Thank you very much for the invitation. I want to begin by noting that my remarks on this panel draw on three experiences and identities that have shaped my personal and professional life: as a Latin American academic trained in the United States, where I completed my doctorate; as a senior professor and former Vice President for Research at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú; and also as a former president of LASA (2017–2018). These three life experiences inform the comments that follow. In that sense, the issue this panel raises is not, for me, merely an intellectual concern. It is the crisis of the institutions that formed me, of the colleagues I know, and of the students we aspire to train and accompany.
We are gathered, moreover, in Paris, a city that has witnessed great social and political upheavals, moments when the academy had to take a stand before power. Today it falls to us to do the same.
1. LASA
As we all know, LASA was founded exactly six decades ago, in 1966, when the Cold War was at its height, Latin America was a site of geopolitical contestation, and Latin American studies needed an autonomous space in which to produce rigorous, independent knowledge.
But LASA was not born, nor did it grow, in peace. Its history is inseparable from the region’s social and political conflicts, which forced it to take positions and which generated intense debates. At first, North American academia proceeded from concerns and interests of its own. But gradually a liberal current of thought took shape that, in dialogue—not always an easy one—with Latin American scholars, built LASA into a platform for encounter and mutual influence between the academies of the South and North of the Americas, enriching our understanding of the problems and challenges the region faced, and still faces.
In this process, LASA developed a voice of its own and spoke out in solidarity against abuses of the rights of the region’s most disadvantaged sectors—a stance that we in Latin America came to value deeply during difficult times. LASA has a long tradition of public statements—its task forces on academic freedom and human rights are part of what makes LASA something more than a learned society: it is a political community in the best sense of the term. Today, LASA brings together more than 13,000 members, over 60% of whom reside outside the United States, making it a genuinely transnational association.
But LASA did not build this alone. Latin American academia raised its own institutions with remarkable creative capacity. FLACSO emerged in 1956 at UNESCO’s General Conference, a bid to build an academic institutional framework of the region’s own for the social sciences. FLACSO has trained more than 10,000 educators, scientists, and professionals across the social science disciplines in thirteen countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Shortly after, in 1967, CLACSO was created as a non-governmental institution with associative status before UNESCO. Today, CLACSO brings together more than 806 research and graduate centers in the social sciences and humanities across 51 countries, making it the largest social science network of its kind for our region.
These three institutions—LASA, FLACSO, and CLACSO—represent decades of collective effort to build a sovereign, critical, and internationally connected Latin American academy. They did not arise out of abundance; they arose out of necessity, out of the conviction that the region needed to produce its own knowledge about itself, with autonomy from political and economic power. That legacy is more valuable—and more threatened—today than ever.
2. The current crisis
We are witnessing the unraveling of the international order built after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the fracturing of international law by major powers, the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China, and the resurgence of old-style imperialism, whose latest expression is the attempt to turn Venezuela into a kind of protectorate. All of this is reshaping the terrain on which the university operates. This is not a sectoral crisis. It is a crisis of an era.
Within this context, the university—especially the Latin American university—is simultaneously losing three pillars we had achieved in recent decades, even if it was always with a high degree of fragility.
The delegitimization of knowledge and critical thought
The conservative political forces that come to control governments and states no longer ground their authority in science or reason. And, as in other regions of the world, they cut funding for the social sciences and humanities precisely because these produce critical thought. In Central America, academics and journalists who are inconvenient to authoritarian exercises of power are already being persecuted and replaced by technology companies that answer only to the logic of the market and not the logic of the common good.
The collapse of the educational myth
The myth of university education as an engine of social mobility—which mobilized Latin American societies from the mid-twentieth century onward and accompanied the great internal migrations—has been broken. The proliferation of low-quality, for-profit universities (what in Latin America we call “garage universities”), economic stagnation, the spread of illegal economies that generate large incomes, and the new paradigm of the self-taught “digital entrepreneur” have eroded the appeal of a university education. A university degree, especially a low-quality one, no longer guarantees a better future.
The structural crisis of the university model
What is already visible in Europe—falling student recruitment, program cuts, early retirements, the sale of assets (“re-sizing”)—is beginning to appear in the Americas as well. In the United States and Latin America, it takes the form of political control over educational content, conditionality attached to international research funding, and a real threat to university autonomy.
3. Three questions LASA cannot avoid
Against this backdrop, as an academic community with sixty years of history, we cannot simply describe the crisis. We must move beyond diagnosis and ask ourselves hard questions—even if we do not yet have clear answers.
For whom do we produce knowledge?
LASA Press was founded precisely in response to what may be the most pressing problem facing Latin American critical thought: the unequal and limited dissemination of research produced in the region. If states no longer fund critical research, if the private foundations in developed countries that have been crucial to supporting independent research are themselves under siege, and if technology companies are displacing the humanities, the question becomes: can we build new alliances—with social movements, with regional organizations, with the South-South networks that CLACSO and FLACSO have sustained—that do not depend on the political cycles of the North? Can we mobilize civil society in defense of the university?
How do we preserve university autonomy?
For us, since the Córdoba University Reform of 1918, university autonomy has been a foundational pillar of our academic work. Today, it is being called into question.
LASA has a history on this front. It has sent missions, issued statements, and stood by persecuted academics. Recently, LASA reiterated its rejection of political repression against Cuban scholars, reaffirming its commitment to freedom of expression and academic freedom as essential conditions for serious intellectual work. That voice must be sustained and broadened to encompass new forms of control that are not always direct repression but financial conditionality, legal restrictions, and institutional pressure.
How do we recover the narrative of the value of knowledge?
It is not enough to defend what we have. The Bologna Agenda, the internationalization model, and the paradigm of the research university—all of these need to be rethought in light of what is happening. The South has experience in building academic institutions under adverse conditions. That experience should now feed into the hemispheric conversation. Perhaps this is the moment for the North to learn a little from the experiences of the South.
4. Closing
To convene LASA in Paris is an opportunity to rethink Latin America and the Caribbean in relation to the great global forces that have shaped our world over several centuries. The Atlantic revolutions, the anti-colonial struggles, the debates over sovereignty and knowledge: all of this resonates in this moment.
LASA was born sixty years ago because the academy needed its own space in which to think about the region with rigor and freedom. CLACSO and FLACSO were born of the same impulse, but from within the South. Today, all three institutions face the same challenge: to survive not merely as structures, but as communities capable of producing critical knowledge, naming what is happening, and imagining alternatives.
The North and the South find themselves today, for the first time in a long while, in a shared crisis. That is no consolation. It is a responsibility. And also, if we know how to seize it, an unprecedented opportunity to build a truly global academy—and not merely a peripheral extension of the Anglo-Saxon academic world.
LASA can be the space where that conversation happens. That, I believe, is the greatest legacy we can leave to those who come after us.