To Export Progress: The Golden Age of University Assistance in the Americas

A View from the South

Reviewed by Imanol Ordorika

Daniel C. Levy.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005

In 1924, Robert Lansing, former U.S. secretary of state, wrote that in order to dominate Mexico, the United States should educate young Mexicans in the American way of life and its values, and teach them to respect U.S. leadership. In time, he said, the United States would take control through these young men without spending one cent or firing one shot, and they would do what the United States wanted.

Lansing’s “educational philosophy” was eventually extended to all of Latin America. After a long history of military interventions and U.S.-supported military coups from 1823 to 1960, the spread of emerging social-reform governments and political protests spawned a new wave of military interventions. These included Central Intelligence Agency disruptions throughout the hemisphere and U.S. support for local military dictatorships in Cuba (Bay of Pigs, 1961), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Guatemala (1966), Bolivia (1967), Uruguay (1973), Chile (1973), and Argentina (1976).

The “threat of communism” and social unrest in poverty-stricken Latin America was also met on political and economic fronts. A key U.S. strategy was the expansion of foreign assistance and development policies through government agencies, such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Alliance for Progress; supranational bodies like the International Development Bank (IDB); and private foundations and donors. According to Daniel Levy, this was “an unprecedented peacetime crusade to export progress through resources, ideas, and expertise.”

Levy’s book, Exporting Progress: The Golden Age of University Assistance in the Americas, deals with one portion of U.S. aid policies in Latin America: the funneling of foundation, government agency, and IDB resources and projects toward the transformation of universities. In his own words, Levy’s challenge was to catalog and understand donors’ efforts to transform universities as key focal points of a “nonmilitary” crusade to export progress and to assess the effect of these efforts on Latin American postsecondary institutions.

The study focuses on what Levy calls “a major set of importers and exporters in the Americas.” American-affiliated contributors and givers— characterized by Levy as exporters—are the largest donors to Latin American universities. These include private foundations, bilateral agencies, and multilateral organizations that have a decisive U.S. presence; the most notable cases are the Ford Foundation, USAID, and the IDB.

Recipients of donor efforts and contributions—universities in Latin America—are, in Levy’s discussion, importers. This book includes data on twenty Latin American nations; in order to provide a more contextual understanding, the analysis concentrates on Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Argentina.

Levy develops a conceptual frame for the analysis of the broader national data and the country-specific experiences. Through the lens of an ideal type—a theoretical construct-he looks at the ways in which a preeminent U.S. university model was exported in order to understand the connections between donor goals, efforts, and results. He also attempts to assess the effect of reform policies and practices among targeted universities. In line with the classical Weberian notion of ideal type, a one-sided accentuated model of concrete social phenomena, Levy attempts to build a “philanthropic ideal type” as an analytical device and not as a representation of reality or an assertion of philanthropists’ claims about their own goals, efforts, and results.

Through this ideal lens, the author describes the performance of distinctive types of donors. He analyzes the amounts and ways in which the funds were given, the projects, policies’ and donors’ styles, and donor attitudes toward local partners. Donor goals and efforts are analyzed along three major areas through which the exported U.S. university model was supposed to transform Latin American universities: system modernization, institution building, and academic work.

Levy looks at the consistency among goals, efforts, and results as components of his philanthropic ideal type of change. While his evaluation recognizes negative and positive results and mixed effects of assistance, he emphasizes the positive, claiming that “assistance was crucial to creating a major portion of what would be best in Latin American higher education.” While this is a valid standpoint, other authors have concluded that successful transformation on the periphery has occurred independent of those interventions, and yet another body of literature suggests that transformation has occurred despite intervention, rather than because of it.

Although To Export Progress is well grounded by an impressive amount of quantitative data and a broad range of interviews with relevant actors, its analysis is lopsided. On one hand, it is too generous in its evaluation of donor motivations, does not sufficiently question the degree of internal consistency between the discourse and reality of donors’ goals and efforts, and presents a relatively limited assessment of donors’ impact on the transformation of Latin American universities. On the other hand, the book’s analysis of the recipient side is weak. The complexities of local actors and institutions and their interactions with the exporter side are acknowledged briefly by the author in references to the widespread criticism of international aid policies and the historical debate between modernization and dependency theories. However, Levy’s
explicit and implicit a priori embrace of a positive stance toward aid policies and modernization is revealed in the very title of this book: “exporting progress.” His bias toward one set of actors makes Levy incapable of fully analyzing the relations between U.S. “exporters of progress” and Latin American universities. This task is impossible without understanding that the history of U.S. “aid” and reform projects for Latin America is a history of local and international conflicts, of political domination, and of resistance, in which universities have been particularly salient.

For academics and university actors in and from the south, Levy’s book renews our awareness of the continuing presence and historical effect of U.S.-exported models upon our own institutions and our university traditions and identities. It should also remind us that the development of higher education in peripheral nations has always been subject to relations of domination and paternalistic attitudes from the central countries. These models in both their idealized and real forms are clear examples of those hegemonic efforts and the powerful resistance they generate. However, in order to understand contemporary interactions between idealized U.S. university models for export and Latin American university traditions, further and deeper studies capable of addressing the complexities of these exchanges are required.

Imanol Ordorika is professor of social sciences and education at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Among other publications, he has authored the book Power and Politics in Higher Education.

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