The neoliberalization of the Mexican public university and its stage of crisis

Abstract

The policy of neoliberalization in the Mexican public university since the 1990s, mainly articulated by budgetary adjustment, conditional evaluation, commercialization and privatization, has triggered a spiral of crisis, which has violated its autonomy, deteriorated its financial, academic and administrative structures, in addition to dramatically diminishing their substantive functions of teaching, research and dissemination of culture in its current stage of crisis. The problem is that the Mexican public university has turned to serve more commercial than social purposes, being at the service of companies and the productive sector. Therefore, the intention of this article is the description and analysis, through a historical, contextual and critical viewpoint of the current situation of the public university crisis in Mexico. The changes that led to the transit of the public university, linked to national development objectives, to another modality of a purely functional nature in the neoliberal university are analyzed. Then the process of neoliberalization of the public university and how certain mechanisms of privatization, commodification and precariousness were dismantled. Subsequently, it is explained what the crisis of the Mexican public university consists of, for example, the deterioration of its financial, institutional, academic and social structures. Finally, it concludes with the need for a new public university project, in which some lines of research or routes for the reconstruction or regeneration of a new integral policy, aimed at autonomous public universities, are drawn. The current political situation of the federal government opens up favorable perspectives that make it possible to propose a comprehensive reform to the Mexican public university, at a time of transition where the premises for a new restructuring of the public university in Mexico will have to be clearly defined from the so-called fourth transformation.