Latin American Universities in Dispute: The Co-production of Community Engagement and Academic Capitalism in Chile

This presentation rethinks higher education community engagement by examining the Chilean higher education system—a historic laboratory for neoliberal policies currently undergoing a reform that mandates community engagement (vinculación con el medio) for institutional accreditation. Moving beyond mainstream definitions that reduce university-society relations to simple reciprocal binarisms, this presentation employs a socio-historical approach—interweaving sociology, history, and science and technology studies—to center the subjectivity and agency of engaged scholars. Drawing on qualitative, multi-sited ethnography and 52 in-depth interviews in Santiago, the presentation advances three core contributions.

First, it conceptualizes community engagement not as an imported institutional function, but as a contested social relation deeply embedded in historical memory and sociopolitical dispute. Second, it reveals how scholars navigate a “conditioned legitimacy” under the dominant World-Class University model. To survive, engaged scholars deploy distinct agentic practices: operationalizing metrics for compliance, negotiating community needs within institutional cracks, and resisting market-driven metrics to recover the historical, democratic project of the Latin American university. Finally, it challenges the assumption that community engagement is an inherently emancipatory antidote to neoliberalism, demonstrating instead how engagement and academic capitalism can co-produce and entangle one another. 

By grounding these dynamics in Chile, this presentation provides a globally relevant framework for analyzing structural tensions shared across borders. It fosters a vital South-North and South-South dialogue, prompting audiences to look beyond managerial checklists and consider community engagement as a strategic space of tension between fear and hope in reimagining the future of our societies.