Hacia un nuevo paradigma de universidad en el siglo XXI

Abstract

This essay presents the results of a reflection on the possible characteristics of the University as a social institution in the XXI century. From a historical point of view, the new paradigm portraiting an international institution, highly democratic, accessible to every human being for life, completely based on solidarity and whose main goal in education shall be deeply rooted in spirituality and morality is analyzed here. It recognizes the founding features inherited and still present in our institution offering new possibilities, such as the professor's figure, the university autonomy, its universality, the appraisal of language and the student definition, together with the new social functions acquired by the University at the beginning of the XX century. It analyzes the new features of universality of the teaching institution in a new social context characterized by its transition to the society of knowledge, where the University is destined to play the main role in the establishment of the necessary conditions for an equal, harmonic and sustainable development. It concludes, however, that this reality occurs in a contradictory way stressed by inevitable paradoxes, such as the global tendencies to widen the gap and increase differences between the countries in the tertiary educational level. A new vision and paradigm of university, urges all the countries to make profound reforms based on the diversification and the flexibility in defining categories for university population, with such methods, contents, actions and means for international agreement and co-operation.