Disputa en torno a la idea de la universidad en América Latina: Imaginarios históricos

Disputes over the Idea of the University in Latin America: Historical Imaginaries

Abstract

The philosophical question of the idea of the university—what the institution is and ought to be—resurfaces whenever its conditions of existence change. This theoretical article reframes that question by shifting from the classical category of “idea” to the socio-philosophical category of “imaginary,” understood, following Castoriadis and Taylor, as an institution of significations that both describes the university and prescribes its behavior. On this basis, it develops an analytical framework that conceptualizes five imaginaries—Napoleonic, Humboldtian, Newmanian, Cordobés, and world-class university—as contested configurations of meaning rather than a linear succession of models. It analyzes how university imaginaries have been formed, sustained, and contested in Latin America. Through a critical documentary analysis of three corpora, each imaginary is reconstructed via a five-dimensional matrix: origin, normative core, institutional crystallization, reproduction mechanism, and disruptive force. The central argument holds that the 1918 Córdoba Reform produced the only properly regional imaginary among the configurations reconstructed here, characterized by a structural inversion: individual academic freedom is subordinated to corporate autonomy conceived as an institutional privilege. Its twofold institutional crystallization—constitutional and regional-discursive—reinforced by socio-professional mechanisms of reproduction and tension, explains its persistence against massification, privatism, policy cycles, and the global model, which have intensified rather than displaced it. Chile, lacking constitutional recognition of autonomy, operates as a divergent configuration that helps specify the role of constitutional anchoring. The article closes by philosophically reactivating the normative question of the Latin American university.