The first university in Peru, San Marcos National University, was founded in 1551, just a few years after the arrival of the Spanish. As an institution it was fundamentally directed toward the training and education of priests and the colonial creole aristocracy, with professors holding static, life-long positions, poor support for students, and little in the way of solid scientific formation. While a more secular and liberal emphasis was introduced in the nineteenth century after Peru gained independence, the universities retained much of their colonial character until the early twentieth century, when the pioneering experience of the university reform movement of Córdoba of 1918 helped propagate a series of principles and proposals among university-aged youths throughout Latin America advocating radical changes in the way universities operated. For more than 50 years, student movements throughout the continent have advocated an agenda for radical university reform based on this experience, including: student representation in university government; university autonomy vis-à-vis the state and other societal institutions; curriculum reform; free, state-funded education; and better outreach programs linking the university to the society at large.
In the first half of the twentieth century, there were a handful of students at the nine existing universities, all of which were public except for one—the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, which was created in 1917. [See Table 1] Five of these universities were located in provinces, while four were in Lima. At this time, Peru was still a primarily rural country. But from the 1950s onward, massive migration from the countryside to the cities—fundamentally Lima—radically transformed this panorama. The result was a new urban population that began to have a decisive influence on national politics. This emerging urban sector had a new set of social demands, and education was among the most important. In just a decade, secondary school enrollment grew exponentially, from 75,526 students in 1950 to 198,259 in 1960—a 270% increase. By the 1960s, similar trends in higher education could be detected: from 15,919 students in 1950 to 30,983 in 1960, and to 92,402 in 1969.[1] The nine universities that existed as of 1960 were unable to accommodate the increasing number of high school graduates seeking a university education.
Table 1: Peruvian Universities By Location and Type, According to Period Established
Period Established
Location (percent)
Type (percent)
Total
Lima
Provinces
Public
Private
1551-1960
44
56
88
12
9
1961-1970
36
64
59
41
22
1971-1980
0
100
100
0
4
1981-1990
12
88
18
82
17
1991-1997
50
50
0
100
12
Total
30
70
61
39
64
Source: National Assembly of Deans, 1999.
In response to growing demand, 22 new universities were created in the 1960s, constituting the first “boom” in institutions of higher education. This boom followed a clear pattern: While the new universities formed in Lima were private, those in the provinces were public. This pattern was interrupted in the following decade by the military government put in place by General Juan Velasco (1968-1980). Only four new universities were created during this period, all of them public and all of them located in the provinces.
When the country returned to civilian rule in 1980, a second boom in the creation of universities took place. This time, however, the pattern was the inverse: These universities were for the most part private, and most were located in the provinces.
The dominant pattern of the 1990s is a reflection of the neoliberal reforms that have been adopted by the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990- ). State support for the creation of universities has been withdrawn completely, and the task of creating new centers of higher education has been yielded completely to the private sector. Of the 12 new universities created between 1991 and 1997, all are private, and half are located in Lima and the other half in the provinces.
Unlike other countries—especially the developed ones—where the university is a predominantly public institution,[2] in Peru the trend is toward the fomenting of private universities. This trend is sustained by the long-standing deterioration of the public university, a process that is fomented by the sustained lack of public and private sector support.
The crisis of the public university is evident in the dwindling rate of enrollment at state-funded institutions, particularly in comparison to the growing enrollments at private universities. [See Table 2] This process has to do with what various analysts have begun calling the “elitization” of education both at the level of secondary school and in higher education. In other words, the social divisions within the country are reflected in large measure within the Peruvian university system itself. The lack of sustained elite and state support for the public university system has, in effect, created a dual system of higher education in Peru: the private universities, which are very well funded and which service primarily the rich and well-to-do; and the public universities, underfunded and in a state of disrepair, which service the poor. In contrast to other countries where the public university is a meeting place of students from diverse social sectors, in Peru the tendency is toward an ever-growing social differentiation reproduced inside—and by—the university system itself, in the shadow of the current ideological hegemony of neoliberalism.[3] And in this context, the curriculum is leaning toward highly technical, business-oriented coursework, while traditional disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities are increasingly marginalized.
Table 2: Demographic Changes in Peruvian Universities, 1968-1996
Applicants
Admitted Students
Year
Public
Private
Total
Public
Private
Total
1968
82%
18%
57,858
68%
32%
22,268
1982
75%
25%
274,086
65%
35%
68,164
1996
69%
31%
305,294
53%
47%
91,719
Source: National Assembly of Deans, 1999.
While the expansion of the public university system was initially a response by the state to the demands of the growing urban middle class to higher education, the lower classes also began demanding a place at the table. As the state sought to meet this demand by creating more universities and by expanding enrollments at existing state institutions, elite private universities were established catering to the wealthy. This process was interrupted in 1968 by the Velasco military dictatorship, marking a definitive rupture between the elites and the public university.
Unfortunately, even as the public university was opening its doors to the less privileged sectors of society, it failed to devise mechanisms to assure high academic standards, resulting in what sociologist Nicolás Lynch has called “massification without a project.”[4] With a few important exceptions, in general the public universities were staffed by professors who had little time to update their knowledge and conduct serious scientific research, and students were attended to in a uniform, routine and deficient manner. In addition, the majority of public university students came out of the public education system, which is deficient in many ways and clearly inferior to the private primary and secondary schools where the middle and upper classes send their children to study, and no real programs were devised to meet the deficiencies in preparation these students brought with them.
In this period in particular, there was a growing radicalization of university youth, who were influenced, like their peers throughout the continent, by historic events such as the Cuban Revolution. Diverse groups on the left, especially those of Maoist orientation, used the public university as a sort of training ground for the formation of party cadres, turning the university into little more than a pretext to engage in confrontational politics with the state and other political groups. Political debate, democracy, administrative necessities and the academic quality of the university became secondary concerns to politics.[5]
The quality of public education continued to decline from the 1980s onward as the state began to slash funds allotted to the public universities. As a result, salaries of professors and university faculty have sharply declined, and many can no longer afford to consider the university career as a sole and viable work option. Many of the best faculty simply left the public universities in favor of teaching at private universities, where they found better salaries and more optimal work conditions. For those who have opted to stay in the public university, moonlighting has become an essential survival strategy.
Already meager resources in the public universities for investigative research and faculty enhancement have virtually disappeared. The effects on physical capital in the public universities has also been notable. With no funds for maintenance or renovation, the university infrastructure has rapidly become obsolete, and the libraries are neglected and full of antiquated books. And as if this were not enough, one must add the problems arising from general administrative chaos and from the climate of violence and ingovernability caused by the terrorism of the Shining Path and the armed forces, which culminated in the militarization of the principal public universities of the country.[6] To this day, many public universities are controlled by government-appointed reorganizing commissions, which are charged with updating the curriculum and improving the university infrastructure, but which have not addressed the issue of the budget allotted to the universities by the government. These commissions are characterized by a lack of transparency and an absence of dialogue with the group of other actors which make up the university environment.
In contrast to the majority of the public universities, many private universities project an image of academic excellence. The quality of instruction, the impressive faculty, the prestige of the institution, as well as the use of sophisticated technology in teaching are some of the common characteristics found at the private universities. In notable contrast to the public university, the student population consists almost entirely of young people from the upper and middle classes.
At the same time, however, not all the private universities are equal. At least four “generations” can be distinguished among them. The first generation is represented by the solitary presence of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, which was founded in 1917 and is now considered the best university in the country, both in the sciences and the humanities. The second generation appeared in Lima with the boom of the 1960s. These included universities that sought to establish and maintain the academic quality lost by the public institutions as well as universities whose primary motive was profit-based, and these quickly became diploma mills of mediocre quality. Among the former are the University of Lima, well known for communication studies; Pacific University, which excels in public administration and economics; and Cayetano Heredia, known for its excellent medical faculty. Private universities of lesser quality include Garcilaso de la Vega University, Ricardo Palma University, and San Martín de Porres University, which have a de facto open-admissions policy. In both 1991 and 1992, for example 10,000 new students entered each of these universities.[7] The third generation of private universities was established in the 1980s, primarily in the provinces, and they too tended to be massive and of mediocre quality. The final generation of private universities sprang up in Lima in the 1990s. These universities—the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences (UPC), founded in 1994, and the University of Saint Ignatius de Loyola (USIL), founded in 1995—had an open neoliberal orientation and sought to compete with the best universities of the first and second generations for academic prestige and the pool of upper-class students.
The number of youths who are able to gain access to universities of high academic quality—like the Pacific University—is very small. According to Rocío Silva Santisteban, the universities with the best academic standing and the highest tuition—the Catholic University, Pacific University, University of Lima, UPC and USIL—represent only 23% of student enrollment in private universities at the national level.[8] On the other hand, those students who can afford the highest tuition brackets at the Pacific University could also afford the tuition bills at the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin, Santa Barbara in California, Florida, and Kansas, or those of Texas A&M or the College of William and Mary or Auburn—including food, housing, books and other living expenses.[9]
In the newly created universities, the demands of the market determine the courses of study on offer. “The university that makes entrepreneurs” is the slogan of the UPC and the USIL. As one can see from the majors offered by the USIL—business, engineering, hotel and tourism, communications—private business is not principally interested in the study of philosophy, art, literature or history, not to mention social sciences. The issue is that while corporate calls for quality training in careers geared toward business are legitimate, these are not the only needs of the country, nor can they be the only motivation for science and thought. Or can they?
Social science courses in Peru—anthropology, sociology, archaeology and history—have developed primarily inside the walls of the public university. Except for the isolated effort of the Pontifical Catholic University, the other private universities—and particularly the most recent generation—are uninterested in these professions because they are “unprofitable.” As such, it is not surprising that as the public university has sunk into a crisis mode over the past few decades, so too have the social sciences.
The signs of the crisis of the social sciences in Peru are widespread: few books published and sold, a smaller number of students majoring in anthropology and sociology, uncertainty over the conceptual frameworks that form the basis of the disciplines, and a shrinking job market.[10] In effect, one of the most serious problems is the persistent gap between the content of the courses offered—in which an uncritical Marxism still holds sway—and the recent developments in social sciences, which involve an emphasis on theoretical pluralism, critical analysis, and the need for applied research.[11]
While the process by which the social sciences became identified at many universities with a drastically simplified Marxism is complex, at least three key elements can be identified. First, in a country so marked by exclusions as Peru in the 1960s and 1970s—where servile relations continued to exist on the haciendas in parts of rural Peru, for example—radical ideologies found fertile soil in which to take root. The Marxism of the public universities was fundamental in developing a discourse demanding the recognition of rights, but it also was the foundation of a discourse calling for the use of violence. The second factor is linked to the weakness of the academic institution per se, due largely to the rapid massification of the universities that inhibited a more organic process of growth and development. With a rapidly growing student body, many social science departments hired faculty members in impromptu fashion and proved unable to develop more solid academic programs. Finally, there were a number of serious obstacles to promote conceptual renovation and faculty enhancement, including perpetually low salaries, the virtual absence of incentives, pitiful library resources, the primacy of political activism, which often undermined a commitment to dialogue and debate essential to any academic environment, and the weakness of university institutions themselves.
These factors contributed to the conversion of the public university into a center of political militancy. But in Peru, in contrast to the countries of the Southern Cone—Argentina and Chile, for example, where military regimes were primarily repressive—the reformist military regime of the 1970s did not signify a setback for the social sciences. On the contrary, it was actually an era of consolidation, growth and expansion. During that decade, the majority of the public universities created and expanded the number of programs related to the social sciences. This was partly linked to the growing demand on the part of the state for social science professionals, which it employed for various programs in “social engineering.” For example, there was a huge demand for anthropologists to work in the various state agencies associated with the Velasco agrarian reform program. The expansion of the social sciences in this period was also linked to the simple fact that a growing number of students went to the university with the goal of bringing about the revolution, and found in the social sciences a hospitable intellectual home.
With the fall of the Velasco regime and the dismantling of the principal reforms of his government, employment opportunities for social scientists dried up quickly. The public universities were increasingly left adrift, and the numbers of students and professors in the social sciences began to decline. At the same time, there was an explosion of new nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Peru, responding to demands from below for training and technical assistance, and to the growing availability of international funds for development projects. A few numbers serve to illustrate this: From a handful of NGOs existing at the beginning of the 1980s, there were 218 by 1988, and over 900 by 1996.[12] This opened the door for an expansion of the job market for social science careers throughout a good part of the 1980s, but after a peak in the early 1990s, the growing scarcity of international funding has led to a sharp reduction of NGO jobs.
How have the changes detailed above affected the development of the social sciences in Peru? The answer to this question must begin by pointing out the absolute indifference on the part of the state to employing professionals with social science backgrounds, and the corresponding lack of interest in investing in improving the training of such professionals. That said, it is also important to note how the social fact that major social scientists are now employed by NGOs has had a significant impact on the structure and content of the social sciences in Peru today.
In contrast to earlier decades, the hegemony of the NGOs in the labor market imposes a pace and style of work that is radically different from the old research and development programs conducted from the universities. The core of NGO work is their projects, which by definition seek to have an impact on very specific sectors of the population, are measured according to specific indicators, and calculate progress in the short term. This often means that NGOs lose sight of the intimate link between practice and theory, and between applied development projects and academic reflection in the universities. There is a growing separation between “pure” theoretical reflection in the universities and the professional “applied” work of the NGOs, a division which has been exacerbated by a state that has abdicated its responsibility to invest in higher education for national development.[13] There is no feedback, no mutual discussion and debate between the theoretical and the practical. In addition, many NGOs have ceased to engage in research at all, and now dedicate themselves exclusively to hands-on development projects. In effect, when the NGOs present their projects to financiers, the word “research” is increasingly off limits.
This has the effect of erasing the boundaries between specific disciplines within the social sciences. In the NGOs, there is a more intense mixture of professionals from varying social science backgrounds who tend to define themselves more in terms of the topics they study—gender or the environment, for example—than by their original disciplines. This may in fact have a salutary effect on the social sciences, as interesting interdisciplinary modes of action and thought emerge from this process. Indeed, different theories and techniques from each discipline may increasingly be understood as tools inside a common and interdisciplinary “toolbox,” such that anyone can use any of them at his or her convenience, thus making disciplinary borders less rigid. It is increasingly common that two NGO professionals from different disciplines have a greater affinity with each other than with their colleagues in their respective university departments. But there is a downside to this, as it undermines the rich dialogue that historically occurred between the institutions that produce knowledge—the universities—and those that apply this knowledge in everyday life—the NGOs.
In recent years, various universities have held conferences and open forums to debate the status and future of the social sciences. The central dispute turns on whether the academy should adopt a more “professional” or more “academic” orientation. In the case of many public universities, especially in the provinces, there is an excessive—and often poorly understood—emphasis on the professional orientation, such that coursework is geared toward training students to work in NGOs. This is partly the result of a conceptual and theoretical vacuum that took hold with the onset of the crisis of Marxism, which was so dominant—if dogmatic—in the public universities in Peru.[14] In this era of fundamentalist neoliberalism, when the Fujimori government has explicitly threatened to simply terminate many existing social science programs, there are desperate attempts to fill that void by following an exaggerated professional path—to the detriment of a more creative way of conceptualizing the social sciences and the role they can play in promoting national development.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Carlos Iván Degregori is a senior researcher at the Institute for Peruvian Studies (IEP) and professor of anthropology at San Marcos National University in Lima. He is co-editor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke, 1995) and author of Ayacucho 1969-1979: El surgimiento de Sendero Luminoso (IEP, 1990). He is currently directing a research project on culture and identity in the Andes under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation. Javier Avila Molero, a historian and anthropologist, holds a Rockefeller fellowship at IEP, where he is a research assistant in the anthropology department. Translated from the Spanish by Eric Fichtl.
NOTES
1. Henry Pease García, El movimiento estudiantil universitario en el Perú, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP), 1977, mimeograph.
2. In many of these countries private universities are few in number, and often cannot compete with the academic quality and prestige of the public universities, which are supported by not only the state but also private firms.
3. In the 1990s neoliberal reforms have been applied throughout the continent, but the most radical antistatist discourse is found in countries like Argentina and Peru, where the changes were much more drastic. See Adriana Puiggrós, “Educación neoliberal y quiebre educativo,” Nueva Sociedad, No. 146 (November/December 1996).
4. Nicolás Lynch, Los jóvenes rojos de San Marcos: El radicalismo universitario de los años setenta (Lima: El zorro de abajo ediciones, 1990).
5. Although this occurred in most universities, the process was much more intense in the public schools than the private ones, and more so in the provinces. The Shining Path’s “hard core” and principal cadres emerged from the public, provincial University of Huamanga during the 1970s and 1980s, for example.
6. During the 1980s the public universities were the stage of long strikes resulting in the loss of various academic years for students.
7. Hernán Burgos, “Universidad peruana: El desafio de la calidad académica,” Quehacer, No. 99 (1996), pp. 46-63.
8. The university with the highest student population is San Martín de Porres, with approximately 40,000 students.
9. Rocío Silva Santisteban and José Carlos Requena, “El que quiere celeste… ¿Cuánto cuesta estudiar en una universidad particular?” Quehacer, No. 103 (1996), pp. 48-56.
10. Gonzalo Portocarrero, ed., Crisis y desafios: La enseñanza de las ciencias sociales en el Perú (Lima: Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, 1996).
11. Portocarrero, ed., Crisis y desafios.
12. Mario Padrón, “Los centros de promoción: Desafíos al desarrollo no gubernamental,” Socialismo y Participación, No. 44 (1988), pp. 17-32; and Abelardo Sánchez León, Los desafíos de la cooperación (Lima: Center for the Study and Promotion of Development (DESCO), 1996).
13. In Peru, the separation between NGOs and universities tends to be greater in the state universities than in the private ones, and more so in the provinces than in Lima.
14. Carlos Iván Degregori, “La revolución de los manuales,” Revista peruana de ciencias sociales, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1990), pp. 103-126.
