Bridging Walls and Crossing Borders in the Caribbean

Globalization and neoliberalism have altered higher education in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Cross-border collaboration and cooperation can strengthen higher education across the region.

By Maria Josefa Canino

The main forces restructuring Latin American higher education today are globalization and neoliberal regimes. In response to these forces, colleges and universities across the region are making adjustments and introducing reforms. In the Caribbean, institutions in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and, with socialist variations, Cuba, increasingly compete for funds from private and public sources as governments reduce subsidies to higher education and encourage institutional self-sufficiency. At the same time, government programs and other initiatives increasingly support university involvement in the marketplace, legislation to reform and restructure the university, efficiency in management, and the use of national evaluation systems to guide funding allocations. In this way, Caribbean colleges and universities are leaning toward the entrepreneurship that has characterized North American institutions, especially in recent decades. Together, these developments are shaping the opportunities and challenges facing public higher education in the Hispanic Caribbean.

In the traditional Latin American view, public education is seen as a vital force in society, particularly in countries where the challenges of poverty seem intractable. In the Caribbean, individual achievement in higher education is held in high regard, as is the prestige of faculty status and intellectual work. Also important is the perceived commitment of public universities to fostering national autonomy, social progress, and global awareness.

Across Latin America, people see faculty as the conscience of society, a role that carries the weight of moral obligation to a greater extent in Latin America than in the United States. The ideal of academics as constructive critics and classical seekers of truth within autonomous institutions of higher education remains especially strong in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. In Cuba, by contrast, academic knowledge and problem solving are urgent and concrete contributions to nation building, grounded in the state’s emphasis on perfeccionamiento, or continuous improvement.

Overshadowing these varying expectations regarding faculty roles is a debate about the function of public higher education. In the 1960s and 1970s, colleges and universities in Puerto Rico and Cuba were seen as extensions of the state, charged with preparing graduates for their long-term roles as social beings and as economic agents in a rapidly changing national marketplace. In recent decades, Puerto Rican and Dominican faculty had begun to ascribe the economic aspect of this function to private institutions, but that view is changing. Though still debated on campus and by policy makers, the perceived value of short- and long-term university-society-market relationships has gained marked ascendancy. There is now broad agreement that state universities should promote economic progress through research and workforce development and should educate faculty, students, and administrators about their obligation to help governments and citizens address complex social, political, and economic issues.

Many institutions have responded creatively to challenges emerging from the turbulent environment created by declining public funding, escalating demands on higher education, and the pressures of economic internationalization. Yet this altered landscape has also introduced some intractable new tensions. For example, universities struggle to balance short-term market pressures and increased government scrutiny with the need to prepare students for their diverse roles in society. At the same time, institutions face demands for efficiency and accountability in Cuba and Puerto Rico and, to a lesser extent, in the Dominican Republic, where patronage and corruption continue to plague the government.

Students in the Margin

Meanwhile, the mission of public institutions to educate marginalized groups persists as a fundamental challenge within Caribbean higher education. In the 1970s access and equity joined nation building, economic development, and social democracy as functions of higher education. The admission of students whose career expectations and racial, ethnic, gender, and social backgrounds differ from those previously served by postsecondary institutions has revealed new claims and needs, bringing forth complex issues for universities in the region.

Integrating marginal groups of black, poor, and, to a lesser extent, female students into all levels and disciplines of higher education remains weakest in the Dominican Republic, although, clearly, this goal has not been fully resolved in Puerto Rico, Cuba, or the United States. Each of the Caribbean countries made substantial gains, especially between the 1950s and 1980s, in moving toward gender, racial, social, and geographic equality in enrollments.

Without doubt, compared with the restricted opportunities before 1959, Cuba has made the greatest advances in extending schooling to all, regardless of gender, race, income, or geographic origin. Puerto Rico has done best in terms of the percentage of population over twenty-four with a college or university education and the percentage enrolled in postsecondary institutions; only the United States and Canada surpass the island in these measures.

Notwithstanding the qualitative and quantitative progress of the last forty years in all three countries, gender, class, and racial inequalities persist. But they are becoming much less pronounced in the universities and, consequently, in the disciplines and professions and in administrative and managerial positions.

Clearly, institutions of public higher education in the Caribbean must have a broad role in national development, one that goes beyond service to their respective national economies or globalization. Integrating poor students, students from rural areas, and newcomer minorities (such as Dominicans, Asians, and Haitians in Puerto Rico) at all levels of schooling is a challenge common to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, as are improving the quality of teaching, especially in science and technology; defining standards to guide administration, teaching, and research; and assessing the relevance of education in a context of shrinking resources. These challenges must be undertaken even as Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic confront national uncertainty, developmental crises, and the dramatic reconstruction and fluidity of international capital.

Bridge Building

One way for higher education to address these challenges is through collaborative projects in the areas of student recruitment, faculty and curriculum development, research and teaching, and student exchanges. Designing innovative, and even entrepreneurial, opportunities for sharing institutional strengths is one component of this approach. Both Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic can build on Cuba’s international perspective and groundwork in providing access to undergraduate and graduate education to students from developing countries. Cuba has provided scholarships to thousands of foreign students and established collaborative relationships with African and Latin American institutions of higher education. Cuba’s international outreach activities in economic development, research, and education include many entrepreneurial initiatives intended to generate revenue for self-support of departments and research centers.

Over the past ten years, the University of Puerto Rico has embarked on regional outreach to Haiti and other anglo- and francophone countries in the Caribbean and to the rest of Latin America, enhancing relationships and partnerships and expanding recruitment programs, much as the university did in its early history when it was designated the "bridge between North and South." Similarly, the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo has extensive contacts with international educational and research support centers in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Collaboration across Caribbean borders would draw on institutional physical plants, research centers, individual faculty, and curricula and reach out to nongovernmental organizations with the goal of devising advocacy strategies, engaging in educational problem solving, and formulating policy and research agendas. Interinstitutional and interdisciplinary teams and task forces could be formed to develop new theories of teaching and learning about the intersections of cultural diversity, nation building, colonialism, imperialism, dependency, and globalization. These joint ventures could also work to identify potential areas of professional service and collaborative studies across the Caribbean and the Americas. Bringing down invisible walls and crossing the multiple borders that isolate these nations from one another may be one of the few options available to mine resources that can make the most out of the reach and impact of higher education in the Caribbean.

María Josefa Canino is coordinator of the Public Administration Certificate in Nonprofit Management at Rutgers University, Newark. She coedited La Politica Social ante los Nuevos Desafios: Cuba y Puerto Rico (1995) and is currently coediting a book on higher education policy in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

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