Renovation and Reform in Dominican Higher Education

How does an agenda for change balance the traditional mission of the university with new social and economic demands?

By Josefina Pimentel

In 1991 the world’s student population numbered 65 million. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) projected in 1995 that the number would rise to 79 million in 2000, to 97 million in 2015, and to 100 million in 2025. In Latin America, postsecondary enrollments were expected to grow from 30 million in 1991 to 54 million in 2025. UNESCO also observed that unequal access to higher education will probably hold steady. In developed countries, half of the population at the appropriate age level will have access to postsecondary education, but in developing countries, less than 10 percent of the comparable population will.

In the Dominican Republic, university and college students numbered barely 3,000 in 1961 but reached some 130,000 in 1995. At the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, a public institution, the student population fluctuated from 60,000 in the 1980s, down to 40,000 in 1990, and up to 65,000 in 1995—which amounted to half of all postsecondary enrollments in the country. These numbers do not, however, reflect increasing equity, since the proportion of college-aged young people enrolled in postsecondary education seems not to have increased. Achieving equal access to and quality in mass higher education is clearly going to be a great challenge.

Perhaps the most formidable task confronting higher education in Latin America is to articulate the triple relationship between the mission of the university, the specific needs of the university’s social, economic, and cultural environment, and the characteristics of a rapidly changing world. In Latin America, as elsewhere, the university is an institution that seeks truth through the development of knowledge. As such, it is ideally committed to the scientific and technological advancement of society as well as to its material and spiritual development. The university must also recognize its fundamental role in shaping the human resources necessary for social development and its responsibility to help solve social and cultural problems. It is thus obliged to open itself to all areas of knowledge and currents of thought without neglecting or underestimating any, because this institution, above others, should recognize theuniversal value of debate for the development of humankind, science, art, and culture.

Market Forces

The mission of the university is not, however, limited to these goals. The larger society’s needs, the construction of knowledge, and educational systems are forces that operate differently. Yet the university must take each of them into account; it does not exist in isolation. Higher education must therefore shape its curricular offerings to fit the demands of the market in a particular context and period, without losing sight of the equally important requirement of encouraging full human development. Because of the volatility and vulnerability of market structures, however, the function of the university cannot be confined to providing the human resources demanded by the market. To do so would be to limit the social relevance of higher education.

Still, a constant interaction with the marketplace is required, because the world of work is undergoing permanent and radical change, and the knowledge acquired by students may become quickly outdated. The challenge for higher education is to build a flexible curriculum that, while preserving an ethical framework, can integrate the universality of knowl-edge with national and local needs. In other words, our challenge is to conduct the university’s affairs in a way that is relevant to a historical moment gripped by rapid change.

Education for World Citizens

Dominican higher education can develop its mission fully only if it makes research the center of institutional activity, taking into account the complexity of the social, cultural, and ecological problems that humanity now faces. Yet financial and administrative limitations and lack of resources, intellectual stimulation, and incentives demand that we find new strategies to advance this ambition. According to UNESCO’s World Report on the Sciences for 1993, more than 80 percent of research takes place in a small group of industrialized countries, reflecting the wide gap between industrialized and developing countries.

Despite the increasing value of research in a world economy based on the supremacy of knowledge and constant technological change, budgetary constraints and the belief that research is costly have resulted in the virtual disappearance of centers and departments of research in Dominican universities. Consequently, we must seek alternative sources of financing, create new organizational forms for research collaboration, and talk about the benefits to students of linking teaching and learning with scientific research.

The pedagogical models traditionally followed in our institutions of higher education no longer develop the cognitive and research skills our students need. If we truly want to prepare them for current demands, we have to offer more curricular choices within a series of flexible tracks. They need to become familiar with freedom of choice and expression, the free flow of ideas, and access to systems of information and means of communication based on new technologies. We must prepare our students not only as professionals but also as citizens able to act intelligently and to live in a democracy. They must understand that knowledge is indispensable to the creation of wealth in this day and age.

To foster students’ creativity and the skills necessary for innovation and research, we have to acquaint them with the complexity of the information that they will manage. We have to develop their capacity for compiling, producing, applying, and critically evaluating information extracted from international databases, laboratories, and libraries and directly from the working world. If we do so, our centers of higher education will become rich and stimulating environments for learning and producing knowledge.

These goals require that we incorporate information technology into higher education in the Dominican Republic, applying advances made in telecommunications, microelectronics, and cybernetics to learning processes and academic disciplines. A curriculum based on these goals will require us to leave behind the conception of knowledge as a simple reproductive process stressing memorization and rote learning—another great challenge for higher education.

Faculty Exodus

Such a curriculum will also require us to rethink the characteristic profile of the faculty—professors’ level of training, the quality of their preparation and performance, their full- or part-time status, and their degree of dedication to creating a climate appropriate for debate and intellectual production. Over the past three decades, as a result of a gradual exodus of many of our most talented faculty, Dominican universities have ceased to be spaces that stimulate the clash of ideas and the constant, exciting search for innovation.

This loss of human capital has been of incalculable cost. Some faculty abandoned academia for other sectors of the economy, where professionals and scientists receive higher salaries and greater social recognition. Others emigrated for economic reasons, but many fled the country to escape political persecution under the repressive regime of Joaquín Balaguer, which ended in 1978. Yet others opted for early retirement because of the absence of an intellectual climate or an institutional policy favoring the development of high-quality teaching and other professional skills.

Most of the remaining faculty seem to view their work only as a job, a means to earn a living. They commit neither their lives nor their know-how to achieving the university’s transformative mission. As for the students, higher education is far from an opportunity to develop their cognitive and social powers; instead, it is simply a means to acquire credentials.

We need to develop new policies to recruit and retain personnel, and we need to create new incentives for the development of teaching and research. We will have to accord prestige anew to these endeavors, and return to them the moral and intellectual authority of which they have been stripped.

Money and Management

In the Dominican Republic, and in almost all Latin American countries, budgetary limitations have made it impossible for higher education to respond in a flexible manner to society’s growing demand for services. Financial restrictions also create problems that obstruct academic work, cause friction between universities and the government, and threaten the stability of institutions. These problems include cutbacks in substantive programs (in the areas of research, cultural exchanges, libraries, equipment, student services, and so on); periodic demands by faculty that salaries be raised; increases in the cost of tuition and student services, followed by student protests; and the impossibility of developing mid- and long-range institutional policies. Fiscally induced tensions generate a doubly negative impact when the solutions to them surrender to economic and political pressures and thus threaten academic autonomy. Such "solutions" endanger the socially valuable achievements of the public university system.

Advancing the contribution of public higher education to social progress will require the support of civil society and the state. The state and its citizens must see higher education spending not solely as a budgetary item, but as a long-term investment that will improve the quality of the nation’s life, especially by increasing the population’s ability to compete economically and by contributing to its cultural and spiritual development. To augment public investment, we should seek alternative sources of funding as long as they do not threaten the autonomy of the university. Such sources might include the sale of services, international technical partnerships, and access to local, private resources.

Another area of higher education worthy of close examination is the management style and the structure that predominate in our universities, as these constitute an obstacle to institutional development. In the past, political confrontations with the state and struggles over budgetary allocations distracted us from attending to the poor management of the public university. But now that the gravest tensions with the state have been overcome, we can focus on internal institutional concerns, including curriculum, administration, and governance. Many of us have criticized the ineffectiveness of academic and administrative processes. Allegations of politically motivated decision making, mutual back scratching, patronage, and partisanship have permeated the university, damaging its integrity. Often, the term "public" in "public higher education" is taken to mean incompetence, lack of productivity, waste, and inefficiency. Politicization, a lack of resources, and, frequently, a "crisis of authority" have further exacerbated this situation. Add to that the massive influx of unprepared students whom the university admits without an increase in resources to address their special needs. Academic reform cannot work unless relations among university authorities, faculty, students, and the state are redefined on the basis of mutual respect and collaboration. Achieving such relations depends on introducing democratic university structures and management styles.

Addressing the complex problems facing Dominican higher education, in a world that is changing rapidly, will require global reform. I hope simply that these remarks might serve as a beginning reflection and a provocation to further thought.

Josefina Pimentel is professor of education and psychology at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo. She served as undersecretary of education in the Dominican Republic from 1996 to 2000.

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