"A quality university is faithful to itself and responds to the needs of its environment"
María José Lemaitre, Executive Director of CINDA
María José Lemaitre, Executive Director of CINDA
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.
When and why did we begin to talk about quality in the university education system?
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.
Was this process experienced in the same way throughout the world?
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.
What is a quality university?
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...
You have travelled providing advisory services to universities all over the world, from Ecuador to Georgia, from Cambodia to Colombia. Do you think the problems facing these institutions in such distant places are similar?
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...
You were telling us about the case of Azerbaijan...
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.
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