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Abstract
After the 1973 coup, Chile swung from a centralized state to a dictatorial decentralized one where education turned from a public to a private good. Since the 1990 restoration of democracy, market-based trends have endured, involving the fomentation of a knowledge society, one where everyone is always studying. The present study, drawn from an action research project to develop English for academic purposes at a top-ranked Chilean university, considers how paradigmatically functionalist research can lead to critical openings for research at an elite Global South university marshalled into public service to promote innovation. As the university in the study fosters innovation to propel Chile from a raw materials to a knowledge-based economy, two points aid our entrée into elite site investigation: the university’s internationalization policy and its focus on graduate students’ getting their work in high-impact journals and conferences. Accessibility remains a challenge for garnering substantive qualitative data at an elite Chilean university, though we suggest that a policy movement toward a knowledge society yields possibilities for researchers able to carry out methodologies with both functionalist and critical aims.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Fulbright Core US Scholar Program and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile for funding and Roxana Chiappa Baros and Hugo Rojas for content suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The Becas Chile program, which funds graduate studies overseas, attempts to create a Chilean economic and social “knowledge society” (Ministerio de Educación, Citationn.d., para. 1), but Becas Chile will not fund business administration degrees.
2. A commercial engineering student boasted on a posted video that his university political and social group features all members of the super elite (ABC1) who socialize including at barbecues. Social media backlashes abounded around the blatant elitism and lack of critical self-awareness in these groups (The Clinic Online, Citation2014). We view the elite group at Victoria Park as similarly self-segregating.
3. In the wake of university student activism, President Michelle Bachelet has promised to channel state funds to the public universities by 2016, signaling a public commitment to quality and affordable higher education (Clarín.com, Citation2014).
4. We understand the governance aspect of neoliberalism as what guides people “to optimize choices, efficiency, and competitiveness in turbulent market conditions [including the] acquisition of skills, development of entrepreneurial ventures, and other techniques of self-engineering and capital accumulation” (Ong, Citation2006, p. 6).
5. In Chile, neoliberal reforms first strove to disarticulate collective action that might threaten the military government (Taylor, Citation2006, p. 86). After the restoration of democracy in 1990, free-market techniques remained robust, especially in education. Edwards (Citation2010) argues that because the liberal democratic governments embraced neoliberalism, the military government is no longer accountable.
6. Free-market economist Castañeda (Citation1992) has said that the military government’s decentralization polices were not ideological, but rather “to promote better use of resources and move the universities closer to the community, to better match university studies and community needs” (p. 42).
7. University studies in Chile have become a game of weighing costs and benefits (Grupo de Estudios Avanzados Universitas y El Mercurio, Citation2013). To date, Chilean students have fought back to vindicate the public character of education and mobilize against surging costs and low quality (Figueroa, Citation2013; Vallejo, Citation2012); several activists, like Camila Vallejo, have won seats in the legislature that in 2015 has discussed tuition-free public university education slated for 2016.
8. Studying within comes with risks. Paley (Citation2001) viewed grassroots “participation” as enabling the Chilean government to “count on the support of citizens to provide social services no longer considered the responsibility of the state. [Participation] curtailed protest by investing residents in the system where they lived” (p. 180). We are cognizant of how free-market reforms thrive when agents cleverly figure ways to improve systems from within so higher-up authorities can withdraw their permanent support.
9. We place research as a practice of the academic elite. Though Marcus (Citation1983) noticed elite-site researchers resist positioning themselves as elite (p. 9), we deem research a characteristically elite activity, given how academic publications are less accessible to practitioners and research neologisms draw little from the speech of everyday life. Likewise, writing for publication may not offer adjuncts, professional staff, and graduate students direct benefits.
10. Identifiable names of research participants and their institutions are pseudonyms.
11. If striving to get their work in high-impact journals serves to audit (Shore & Wright, Citation1999) their work, none of the doctoral candidates complained about this form of surveillance.
12. For a link between ethnography and genealogy, see Li (Citation2007) and Tsing (Citation2005) for groundbreaking studies which problematize how ideas and practices of development have come to be understood in their present terms.
13. Foucault (Citation1980b) provides a genealogy of sexual repression in his History of Sexuality. Through using genealogy, he does not assume outright that we are repressed and then go about finding out how. Instead, through archival research, he assembles a story about the ways people have come to believe that they are repressed.
14. In Santiago, the rich and poor live and study apart to the degree that jokes circulate on the affluent east side that someone would never deign to venture west of Plaza Italia, which is where most people live. See Kamat (Citation2011) and Lipman (Citation2004) for how urban land use and education policy shape the neoliberal city.
15. One Swiss-chalet-looking mansion in this neighborhood, built by the influential Edwards family, would turn into offices of the fabled Colo Colo Football Club and later, a university law school. In a single building, the power elite merges from family kinship toward a maximizing elite via athletic efficiency and academic acumen.
16. Prior to the 1973 coup, Chilean governance had begun to favor technocratic skills (Silva, Citation1991, p. 387). Hired from 1964 to 1969 under President Eduardo Frei to bolster rural political participation for the centrist Christian Democratic Party, one such state-funded expert was Brazilian critical pedagogue, Paulo Freire (Kirkendall, Citation2004).
17. Castro (Citation2013) has hoped that Chilean education might resemble Finland, which thrived academically and economically after the devastation wrought in World War II (p. 138).
18. Batteson and Ball Citation(1995) note that elite educational policy-makers could indoctrinate the researcher (p. 202), so if limited access at elite sites causes one problem, too much access might cause another.
19. Considering nineteenth-century intellectuals José Victorino Lastarria and Valentín Letelier visiting Germany to study Prussian educational innovation (Silva, Citation2008, pp. 34–41), Chileans have long focused on maximized and internationalized education. Letelier particularly thought Chile needed to become an estado docente, a teaching-focused state, to expand rational and scientific knowledge (p. 43). The Instituto Nacional of the period issued scholarships to Latin American international students (Yeager, Citation1991), demonstrating the long history of elite internationalized education in Chile.
20. In 2010, Chile became the 32nd member nation of the OECD.
21. The Times higher education world university rankings (Citation2014) has published the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and Emerging Economies Rankings to show how the universities outside of the core industrialized countries are making inroads into the top 200 universities in the world.
22. Internationalization matters in 3 of the 17 ranked criteria, including the departmental publications in journals in the top quarter “high quality publications (Q1),” the publications cited via the “Excellence Ratio (ER)” and the number of professors and students who have international graduate degrees (Grupo de Estudios Avanzados Universitas y El Mercurio, Citation2013, p. 9).
23. Except for one international student more proficient in Spanish, her fourth language, than English, her fifth, we conducted interviews in English.
24. Over half the 18 doctoral students in our research are UM international students, coming to Chile from four continents, though most are native Spanish speakers.