University Extension in Dispute: Neoliberal Counterreform and Alternatives in Latin American Universities

• Author: José Agustín Cano Menoni
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211004911
• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Date: 01 May 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211004911

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 244, Vol. 49 No. 3, May 2022, 49–65

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211004911

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

49

University Extension in Dispute

Neoliberal Counterreform and Alternatives in

Latin American Universities

by

José Agustín Cano Menoni

Translated by

Victoria Furio

The neoliberal university project contains a program aimed at terminating the critical

traditions of Latin American university extension. The program combines two models

introduced as the legitimate and dominant orientations of the current university-society

relationship: linkage and university social responsibility. At the same time, alternatives of

great academic and political power for university extension on the continent include inte-

gration of critical education into the curriculum, partnerships with social movements,

popular cooperative enterprises, holistic programs, and repoliticization of the polis.

El proyecto universitario neoliberal contiene un programa destinado a poner fin a las

tradiciones críticas de la extensión universitaria latinoamericana. El programa combina

dos modelos que se presentan como las orientaciones legítimas y dominantes de la actual

relación entre el espacio universitario y la sociedad: vinculación y responsabilidad social

universitaria. Al mismo tiempo, las alternativas de gran poder académico y político para

la extensión universitaria en el continente incluyen la integración de la educación crítica

en el currículo, asociaciones con movimientos sociales, empresas cooperativas populares,

programas holísticos y una repoliticización de la polis.

Keywords: University extension, University reform, Neoliberalism, Pedagogical alter-

natives, Latin America

University extension, as understood in Latin America, is a distinctive fea-

ture of the public universities that succeeded the reformist movement of the

first half of the twentieth century. However, there is no agreed-upon definition

of it, and universities perceive and carry out this function in various ways.

Picos (2014) is correct in stating that extension is more a precursor than a prod-

uct of the Córdoba reformist movement. In fact, the originality with which

ideas about university extension that arose at the University of Cambridge in

1872 and shortly thereafter in the French and Spanish popular universities

José Agustín Cano Menoni is an associate professor in the Programa Integral Metropolitano and

the Instituto de Educación of the Universidad de la República de Uruguay and a member of the

national system of researchers at the Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación. He is also

a research associate in the higher-education seminar of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de

México. Victoria Furio is a translator and conference interpreter located in Yonkers, NY.

1004911LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211004911Latin American PerspectivesCano / UNIVERSITY EXTENSION IN DISPUTE

research-article2021

50 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

(Palacios, 1908; Torres Aguilar, 2009) flourished on our continent can only be

explained by the early activity of the Latin American student movement.

Inspired by the reform movement and its diverse links to the continent’s polit-

ical and social processes, on the one hand, and the new pedagogical trends, on

the other, various traditions of reformist-oriented university extension began

to take shape.1 Prominent among them was a tendency basically concerned

with students’ critical and humanist education, linking its formation with the

saddest realities of its social context while supplementing subject-area train-

ing with general cultural content and political education. Another was a tradi-

tion connected to transmitting culture (literature and the arts) among social

sectors excluded from their enjoyment, and yet another was aimed at focusing

university knowledge on “major national problems” through research and

socio-educational and literacy campaigns. Extensionist perspectives designed

to collaborate with processes of transformation and social emancipation were

also of great importance, linking the university and student movements with

popular-sector struggles through initiatives such as the popular universities

that were so significant in many countries around the continent (Biagini, 2006;

Bralich, 2007; Cano, 2015; Torres Aguilar, 2009).

These different traditions, with their rationales, meanings, and particular

emphases (and their intersections and linkages), nurtured what could be

called a twentieth-century Latin American extensionist tradition. As part of

this tradition, a critical-extension focus opposed to U.S. models of technology

transfer, geared to a politico-pedagogical praxis of social transformation that

was “liberating” and “emancipating” in terms of various concepts of anti-

capitalist social change, generically aimed at creating a society “with neither

exploited nor exploiters” (Freire, 1998; Picos, 2014; Tommasino and Cano,

2016). This does not mean that all Latin American extensionism has been crit-

ical and all U.S. extensionism positivist or that the two traditions do not over-

lap or that under the label “critical extension” authoritarian or extractive

experiments have not been developed. The point is to identify ideal types that

enable analysis of the meanings and the politico-pedagogical foci of various

extensionist traditions. In this manner, one can observe that it is this critical

tradition that finds itself radically questioned today by the neoliberal mod-

ernization of the university.

As the Uruguayan philosopher José Luis Rebellato (1995) has argued, “It is

not possible to think ethically without considering the North-South conflict”

(taking into account, of course, local expressions of reproduction of and resis-

tance to the colonial conflict). The principle becomes particularly relevant

when analyzing the historical modes of production of university-society rela-

tions connected to the trends in university reform in the framework of the

geopolitics of knowledge typical of “cognitive capitalism” (Falero, 2012) and

“academic capitalism” (Slaughter and Leslie, 1999). As Austin (2006: 67) has

pointed out, “Cultural globalization, the contemporary expression of

‘Americanization,’ has broadly resonated in educational systems as appar-

ently impossible to resist, since it is conditioned—according to the dominant

ideology—by market forces, portrayed as virtually ‘natural.’” Along the same

line, Ordorika and Lloyd (2014: 130) have observed that in the current context

of capitalist globalization, institutions of higher education fulfill “a double