1. Concluding remarks ….
Dr. Rafael Aragunde
Interamerican University of Puerto Rico
I have to start by acknowledging the rich variety of positions presented by the different participants. The
invitation to think ourselves under the guise of our relationship to the Global Agenda was answered by a
wide diversity of scholars from all parts of the world: Australia and Sweden; Kenya and Pakistan; Brazil
and Malaysia; India and Lithuania; UK and Ghana; France and Japan; Israel and Jamaica; Egypt and the
USA are a few of the places from which colleagues have flown to Puerto Rico to think and converse
about the alternative paths to the future that Higher Education proposes.
In the opening session on Tuesday evening we were invited to “think about trends, developments and
preoccupations” in higher education, in the words of Juan Ramón de la Fuente. And that’s what was done
in the next two days and a half.
The morning session on Wednesday was crowned by the visual richness of the world some of us – the
very privileged who work in Higher Education institutions - are starting to inhabit. That is the kind of
world we would all like to share and yet we know perfectly well that it won’t be easy to achieve. There is
no need to insist that there was a train of thought throughout the conference that stressed this alternative
path to the future. There are great possibilities of development, many seem to have told us in their own
ways, and it’s just a matter of following what science and learning, understood and defined in weberian
terms, have to offer. But will this suffice? It hasn’t in the past. What kind of guarantee do we have that
that kind of scientific and industrial rationality will do justice to those who share the planet? How often
since the Enlightenment, and the period that followed, where many and not only positivists, thought that
science and its progress would put an end to injustice, have we read and heard that techno-scientific
development will solve all of our problems?
But that same Wednesday morning session gave us another alternative pathway to the future. Not only
higher education as a public good is now contested in countries where universities have been part of
their culture for centuries and soon for a millennium, but also in lands where higher education hasn’t had
too many birthdays and where resources that were scarce at times today are being fought over because
they are not there anymore. What were many of our colleagues telling us, never losing their smiles and
hopes? In fact, at times I thought that they were not telling us enough about their needs. But from what I
heard it seems that they don’t need the competition they are getting from all kinds of foreign universities,
besides not counting with a state that will support them properly. This alternative path to the future which
is being forced on some institutions is obviously much more challenging for they must face, from a weak
position, the unpredictable behavior of markets and their irrationality. It would be interesting to know
how many agreements were made during these days between those that are representing universities that
had a chance to develop with the help of strong national support and no foreign competition and
universities that have too much of the later and hardly anything of the former. These are the challenges
facing a globalized humanity. Are Higher Education institutions addressing them?, was the first question
we had to address.
There was an evident consensus in respect to funding and what it means in reality. No higher education
institution feels satisfied with what it has or receives. There was a time when in the name of autonomy
Faculty resisted what was conveniently thought improper state intervention. Those were the days when
2. research was a thing done in very few universities around the world. Money would come in from the state
or as revenue from moderate tuition and there was not much else we would do besides “teaching”.
Legislatures didn’t question us. But history has a way of laughing at its inexperienced actors. Anyway,
during the conference nobody questioned the assertion that money goes nowadays where politicians and
big multinational companies want it to go. That was the unanimous answer given to the second question
How and where are current dominant funding models steering higher education and research? But
shouldn’t the question have been phrased differently. We should have forced ourselves to think about the
possibility of other funding models that don’t include raising student tuition and becoming slaves of
capitalism’s latest trend? Because that’s what we have been doing. This question, phrased this way, would
have given us the chance to identify alternative paths. Stated as it was, it doesn’t seem to have inspired
much thought. But isn’t the need to find new funding models one of the biggest challenges that we are
facing, especially in the developing countries where research in general terms is, very often, not a priority.
Yet research or whatever we get obsessed with doesn’t need to be a priority, as was clearly suggested by
certain panelists, and which takes us to the third alternative path to the future that, we must admit, was not
enough dwelled upon. And this third path is not only a very valid answer to that second question, which
we would rephrase. It is also a convenient answer to the first one and, if you allow me, to the third
question we dealt with, which was: Is globalization setting a new agenda for internationalization of
higher education? Nosce te ipsum. Know yourself. Work on your strengths. Get rid of what is not
relevant. Why force your Faculty to publish in magazines that don’t add much to what you are, or that
nobody reads. Productivity is highly overrated. The most important things in our lives – all experiences -
love, health, culture, are all the results of a change of rhythm. Globalization might be a fact, but you
don’t need to be obsessive about sending or bringing students and faculty just because everybody is doing
it. Internationalization opens up doors, but how many doors can you walk through when you want to get
to know a different culture?
Once you get to know yourself, be yourself. But be yourself and undertake a project that will reconsider
for example the way we compete with each other, as stated yesterday by one of the panelist. We can
compete to improve each other, not to beat the other. We must rescue public discourse where we make
explicit the values involved in the decisions that are being made. We need a vision of what is success so
that its criteria is not defined by performance, management managed by the latest fad, or based on a
misunderstanding of scholarship. Our business is knowledge. And we can pursue a knowledge that
contributes to a world public culture; that resists manipulative elites; and that makes sure that ethics is not
displaced by pergormance. Did we insist enough on this?
Concluding, lots of good things are going on in our institutions and what we heard is definitely
encouraging. But what fills us with optimism are all those projects that stem out from institutions’
strengths and from a courageous evaluation of what is really taking place in the world. If restructuring is
necessary, it should take into account that since neo liberalism spread its wings more than two decades
ago we haven’t gotten richer, higher education has lost much of what it once pretended to be and that
critical approaches to these realities have gotten scarcer. But then, higher education does posses a huge
amounts of creativity. Based on that, we certainly must work on that third path that will respect the
different.
3. I cannot end without thanking Eva Egron Polak and our Chancellor Marilyna Wayland and their teams for
their efforts. They did organize a very successful and enjoyable meeting. We should also thank President
Manuel Fernós for bringing us the 14th. General conference and IAU President Juan Ramón de la Fuente
for his support and, aware that I might be breaking with the protocol – why not – I invite everybody to
give them a round of applause for a great and unforgettable week that we know took endless days to
organize and that has been a real success.