Proposal of guidelines to assist managers to face pressing challenges confronting Latin American universities: a complexity theory perspective

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated pre-existing problems in Latin America and posed unprecedented challenges for Latin American universities (LAU). These challenges can be characterised as complex problems that cannot be understood through reductionist approaches. This paper aims (i) to provide a complex system perspective of the challenges confronting LAUs and (ii) to propose guidelines for managers of LAUs to address them in practice. A multidisciplinary group was formed and conducted an iterative process of research, brainstorming and debate of potential solutions to the following problems considered particularly important by their universities: mental health issues in the university environment, student learning gaps, brain drain, and anti-science movements. Complexity theory and E/HF concepts are integrated to demonstrate that understanding what LAUs are experiencing in a fragmented manner is impossible, and that the interactions between the challenges should be at the centre of the managers’ actions plans.

Practitioner summary: Managers of LAUs can benefit from the guidelines proposed to understand the pressing challenges confronting universities and develop systemic approaches to address them.

Keywords:

• Complexity theory
• complex systems
• Latin American universities
• current challenges
• wicked problems
• guidelines

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The institutional website of the Unicamp’s Board for Undergraduate Affairs is https://www.prg.unicamp.br/.

2 State University of Campinas and University of São Paulo were considered the top 2 best universities in Brazil and were included in the top 3 in Latin America, while Universidad Católica del Norte was ranked 13th in Chile (The World University Ranking 2022).

3 The search was conduct in August 2022.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful for the support of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq/Brazil) under the grants nº 307536/2018-1 and nº 303924/2021-