Book Review
Daniel C. Levy, Higher Education and the State in Latin
America - Private Challenges to Public Dominance. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1986. XVII+434 pp. ISBN 0-226-47608-1,
$27.50
Simon Schwartzman
Published in Journal of Higher Education,
July-August, 1988, v59, 4, p. 475(3).
This is certainly the most important book on Latin American Higher Education
produced so far. Drawing on the author's previous experience on Mexico [1],
the analysis of finance, governance, mission and other important concerns
is now expanded to Chile and Brazil, with a wealth of information and insights
drawn from other countries. More significant than the exhaustive information
gathering, however, is the integration of data into a conceptual and global
interpretation of the long term transformations of the region's higher education
systems.
At first glance, Levy's emphasis on the role of the private sector seems
awkward. Latin American countries are believed to follow the Continental
tradition of all-powerful, interventionist states; higher education in the
region usually brings the image of the large, autonomous, free and highly
politicized public universities in Mexico, Buenos Aires, São Paulo or Lima;
and, in fact, almost all of the literature produced in Latin America about
their higher education institutions relates to the public sector. Seen from
this angle, private education seems to be just a minor aberration.
What we learn from Levy, however, is that this conventional view is just
one side of the coin. Today, about a third of higher education enrollments
in Latin America - and more than half in Colombia and Brazil - are in private
institutions. In the past, private institutions were mostly Catholic, and
their challenge to public education was part of the Church's historical
struggle to keep education under control. Today, however, Catholic universities
are a minority within the private sector, and most of them do not have a
distinctive confessional profile. Private higher education is additionally
divided today in two broad, different subsectors. One is made up of those
elite, rather expensive institutions which try to compensate for the disarray
that over-politicization, bureaucracy and low budgets have brought to the
public sector. At the other extreme there are those institutions which attract
the students who cannot enter the public sector, either because they do
not qualify or because they are older, employed, and can only study at night.
Whether one or the other variety prevails depends very much on what happens
with the public universities - whether they remain mostly as elite institutions,
concerned with quality and relatively shut off from lower social groups,
as in Brazil, or whether they open their doors, lose quality and selectiveness,
and force the elite sectors to look for other educational alternatives,
as in Peru or Mexico. In short, the book rightly analyzes two sectors (is
not only about the private sector), variations within each, and interactions
between the two.
Levy also shows how the distinctiveness between the public and private sectors
is not nearly as clear as one might expect. For example, the notion that
Catholic universities are "private" is a consequence of the secularization
of the State after independence; in Colonial times all "public" universities
were also Catholic. There was an attempt to reestablish this close association
between State and Church in modern Colombia, and recent research has shown
that a similar project was tried by the Vargas government in Brazil during
the thirties [2]. As these attempts failed, the Church
went on with their independent educational projects, which very often relied
strongly on public support. Public support for private education has occurred,
in part, because of the Church's political influence; but also because it
has been possible to argue convincingly that these nominally private institutions
in fact perform a socially meaningful role.
Levy talks about three different waves of privatization, the first related
to the Catholic institutions, the others predominantly secular, specially
in the case of the second wave, and related to more clearly private, capitalist
sectors. He also shows how these differences, and private-public differences
generally, are far from uniform. In many cases Catholic universities cater
to social strata that cannot reach the public institutions, while traditional
Catholicism is replaced by post Vatican II political awareness; these institutions
see themselves as performing a significant social and communitary work,
and claim for public support. In other cases private institutions, Catholic
or not, specialize in elite education and research, performing roles that
the overburdened public universities cannot fulfill, and therefore can also
sometimes claim and obtain public support. But much depends on field of
study, and the public sector remains dominant in both enrollments and quality
in natural and medical sciences, for example. At the same time, the degree
of autonomy achieved by many public universities has led to relative inability
of their governments to actually influence in their normal activities, which
puts a question mark on the true sense of the word "public".
Higher education in Latin America faces now a series of challenges - how
to continue to expand its enrollments, how to keep and improve quality,
how to develop research and graduate education - all this in a context of
intense politicization and limited resources. This book helps us to realize
that, contrary to common belief, the State is relatively weak in its ability
to lead this process, and the end result may be much more complex than the
simple opposition between "public" and "private" education could suggest.
References
1. Daniel C. Levy, University and Government in Mexico:
Autonomy in an Authoritarian System. New York, Praeger, 1980.
2. Simon Schwartzman, M. Helena Bomeny and Vanda Costa,
Tempos de Capanema. Rio de Janeiro, Editora Paz e Terra, 1984.
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