"A quality university is faithful to itself and responds to the needs of its environment"

María José Lemaitre, Executive Director of CINDA, wanted to work in university planning and management. As this course did not exist as such, she enrolled on a Sociology course and studied a postgraduate degree in Pedagogy with that objective in mind. Soon, Iván Labado invited her to join CINDA, with which she has worked in one way or another ever since. Decades later, her curriculum is extensive: she has held positions linked to higher education in her country, Chile, has provided advisory services on quality assurance for university systems in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Argentina and organizations such as the OECD or UNESCO, and has chaired high-level international organizations linked to quality agencies. When we ask her what she has left to do, she recognizes that, “I would return to Cambodia, with everything I know now. After the years of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, we were presented to a committee of experts to set up the university system. It was a devastated country. We had meetings with youths aged 20 or 30 and the Minister of Education was a social worker who had studied in the United States. It was the highest level of studies. A whole generation had disappeared, all the structures of a country”. Undoubtedly this says as much about her as her spectacular service record.

María José Lemaitre, Executive Director of CINDA, wanted to work in university planning and management. As this course did not exist as such, she enrolled on a Sociology course and studied a postgraduate degree in Pedagogy with that objective in mind. Soon, Iván Labado invited her to join CINDA, with which she has worked in one way or another ever since. Decades later, her curriculum is extensive: she has held positions linked to higher education in her country, Chile, has provided advisory services on quality assurance for university systems in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Argentina and organizations such as the OECD or UNESCO, and has chaired high-level international organizations linked to quality agencies. When we ask her what she has left to do, she recognizes that, “I would return to Cambodia, with everything I know now. After the years of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, we were presented to a committee of experts to set up the university system. It was a devastated country. We had meetings with youths aged 20 or 30 and the Minister of Education was a social worker who had studied in the United States. It was the highest level of studies. A whole generation had disappeared, all the structures of a country”. Undoubtedly this says as much about her as her spectacular service record.

Until the 1980s, in our sector, quality was taken for granted. It did not occur to anyone that the university was not a good place to learn, an institution where knowledge was created… Until then, the university had been very elitist, not in economic terms but in terms of culture and training. Around that decade, a greater demand began to emerge and, therefore, a wider range. More people wanted access to higher education. Private universities and, to a lesser extent, non-university centres appeared. This caused some uncertainty. When is higher education good? Where is it worth studying? At that time, the process through which someone guarantees the reliability of an institution began.

In Europe accreditation was regarded at “that suspicious American thing”. What had to be done here was to assess the ability of the universities to fulfil their purposes, what we know as academic auditing. But in the 1990s pressure for accreditation began to emerge. It is not due to the increased demand but to the need for student mobility, the Bologna Process.

At CINDA we have worked extensively on this issue. Years ago we carried out a project, with the support of the European Union, to discover if these quality assurance processes had been useful for improving the institutions. All the assessments were focused on how many universities had been assessed, how many assessors had been mobilized… and we wanted to look to the other side to see what had happened to the institutions. We contacted over 20 universities in 17 countries. What conclusion did we reach? Quality had to respond to two demands. The first, for the institution to be faithful to its identity, principle, priorities… Quality is achieved from internal consistency. Does the university want to cover all areas or specialize? To be inclusive or only for certain sectors? Some decisions are taken based on identity. The second demand is that of external consistency. This refers to the field of influence: how the institution is able to respond to the needs and demands of the disciplines it teaches, of the professions it trains for, of the regulatory framework, of its students...

Their problems are very similar but they are experiencing different moments of development and therefore the responses are different. For example, Azerbaijan is a country that comes from the Soviet orbit. Until its recent independence, the decisions were taken in Moscow. Not anymore. They are at a stage that others have already overcome. However, issues such as the how what is done inside the institution clashes with the needs of the labour market, the challenge of including a non-traditional population of students, the need to train teachers of the 21st century… are common to all. Their responses to these questions depend on development, on the national context, the culture...

In Azerbaijan, I had meetings with 15 presidents of different universities. Generally, the president, the vice president, an interpreter and me. We were designing a higher education policy. How would they approach it? What problems did they have? No, everything was fine, they told me. I asked the interpreter, “Why are they responding that everything is perfect when we know it is not, that the curriculums are outdated, that the texts that came from Russia are now useless, as they no longer use the Cyrillic alphabet?” One day she answered: “The most powerful lesson of all the years of the Soviet regime was that you must not make mistakes. This was punishable.” “You and I were alone, why not recognize it?” “Why do you think the vice president was there? To maintain control.” Such a thing would never have happened in Uruguay. If you make a mistake there... well, you make a mistake, say sorry and carry on.

We did not find any differences. The gap is not between public and private. The gap is between the good and bad. In Latin America, at least, this difference is not significant in terms of quality. Perhaps there are countries where this division is more accentuated in terms of policies or funding. We need a quality assurance 3.0. Why? Because of the success of the first wave: the institutions got involved, learning how to self-assess, then there was external assessment, and it was done well… More of the same is no longer valid, partly because the institutions learnt what they should and should not say. At present, we see two lines that are beginning to diverge. On the one hand, quality is assured from inside institutions. If the university does not want to improve, it won't, however much the agency imposes rules. There is a need to promote internal quality management mechanisms. If quality does not become a central concern of the institutions in terms of their everyday management… there will be no ongoing improvement. On the other hand, governments soon discovered that quality assurance was a wonderful instrument to control these uncontrollable institutions that are the universities. The development of quality assurance processes is far more marked by the demand for more quantitative indicators or the need to respond to what the State requests through the quality agency than to promoting autonomous development. The agency should say its curriculums do not respond to what the students need. How the university resolves this problem is its business. If the agency tells it how to do it, it will do so and when it does not work it will say it did it because it was told to. The emphasis must be on the capacity for self-regulation but, lately, governments distrust the institutions more and are proposing demands for more external regulation. Thus they create a culture of obedience rather than quality. When quality assurance does not demand filling in endless forms, when institutions are supported in conducting serious self-assessment processes… the institutions themselves discover that this has its advantages. They have an important role. The State guarantees quality. Someone has to say that this university performs well. But, careful, it is performing well because it knows what it has to do or makes the appropriate decisions. It does not perform well because it has 48.3 fulltime teachers and 95% have a PhD. This emphasis on control based on measures and indicators imposed from outside does not assure quality. Nevertheless, we must recognize that the agencies do something incredible: they give a sense of urgency to what is important. If you go to university and you ask when they are going to start working on these matters, they say when they have time after the assessments and… But what does the agency do? It comes and tells you: “You have to submit a report in October”. That is important. The other thing it does is to clarify expectations: it establishes what is expected of the university. This is useful, otherwise quality ends up being something interpreted by each one in its own way. We have to advance in a non-binding definition that allows room to organize and organize differently. The State has a fundamental role if it respects the autonomy and responsibility of the university. And it must demand that this autonomy is exercised responsibly. The first reaction of a university to a process of certification is to exclaim “that it interferes with my autonomy”. And to some extent it does; above all, it depends on how you understand autonomy. The State will make demands of the staff you employ, on how you define the curriculums… Education is a public function and the State has the right to impose certain rules. Yes, it is possible. At least in Chile, which is a case I know very well. We have results from the PISA test that are very good if compared with Latin America and bad but consistent if compared with the OECD. We have expanded coverage to 90% of the population. With 30% coverage we had a score. With 90% we maintain the score. This means we have improved. Because those who were in secondary education before were the good ones. Those who are coming now are those who fell by the wayside, the children from broken homes, the dyslexics… we managed to get 90% of the under-18s through secondary education. I have never been in a university where they do not say to me, “Students who come to us from secondary education are poor, they know nothing…”. That attitude is very easy. Part of quality is deciding which students I take and teaching those I take. You can have a quality university without quality secondary education but you have to work on it. You cannot do it by trusting that students will learn alone. You have to teach them. In order to bring about learning we have to have good teaching strategies. You have to define the teaching process according to what the students you actually have need to learn and not the imaginary ones you would like to have. CINDA was born as an idea based on the conviction that the universities have much to contribute to the development of their countries: a space where the universities come together to think about what is good for them, for their education system and for their countries. It was created in 1971 on the initiative of three private universities in Chile, Peru and Colombia. It grew very cautiously. It was a powerful and innovative idea. Today there are many similar networks. I like the idea that President Planell is now the also CINDA’s president. CINDA is confronting the challenge of reinventing itself. The president has this ability partly because he belongs to a university that is very different from the traditional ones.