán de base para ello. Presentado originalmente el 6 de septiembre de 2013, en el marco de la 192 sesión del Consejo Ejecutivo de la UNESCO, fue actualizado en 2019. Uno de sus rostros más potables son las alianzas alrededor de las Cátedras UNESCO.

[61] Información suministrada por la Oficina de Información Pública de la UNESCO.

[62] Presentación de la Recomendación en el sitio web oficial de UNESCO https://www.unesco.org/es/legal-affairs/recommendation-concerning-international-standardization-statistics-relating-book-production-and

[63] 1. Generalidades (0); 2. Filosofía, psicología (1); 3. Religión, teología (2); 4. Sociología, estadística (30-31); 5. Ciencias políticas, economía política (32-33); 6. Derecho, administración pública, previsión, asistencia social, seguros (34, 351-354, 36); 7. Arte y ciencia militar (355-359) ; 8. Enseñanza, educación (37) : 9. Comercio, comunicaciones, transportes (38); 10. Etnografía, usos y costumbres, folklore (39); 11. Lingüística, filología (4); 12. Matemáticas (51); 13. Ciencias naturales (52-59); 14. Ciencias médicas, higiene pública (61); 15. Ingeniería, tecnología, industrias, artes y oficios (62, 66-69); 16. Agricultura, silvicultura, ganadería, caza, pesca (63); 17. Economía doméstica (64); 18. Organización, administración y técnica del comercio, comunicaciones, transportes (65) ; 19. Urbanismo, arquitectura, artes plásticas, oficios artísticos, fotografía, música, film, cinematografía, teatro, radio televisión (70-78, 791-792); 20. Recreos, pasatiempos juegos, deportes (790, 793-799); 21. Literatura (8) : (a) Historia y crítica literarias, (b) Textos literarios; 22. Geografía, viajes (91); 23. Historia, biografía (92-99). (UNESCO; 1964, Recomendación sobre la Normalización Internacional de las Estadísticas relativas a la Edición de Libros y Publicaciones Periódicas)

[64] Congreso de Bruselas (1853), Congreso de La Haya (1869), Jubileo de la Royal Statistical Society (1885)

[65] https://council.science/es/member/isi-international-statistical-institute/

[66] Limitadas a datos básicos sobre escuelas, estudiantes y docentes.

[67] https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/uis-basic-_text-2015.pdf

[68] Nivel 1: Campos principales (2 dígitos). Nivel 2: disciplina (4 dígitos). Nivel 3: Subdisciplinas (6 dígitos). Dos dígitos representan las categorías principales (Física 22, Lógica 11), luego, cuatro dígitos con más detalles de la categoría (física 22 electromagnetismo 2202, por ejemplo).

[69] Red de Universidades Privadas de América Latina y el Caribe

[70] Sistema de Acreditación Regional para Cursos de Graduados del MERCOSUR y Estados Asociados.

[71] Iniciativa de la Unión Europea para el desarrollo de sistemas regionales de acreditación

[72] Promovido por la Unión Europea para la promoción de la calidad de la educación superior mediante la armonización de currículos y la normalización de competencias. Su metodología de trabajo contempla consulta a expertos, análisis de currículos, definición de competencias, mediante mecanismos de transparencia en el reconocimiento que faciliten la movilidad académica.

[73] Creada en el 2003 en el contexto de la XIII Cumbre Iberoamericana de jefes de Estado y Gobierno, celebrada en Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Su sede central está ubicada en Madrid, España.

[74] Con sede en Ginebra, Suiza

[75] https://www.iso.org/es/home

[76] En la traducción del inglés al español, normalización y estandarización aparecen como sinónimos en este campo de normas y procedimientos.

[77] https://acessoacademico.com.br/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw7ZO0BhDYARIsAFttkChw83t4w3fU7RqN61zyN0HRC9RBy5RvftBMg5ahM1hEhLqaDBWmZoUaArdvEALw_wcB

[78] https://bibliotecas.csic.es/es/doi

[79] https://datacite.org/create-dois/

[80] https://www.doi.org/

[81] La despedagogización consiste en el uso instrumental y operacional los componentes de la pedagogía, separados y fragmentados, con lugar de enunciación distintos a las aulas y sistemas escolares. La despedagogización promueve el retorno al modelo de instrucción centrado en la transferencia de conocimientos, no es su construcción, reconstrucción y reelaboración en dinámicas colectivas. La despedagogización es una forma de anular el pensamiento crítico y la creatividad transformadora

[82] Consideramos la brecha epistémica como la distancia que existe entre el desarrollo de la innovación científica y tecnológica y lo que se enseña en las aulas. Este desfase disminuye la importancia de los sistemas escolares y universidades en la reproducción simbólica y material de capitalismo. En la medida que los ciclos de innovación se acortan, se multiplica exponencialmente la brecha epistémica. La cultura evaluativa neoliberal procura resolver este problema mediante procesos de evaluación y recomendación de cursos de corrección puestos en marcha de manera permanente y, de manera simultánea a escala internacional.

[83] Quienes deseen profundizar en el tema pueden leer los trabajos de Bonilla-Molina (2023) en los cuales desarrolla ampliamente las taxonomías educativas mencionadas y otras, así como su impacto en las escuelas e instituciones de educación superior.

[84] Fundada en 1842 por Julius Springer en Berlín, Alemania. En 1999 el grupo Bertelsmann adquiere la mayoría accionaría de la editorial. En 2003 pasa a manos de los grupos de inversión Cinven y Candover, fusionándose en 2004 con Kluwer Academic Publishers, convirtiéndose en Springer Science+Business Media. En 2015 se desarrolla otra integración, en este caso con Nature Publishing Group y Macmillan Education, asumiendo el nombre de Springer Nature

[85] Fundada en 1807 por Charles Wiley en Nueva York, actualmente es una empresa de alcance global que publica más de 1.500 revistas científicas y más de 1.500 libros nuevos por año.

[86] Fundada en 1852 por Richard Taylor y Francis Galton, tiene actualmente oficinas en más de 15 países, publicando más de 2.000 revistas y centenares de libros por año. En 2004 se fusionó con Informa, ampliando su radio de trabajo.

[87] En 2016 Onex Corporation y Bering Private Equity Asia adquirieron la division de propiedad intelectual y Ciencia de Thomson Reuters, renombrándola como Clarivate Analytics. Clarivate ha adquirido en 2017 a Publons (plataforma para el seguimiento de las revisiones de pares), en 2021 a ProQuest (bases de datos para bibliotecas) y a GPA (datos sobre propiedad intelectual).

[88] Formula que calcula de los artículos publicados por un investigador, cuantas veces ha sido citado. Por ejemplo, si ha publicado 10 artículos y cada uno de ellos ha recibido 10 citas, su h-index será de 10, si por el contrario ha publicado 25 artículos, pero solo 10 de ellos han sido citados un mínimo de 10 veces, entonces continúa en el h-index 10. Esto ha generado la perversión académica de incitar a los estudiantes que citen los trabajos de sus profesores, como una forma artificial de inflar el índice.

[89] Desarrollado por Larry Page y Sergey Brin, cofundadores de Google, que establece la importancia de las páginas web, a partir de las relaciones de los enlaces existentes entre ellas.

[90] Paradójicamente los Estados Unidos coloca trabas para avanzar en los reconocimientos de títulos, debido a que procura controlar y mantener el control de los flujos profesionales y estudiantiles que llegan a ese país. Desarrolla un sistema propio para la captura de talentos que le sean funcionales a su lógica reproductora o para avance tecnológico con impacto en su complejo industrial.

[91] En el texto ¿Qué es la brecha epistémica? (2021 Bonilla-Molina explica que es la distancia entre lo que se enseña y aprende en las aulas y el conocimiento y tecnología de punta que se da a conocer. El problema para la universidad y los sistemas escolares es que esa brecha epistémica pareciera ampliarse desde la tercera revolución industrial.

[92] Se menciona que los criterios de evaluación sean justos, transparentes y no discriminatorias, lo cual pone en evidencia los problemas que se vienen evidenciando en las evaluaciones estandarizadas internacionales, fundamentalmente privativas. Pero lo sustantivo en esta materia es el encuadre con la cultura evaluativa que promueve el neoliberalismo.

[93] La parte de los rankings fue publicada parcialmente por Bonilla-Molina, Luis (2020) en el artículo “La crisis sanitaria del COVID-19, educación y universidad” de la Revista OLAC, del IEALC, UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

[94] https://www.qs.com/rankings/

[95] Herramienta para el seguimiento de desempeño comparado a escala global y la identificación de las áreas de mejora (Gestión de la Calidad Total). Cuenta además con informes personalizados, que posibilitan la mejora de la visibilidad global, información para la toma de decisiones y la mejora continua del desempeño.

[96] https://www.shanghairanking.com/

[97] Shanghai Ranking Consultancy se define como una organización totalmente independiente sobre inteligencia de educación superior y no está legalmente subordinada a ninguna universidad o agencia gubernamental.

[98] Por sus siglas en inglés.

[99] Por sus siglas en inglés,

[100] http://www.arwu.org

[101] Fuente: https://www.nobelprize.org/

[102] Fuente: https://www.mathunion.org/

[103] Fuente: https://clarivate.com/highly-cited-researchers/

[104] Fuente: https://access.clarivate.com/login?app=wos&alternative=true&shibShireURL=https:%2F%2Fwww.webofknowledge.com%2F%3Fauth%3DShibboleth&shibReturnURL=https:%2F%2Fwww.webofknowledge.com%2F&roaming=true

[105] Datos sobre el número de personal académico se obtienen de agencias nacionales o regionales como el Ministerio Nacional de Educación, la Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas, la Asociación Nacional de Universidades y Colegios, la Conferencia Nacional de Rectores (Tomado el sitio web del ranking)

[106] Institución consultora independiente con sede en Emiratos Árabes Unidos. https://cwur.org/about.php

[107] https://cwur.org/2023.php

[108] https://cwur.org/2017/subjects.php

[109] https://www.eduniversal-ranking.com/eduniversal-ranking-agency.html

[110] Serpiente mitológica que se muerde la cola, creando un círculo eterno.

[111] Coordinación para el Perfeccionamiento del Personal de Educación Superior (CAPES)

[112] El concepto de la educación como bien público pretende ser presentado como el consenso respecto a que las dinámicas escolares y universitarias son un sector que interesa a todos y les permite comprometerse con su expansión y logros. Sin embargo, el concepto de educación como bien público presenta ambigüedades y problemas a) al identificar a la educación como un bien y no como una construcción social cultural, la coloca en la dimensión del mercado, convirtiéndose en una adaptación de la definición de mercancía que pretendió imponer la Organización Mundial de Comercio (OMC), b) la educación como bien público se convierte en paraguas que permite la entrada del empresariado e intereses económicos a la educación, multiplicando el riesgo de diversas formas de privatización educativa, c) la idea de consenso universal opera como dinámica para la neutralización del conflicto social, lo cual limita el accionar defensivo y ofensivo del movimiento social pedagógico, d) oculta la transferencia de fondos públicos a las formas mercantiles de educación, es decir al bien privado financiado con recursos públicos, e) diluye la obligación estatal con la educación a porcentajes de aporte al desarrollo de la educación, f) permite la mercantilización de servicios universitarios, el cambio de la razón social de la universidad a empresa, con el propósito de lograr mejor financiamiento, g) limita la participación democrática a actores decisivos en el desarrollo del bien público, h) centra su esfuerzo en la formación de capital humano y el derecho a la educación para la empleabilidad.

[113] Fondo patrimonial conformado por donaciones que se invierten en instrumentos financieros, aspirando alcanzar rendimiento que permita financiar becas, investigación, cátedras, o mantenimiento de infraestructura.

[114] Este texto forma parte del libro colectivo que escribo con Allisson Goes, Izabela Gomes y Bruno Menezes

[115] This text is part of the collective book I am writing with Allisson Goes, Izabela Gomes and Bruno Menezes

[116] The OECD primary and secondary education, the World Bank higher education and the IDB – like other regional entities – initial and preschool education, while more local corporations such as CAF prioritize infrastructure, endowment and updating.

[117] GIQAC stands for the Global Initiative for Quality Assurance Capacity developed between UNESCO and the World Bank to strengthen educational quality assurance initiatives in higher education.

[118] Especially in terms of training focused on good practices for university accreditation, support for the creation of regulatory frameworks linked to the educational quality of HEIs and their accreditation and exchange of good practices, especially with INQAAHE.

[119] Financing, technical assistance and resources for training, development of standards and holding of international events.

[120] It provides resources for the development of harmonized accreditation systems, training of evaluators, and promotion of regional standards.

[121] It seeks to build a regionalized system of university accreditation for the area of influence of Mercosur, especially with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

[122] Financial support for the standardisation of assessment and training criteria of national accreditation agencies, especially in terms of comparability of degrees and academic programmes.

[123] Dashboards are data visualization tools that allow the integration of outstanding reports on the behavior of HEIs, in an understandable and easily accessible format. Some examples of them are SABER (Systems Approach for Better Education Results), GEPD (Global Education Policy Dashboard) and LeAP (Learning Assessment Platform). The purpose is to identify critical areas, facilitate decision-making and align educational practices.

[124] KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are quantitative metrics to monitor the shift of goals to achieve educational quality assurance. KPIs should be specific and measurable, contexxtualized and evidence-based.

[125] Online platform, created in 2011 by Dhawal Shah, which operates as a search engine and course aggregator. Its core features are: course aggregation, advanced search filters, reviews and ratings, custom lists, and focus on free courses.

[126] Author metric.

[127] Advanced Research Projects Agency Network created in the 1960s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (SARPA) of the United States.

[128] Developed and introduced by Netscape in 1994.

[129] Intelligent electronic devices, designed to be placed on the body, integrating into accessories or clothing to generate data in real time.

[130] Video report presented by the director of IESALC UNESCO.

[131] Venezuelan university professor. Director of the International Research Center Other Voices in Education (CII-OVE), PhD candidate in Sociology. Member of the GEPPIP research team.

[132] 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.

[133] It is an interactive 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) to approach solutions already explored.

[134] Simulation that allows the worst solutions to be accepted temporarily, escaping from the entropy of the optimal decision not achieved.

[135][135] This is not only a productive problem, but basically a geopolitical problem of power, because the impact of factories 4.0 on money flows and their impact on the financialization of the economy must be resolved beforehand. 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 by way of a new war on a global scale, which does not rule out local wars as part of these tensions.

[136] Signed by the Ministers of Education of France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, it raises the urgency of harmonising the architecture of higher education systems, promoting student and professional mobility, recognising qualifications and credits, strengthening European competitiveness, cooperation and promoting educational quality. A European identity in higher education. From our perspective, the Sorbonne Declaration is a response by European countries with hegemonic pretensions 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.

[137] The Erasmus Programme, an acronym for the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, began on 15 June 1987, with emphasis on the academic mobility model of the evaluative culture in the neoliberal era. In 2014 it evolved to Erasmus+, operating in multi-year cycles (currently 2021-2027). It seeks to promote competitiveness by promoting educational mobility (professors, students, administrative staff), improving educational quality and indicators of the evaluative culture in higher education (quality, relevance, innovation, impact and efficiency), increasing the employability possibilities of graduates, promoting the internationalization of higher education, supporting lifelong learning through the micro-credential model. Erasmus funds related projects such as MICROBOL, CertDigital and DC4EU, from which it proposed a Common European Framework for Micro-Credentials. Erasmus+’s Erasmus Innovation Alliances programme develops and implements a strategy with private companies for the development of micro-credentials of interest to the goods and services generating sector. Erasmus promotes Europass with Blockchain technology. A topic of special attention for the next EHEA Ministerial Conference (2027) will be micro-credentials.

[138] MICROBOL (Micro-credentials linked to the Bologna Process Key Commitments) is an initiative that promotes the use of micro-credentials in higher education.

[139] Certifications for short-term learning, focused on specific competencies, offered by universities or third-party providers.

[140] Model program to integrate microcredentials into the Spanish university system

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

[142] The most recent version we have had access to is the 2015 version

[143] Catalogue of subjects, in which the programmes, subjects, learning outcomes and ECTS credits are contained by institution.

[144] It is the learning agreement or contract between the student, the home and destination institutions, where the courses to be developed and their value in terms of recognized credits are specified. Inter-institutional master’s and doctoral models have popularized and strengthened this model.

[145] Supplement to the degree where the skills acquired and the ECTS credits are detailed, to enable the comparison of qualifications.

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

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

[148] Project of Spanish universities together with European universities for the promotion of the digitization 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 ESG, based on the Recommendations of the Council of the European Union on Micro credentials (2022).

[149] The Digital Credentials for Europe (DC4EU) is a 24-month project (2023-2025) involving 80 organisations from the European Universities Area and more (Ukraine, Norway, among others), focused on implementing the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW). Its purpose is to advance in solid and reliable infrastructure for the implementation of micro-credentials, 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.

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

[151] Group of Spanish universities

[152] University Network of Postgraduate Studies and Permanent Education. It meets annually, with the assembly on 26 March 2025 at the University of Oviedo being its most recent meeting. He 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.

UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONALIZATION IN THE UNSUBMISSIVE HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

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