The Contemporary University: Its Socio‐Economic Environment

The contemporary university is subject to very contradictory social and economic demands that are tending to reveal and to accentuate its own contradictions. It is being massified while being told that it must maintain its traditional academic standards. At the same time, it is denied the funding that it needs in order to respond to these demands. Massification accentuates the contradictions between the teaching and the research functions of the university. The need for non‐governmental sources of funding forces the university to undertake practical and targeted rather than fundamental research, thus accentuating contradictions in the research mission of universities and indeed the whole Humboldtian conception of the university. In this situation, both students and teachers are very frustrated and subject to attrition. Solutions can only come from personal initiatives; however, given the Humboldtian model that seems to prevail, students must be better counselled and oriented when they begin their university studies. The idea of the total complementarity of research and teaching must be seriously questioned, and the objectives of teaching according to each level (lower and upper division of undergraduate studies and postgraduate programmes) must be reconsidered.     

The Evolution of the University in Europe and in the United States

The author takes a broad look at the history and the developing functions of higher education, specifically universities, in the West in order to estimate the degree to which the historical link between teaching and research will continue to characterize universities. She is persuaded that the pressures arising from massification, on the one hand, and the increasing volume of applied research, on the other hand, will lead to increased separation of the teaching and research functions, even in the historically research‐oriented universities.