In the Service of the Nation: The Establishment and Consolidation of the Universidad de Chile, 1842-79 Open Access

The creation of the Universidad de Chile (UCH) in 1842 represents one of the first truly national projects undertaken by the emerging Chilean state in the nineteenth century. The university was expected not only to create a scientific and academic tradition, but also to encourage and supervise all matters related to education in the country. Education, in turn, was expected to bring into the Chilean polity a set of shared values and a sense of national identity. Although the university confronted myriad challenges in fulfilling its mandate, the tasks of educational and cultural development became a resounding success. From 1842 to 1879, under the rectorships of Andrés Bello and Ignacio Domeyko, the UCH established itself as the leading educational institution in the nation and perhaps in South America.¹

While this essay concentrates on the institutional evolution of the UCH, it also shows that the transformations of the university during the period reveal larger changes in Chilean society. The university evolved from an essentially academic and supervisory body into a teaching institution. The architects of the UCH had initially conceived of the university as a body primarily in charge of promoting research and teaching across the nation, but soon they found that this role was insufficient to satisfy Chile’s growing demand for licensed professionals. There were also strong challenges from a growing private educational sector that demanded recognition for its own programs and curricula. The response by educational authorities was to turn the university into a teaching establishment that would at the same time, on a national basis, effectively control the development of professional fields and closely monitor curricular development, examinations, and the granting of degrees. This transition involved substantial outlays of government resources to the educational system, and accounts for the dramatic growth of the educational budget during the period in question. It therefore reveals the commitment of the Chilean state to a policy area that had become vital to the nation and consequently the center of attention for competing political forces. By the end of the 1870s, both university and government had achieved a degree of centralization and control of the educational system that was unprecedented in postindependence Chilean history.

Studying the conception, foundation, and consolidation of the UCH helps us understand several significant themes in nineteenth-century Chilean history. First, it sheds light on the role of the state in a field of critical concern: the education, training, and recruitment of the citizenry. Second, it explains how that nation tried to, and to some extent did, lessen its dependence on foreign talent through the development of a national scientific and academic tradition. Despite significant governmental commitment, economic constraints made Chile develop a higher educational institution that focused its energies not so much on the advancement of knowledge per se—although this was an aspiration of the builders of the UCH—as on the fulfillment of specific national needs. Third, it underscores the role of education in the increasingly antagonistic confrontations between church and state during the second half of the century. Because of the increasing government control over the educational system, underscored by the university’s supervisory role along with its evolving teaching responsibilities, education became a subject of political and intellectual debate involving Chile’s principal institutions and political forces. Finally, the history of the UCH during the 1842-79 period provides an excellent vantage point from which to observe the development of a Chilean intellectual and professional elite that would make a strong impact on Chilean society. Because the formation of this elite was both encouraged and closely monitored by the state, UCH graduates understood that their expected role was primarily one of service to the state. Their education was secular and increasingly liberal. In turn, they furthered the development of the liberal republic during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Historical Antecedents

During the colonial period, Chilean higher education was provided primarily by agencies of the church. Dominican and Jesuit establishments obtained pontifical status in the eighteenth century, and granted degrees in theology, philosophy, and ecclesiastical law.² That is, they were primarily oriented to meeting the needs of the church itself. Law degrees for civilian purposes had to be obtained in the viceregal capital of Lima. At the request of the Santiago cabildo, a royal university, the University of San Felipe (USF), was founded in 1738, and it began to function in 1747.³ The new university expanded the curriculum to include medicine and mathematics, but the emphasis remained on religious subjects. Between 1747 and 1839, the year of its demise, the USF granted 620 degrees in philosophy, 569 in theology, 526 in law, 40 in mathematics, and 33 in medicine.⁴ However modest, and despite the religious character of the institution, the major USF contribution to civil society was the training of Chilean-born lawyers.

The Bourbon reforms, with their emphasis on useful knowledge, influenced individuals more than they did the USF as an institution. Manuel de Salas, the prominent educator and public official of later colonial times, was among the few who sought to adjust education to the agricultural, industrial, and mining needs of the country. But for that purpose he had to create a separate institution in 1797, the Academia de San Luis.⁵ Others, like Juan Egaña and Camilo Henríquez, shared similar interests, and all three in fact became founders of the Instituto Nacional (IN), the first educational institution created in Chile after the beginning of the independence movement. Established in 1813, the IN was a fusion of several colonial schools, namely, the USF, the Academia de San Luis, the Colegio Carolino, and the Seminario Conciliar.⁶ Although the IN was created by Chileans concerned with the founding of national institutions, it retained many of the elements inherited from the colonial era. In particular, the IN not only offered religious education but assumed the functions of a seminary for training the ecclesiastics formerly educated at the Seminario Conciliar.⁷

The IN derived its name from the Institut de France, which was a source of inspiration and a subject of much praise for IN founder Camilo Henríquez. But the creation of the IN in Chile was also influenced by political and economic realities. On the one hand, Chile’s Patria Vieja (1810-14) did not have enough resources to commit to education, and was thus forced to take advantage of existing educational institutions. On the other hand, the role of religious education at the IN was as much a reflection of the inertia of longstanding educational practices as a reflection of the caution with which the leaders of the Patria Vieja approached church-state issues. In this sense, educational leaders attempted to reconcile the desire to create national institutions that were revolutionary in character with the political realities furnished by a still fragile national state in a predominantly Spanish and Catholic country.

It is important to point out, however, that there was more than political pragmatism to the actions of leaders such as Manuel de Salas and Juan Egaña. The latter were part and parcel of the strong current of Catholic enlightenment that developed in Chile, as elsewhere in Latin America, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These educational leaders were themselves Catholic and participated in an enlightened but still profoundly religious world of ideas.⁸ Nevertheless, social and political events moved the country in an increasingly secular direction. For instance, after independence was assured in 1818, the O’Higgins government moved decisively to enhance the status of the IN and to undermine the position of USF. In 1819, the senate decreed that USF faculty were to either move to the IN or resign. Although the USF had merged with the IN earlier, the fusion basically involved a transfer of funding and courses. The USF subsequently recovered its autonomy during the Spanish reconquest. The senate decree substantially eroded the USF’s position by transferring teaching to the IN and making USF degrees conditional on IN-approved examinations. The USF continued to exist, however, in a diminished role as a degree-granting institution.

Despite the national character of the IN, many liberals during the 1820s viewed with impatience the predominance of Spanish and Catholic traditions in the school’s curriculum. The administration of Francisco Antonio Pinto (1827-29), in particular, tried to bypass the influence of the IN by creating a competing school more amenable to the interests of the state. During the IN rectorship of conservative clergyman Juan Francisco Meneses (1826-29), the Pinto administration founded the Liceo de Chile, known also as the Liceo de Mora, thus breaking the IN monopoly on higher education. Pinto appointed the Spanish emigré José Joaquín de Mora, a prominent liberal, as head of the institution, and provided the school with building facilities and 42 scholarships. Such largesse greatly antagonized supporters of the financially hard-pressed IN.⁹

Mora’s fate as well as that of his school was closely linked to the political health of the Pinto administration, which proved to be failing precipitously. Mora was also the author of the liberal constitution of 1828, which hardly recommended him to the conservatives, or pelucones. Conservatives therefore created their own institution, the Colegio de Santiago, to counter Mora’s influence, and education became the arena for heated political struggles. The colegio was staffed by French professors recently arrived in Chile, and directed by Juan Francisco Meneses, who was soon replaced by the Venezuelan expatriate Andrés Bello. After the defeat of the liberals at Lircay and with the advent of pelucón rule in 1830, the Liceo de Chile—and Mora himself—were doomed. Diego Portales, the dominant political figure of the 1830s, had Mora arrested and deported to Peru.¹⁰

With the dissolution of the Liceo de Chile in 1831, the Colegio de Santiago had little reason to exist, and in fact it merged with the Instituto Nacional shortly thereafter. However, the impact of both institutions on Chilean education and culture had been paramount, since they demonstrated that there was more at stake than the training of the country’s professionals and intellectuals. On the one hand, Chilean education reflected the debates that engulfed the country’s leading contenders for political predominance; on the other, it emerged as an aspect of Chilean life that many attempted to control for a variety of political, cultural, and religious ends.

The pelucón government of José Joaquín Prieto and his powerful minister, Diego Portales, made public education “una atención preferente del estado” in Article 153 of the Constitution of 1833, thus reaffirming a policy that would come to be known as that of the Estado docente. At first, the constitutional provision essentially secured the state’s right and intent to create a public educational system.¹¹ At the same time, however, the government actively encouraged private and religious education, as the state was unable to afford total control over the development and supervision of education in the country. Also, and perhaps because of this inability to meet all educational needs, administrations during the first half of the century often preferred to strengthen existing educational institutions that already enjoyed a considerable reputation, such as the IN, rather than create new ones. The IN thus underwent a major reform in 1832, which substantially modified its curriculum and its statutes of 1813. In 1835, congress separated the Seminario Conciliar from the IN, thus taking a significant step toward the secularization of education.¹² This tendency was also apparent in the increasing number of lay rectors heading the school: Manuel Montt and Antonio Varas, to mention two of the outstanding members of the faculty who would also become powerful political figures in the future, were laymen who occupied the position during the period between 1835 and 1845. During these years, the importance of the institution in educating the country’s young was overshadowed only by its pivotal role in providing national leaders. Indeed, Portales personally recruited from among its graduates and professors such collaborators as Antonio García Reyes, Salvador Sanfuentes, Ventura Marín, and Montt. Excellence at the IN became a sure means of access to important public positions.¹³

However central the role of the IN might have been during the period, the school still was not the kind of national entity envisioned by the founders. In particular, it did not exercise an effective regulatory role vis-à-vis other institutions, nor was it alone in granting degrees recognized by the state. These tasks were assigned in 1842 to the Universidad de Chile—whose founding was really the outstanding educational development of the century.

The Establishment of the Universidad de Chile

Andrés Bello is credited, and justly so, with the conception and creation of the UCH. Yet his achievement would have been impossible without the active support of the Manuel Bulnes administration in the 1840s. Chile was ready for the creation of such an institution partly because of the need for it in a country with a constitutional mandate to promote national education, and partly because many of the nation’s leaders had become receptive to the notion that higher education was a viable avenue for the recruitment of the country’s political elite. Minister of Public Instruction Manuel Montt, a man of humble origins, knew only too well that education was a significant, if not the only, means for social advancement. The need for an educated elite was underlined by the fact that an independent country could no longer rely on a steady supply of bureaucrats and professionals from a colonial power. Chile had to educate its own, and the university seemed to be the best way to do this. After a victorious war against the Peru-Bolivian Confederation (1836-39), Chile could afford, and was even anxious, to undertake the creation of its own university.¹⁴

The factors precipitating the creation of the UCH developed from a direct confrontation between Montt, at the time still IN rector, and USF rector Juan Francisco Meneses. Under a March 13, 1823 law, only IN’s examinations for the baccalaureate were considered valid. The USF, however, continued to grant law degrees to students from private institutions such as the Seminario Conciliar until Montt protested to the government that such practices opened the legal profession to students who were not trained by IN faculty. Minister Mariano Egaña supported Montt’s protest, and swiftly moved to announce, on January 12, 1838, the government’s decision to create a state (meaning government-run) university. Egaña understood that the problem was not whether a university should grant degrees, but that at present those degrees, particularly law degrees, came from the Catholic-controlled USF. The problem would persist without a government-controlled state university.¹⁵

USF officials ignored the government’s intention to create a new university. In October 1838, Montt renewed his protest, indicating that “many students who have only taken a few of the examinations required by the curriculum receive a [USF] law degree that entitles them to be recognized as lawyers by the illustrious Court of Appeals.”¹⁶ He estimated that about half of that year’s graduates had obtained law degrees in this fashion, and added that “students who have just a few elementary notions of civil and canon law can become lawyers and thus be eligible for the most important and delicate public positions of the Republic. ”¹⁷ Minister Egaña, then acting as plenipotentiary representing Chile in the conflict against the Peru-Bolivian Confederation, could not make a decision until his return in 1839. He then cautiously asked Rector Meneses for a rebuttal, which ironically presented the best arguments for the dissolution of the USF: while the university was in place, Meneses argued, it had a right to administer all educational matters, including examinations, and regulate teaching at all educational establishments, including the IN.¹⁸ Government officials who had wanted to preserve the institution while changing its character agreed that the USF had to be closed in order to do exactly what Meneses proposed: to create a university that would be an effective national institution according to the mandate of the 1833 constitution. Despite Meneses’s protests, Egaña declared the USF formally abolished on April 17, 1839, and called for the writing of statutes to guide the new national university.

By the end of the 1830s, the government was in fact strongly determined to implement the constitutional mandate concerning national education. In his annual report to the congress in 1840, Egaña presented a plan for the development of primary, secondary, and higher education. Primary education was presented as universal, meaning that members of all social classes should benefit from it, including Araucanian Indians. Education would presumably introduce morality among the population and demonstrate the advantages of civilization to all. Secondary education had traditionally been viewed as elite education, a view that Egaña reaffirmed when he stated that it was “indispensable for the superior classes as it provides for the education of a person of distinction.” Egaña also announced that the state-run Universidad de Chile, as a superintendancy of public instruction, would supervise all national education.¹⁹

Egaña’s successor in the ministry, Manuel Montt, reaffirmed the government’s commitment to education in general, and to the University of Chile in particular. In his message to the congress in 1843, at a time when the university council was discussing the institution’s charter, Montt stated that the country could expect much more from the UCH than from the USF. “[The university] will be involved in more relevant, and altogether more beneficial, purposes. It will make recommendations to the government as to the best means to improve and disseminate education throughout the Republic.’’ All of the faculties of the UCH, he added, “will provide the supreme authority with important data about their respective fields.”²⁰ The significance of the Egaña and Montt messages to the congress lies in the central importance attached to the UCH for the educational system as a whole. These messages also underscore the government’s determination to establish the institution on a sound footing and provide it with needed financial support, since both reports were accompanied by recommendations for substantial budget increases.

In still another effort to ensure the success of the project, the government turned to the talented Andrés Bello to ask him to prepare the statutes of the new institution. Bello had been involved in cultural and political activities in Chile since his arrival in 1829. He had been a faculty member at the Colegio de Santiago, a public official in the Prieto administration, and also a private teacher of many important Chileans during the 1830s. He thus commanded wide respect and admiration in government circles. His university training in Venezuela and his experience of 19 years in England as a writer, researcher, publisher, and diplomat furnished Bello with the needed skills for the assignment. Indeed, he not only drew up the charter of the UCH but also became its first rector, a position he held until his death in 1865—by which time the institution was widely regarded as the leading university in Latin America.²¹

Between 1841 and 1843, Bello worked diligently to prepare the UCH charter. He had the legal training to accomplish this task, but he was also a thinker who had his own ideas about the aims of higher education. Bello presented these ideas at the formal inauguration of the UCH in 1843.²² In his speech, he emphasized that the cultivation of “letters and sciences” had a profound political and moral influence on society, and that the university was the most appropriate institution for the concentration of scientific and literary knowledge. The utility of such knowledge was demonstrated by history, since civilization itself was the product of literary and scientific activities. But it was the moral aspect that he wanted to emphasize most, because morality—which could not be separated from religion—made civilization possible. The social significance of cultivating knowledge at the university, furthermore, was that “elementary education has reached the working class, which comprises the majority of the human race, only where sciences and letters have flourished first.”²³ The UCH, Bello suggested, had been established with that very purpose in mind: to perfect and concentrate knowledge in one institution of higher education from which enlightenment might then be spread to every class in society through nationwide elementary education.

There are several elements that make Bello’s ideas on the purposes of the UCH significant. For one thing, Bello’s statements demonstrate that however radical an educational departure the creation of the UCH might have been, his and the government’s emphasis was more on conciliation with the Catholic church than on antagonism toward it. In effect, Bello’s insistence on the close connection between morality and religion was aimed at addressing the grievances of the church as well as those of the USF faculty who had been left unemployed by the government’s closing of the colonial institution in 1839. Clerical members of the USF faculty had then staged a protest that threatened to upset the relations between church and state. Moreover, Bello’s emphasis on morality and religion was designed to appease a large and powerful sector of Chilean society sympathetic to the church. In discussing the functions of the different branches of the institution, Bello described the Faculty of Theology as the most important, stating that “the promotion of the ecclesiastical sciences, which is destined to educate the dignified ministers of the faith, and in the last analysis to provide the republic with a competent religious and moral education, is the foremost purpose [of the university] and its most transcendental.”²⁴ Bello was himself a Catholic, but his emphasis on the relationship between morality, religion, and society was not intended to be an expression of personal convictions so much as an effort to solve a delicate situation between church and state. By it, he successfully articulated a rationale for soothing the wounds of minor, but continuous, skirmishes between both institutions of Chilean society.

Another important element in Bello’s views on the university was his understanding of the institution as above political differences. “The university,” he stated, “would not be worthy of a place among our social institutions if the cultivation of the sciences and letters could in any way be viewed as dangerous from a moral or a political standpoint.”²⁵ The university should, in his view, provide a haven for the pursuit of knowledge that was not subject to the divisions that characterized society. Such a pursuit required freedom, and Bello hastened to add his meaning of freedom: “Freedom as opposed, on the one hand, to the servile docility that accepts everything without examination, and, on the other, to the disorderly license that rebels against both the authority of reason and the noblest and purest instincts of the human heart.”²⁶ This view of freedom as a middle ground between “docility” and “license” is characteristic not only of Bello’s philosophy, but of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century moderate Scottish philosophers (and their French followers) whom he knew well.²⁷ Such a concept of freedom, Bello concluded, “will undoubtedly constitute the theme of the university in each of its sections.”²⁸

Bello’s audience at the inauguration of the UCH was both distinguished and powerful. It included the president of Chile; the entire cabinet; and church, congressional, and military leaders. Bello was widely recognized as a man of singular knowledge and tact, but his politics were viewed as conservative, and for this reason they drew sharp attacks in more liberal circles. José Victorino Lastarria, in particular, reacted critically to Bello’s views on the university. In his Recuerdos literarios, Lastarria charged that Bello had profoundly disappointed liberals by defending the marriage of science and religion and advocating a “confessional education” that attempted to perpetuate the doctrinal as well as oligarchical basis of the Prieto administration of the 1830s. “The distinguished rector proclaimed in the name of the university,” Lastarria wrote, “doctrines that sought to curb the natural effects of the [liberal] evolution. The foremost representative of wisdom in our country thus placed the old laws before our new hopes.”²⁹ Other critics included the historian Diego Barros Arana and Vicente Pérez Rosales, who did not attack Bello personally but were highly critical of the close connection that he called for between university and government.³⁰

This connection was indeed the most important feature of Bello’s scheme for the university, both institutionally and conceptually, as the university was designed to be of service to the society. “Practical utility, positive results, social improvement: this is what the government expects from the university,” he stated, “and this will be the principal contribution of [the institution] to the Fatherland.”³¹ In fact, and really for most of the nineteenth century, university and government enjoyed a prolonged honeymoon that was closely related to the success of the institution in several areas of interest to the state, particularly the supervision of education, the pursuit of scientific research, and the recruitment of political leaders. Many members of the faculty were also government officials; and these dual appointments were written into the university’s statutes.³²

Members of the government were careful to coach the university until the institution was standing solidly on its feet, and they repeatedly came to its defense before a suspicious and economically tight-fisted congress, as in 1849 when the lower chamber voted for the elimination of university wages. When discussion of the bill moved to the senate, the budget committee charged that some university salaries were too high for the services performed. The committee further charged that certain of the faculties met rarely and that for both reasons a budget cut was in order. Bello, a senator himself, skillfully refuted the charges while focusing the discussion on the constitutional mandate for the creation of a superintendancy of education, which the 1842 law creating the university had assigned to the UCH. He also underscored the importance of the institution for promoting religious education, an argument that fellow senators on the floor were unwilling to refute publicly. Thanks to his intervention and to the support of the government as a whole, the congressional bill was voted down.³³

The financial allocation to education provides the strongest proof of the state’s commitment to a national system of education closely supervised by the UCH. As shown in Table I, the percentage of the budget allocated to public education oscillated between 4 and 8 percent during the period 1843-79, reaching a low of 3.4 percent in 1849 and a high of 9.3 percent in 1859. Moreover, while the national budget grew by 379 percent between 1845 and 1879, the educational budget grew by 553 percent. As of 1864, the latter was greater than the allotments to such other governmental functions as foreign affairs, welfare, roads, religion, national guard, and navy. The university’s budget, however, was relatively small, accounting for 2 to 8 percent of the total educational budget. This is due to the fact that the university’s role was fundamentally administrative, its original efforts being primarily geared toward the creation of a national system of education and the organization of scientific and academic fields central to national needs. Indeed, UCH expenditures were limited to salaries of the administrative personnel, including the rector, secretary general, deans, treasurer, and beadle. The teaching faculty were all on the IN payroll. The dramatic increase in the secondary education budget is thus, in part, a reflection of the growth of the UCH itself as well as of its success in fostering the expansion of the educational system generally.³⁴

Several authors, most notably Diego Barros Arana, have pointed out that French higher education, as reformed in the Napoleonic period, provided the model for the UCH.³⁵ There are indeed similarities between the two systems. In France, the state centralized authority in order to ensure equality of access to education and to supervise its contents. The imperial university system carried out the “academic” functions of promoting research and establishing scholarly norms through the Institut de France, while the faculties supervised scientific and humanistic education. The grandes écoles, in turn, supervised professional education. Teaching was carried out at the lycées, or secondary schools.³⁶ Similar to its French counterpart, the UCH had five faculties, which in Chile included philosophy and humanities, law and political science, physical and mathematical sciences, medicine; and theology.

However, the parallels between the two higher education systems have been somewhat overdrawn, as substantial organizational and conceptual differences did exist. For one thing, the UCH had a faculty of theology that did not exist in the French system. The UCH also incorporated both academic and supervisory functions within the faculties. Conceptually, moreover, Bello insisted that the UCH was a nationally oriented institution and that the activities of each faculty were primarily for the purpose of understanding Chilean reality. While he may ultimately have envisioned a basic research emphasis for the UCH similar to that of the French, he preferred to emphasize the utility of the faculties for resolving specific Chilean problems. Still, the UCH adopted two of the fundamental features of French higher education: the academy concerned with the advancement of scientific and humanistic fields, and the superintendancy of education that involved the supervision of primary, secondary, and professional education. These two major purposes of the university must now be examined separately.

The Superintendancy of Education

The creation, centralization, and supervision of a national system of education was perhaps the most important accomplishment of the UCH. The Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades (FFH) was the faculty directly responsible for this aspect of the university’s mission. Initially, major emphasis was given to the development of primary education, through the preparation of textbooks, collection of data, and inspection of primary schools throughout the nation. By 1860, this task had become so enormous that the government created a separate body to supervise primary education. Secondary education, as a result, received the longest and most concentrated attention of the FFH.³⁷ To carry out the functions of educational supervision and development of fields in the humanities, 19 faculty members were appointed (despite the 30-member composition mandated by the 1842 university statutes). But the small group included such highly committed individuals as José Victorino Lastarria and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who were instrumental in lobbying for legislation favorable to national education, and for developing the first teacher training school. FFH members were required to inspect educational establishments, examine and approve the curriculum, and approve textbooks for use in schools nationwide. Thanks in large part to their efforts, the secondary curriculum moved from a heavy emphasis on philosophy and Latin to an increasing emphasis on history, literature, geography, and various scientihc subjects.³⁸

At the UCH, FFH faculty members did not teach, except for a few who actually taught at the IN. By and large, they concentrated on monitoring the educational system, and their meetings often revolved around discussions of the virtues of one or another textbook for use in the nation’s schools. Teaching, particularly secondary-level instruction, was primarily done at the IN by its own personnel. This separation was in accordance with Bello’s view that the nonteaching functions of the university were sufficient to develop the educational system. By virtue of its scientific work and its supervisory powers, Bello thought, the university would radiate knowledge to the lower classes. This approach came to be challenged, however, politely but strongly, by the Polish educator Ignacio Domeyko, who had arrived in Chile after an active scientific and educational career in Europe. According to Domeyko, universities could have any organization appropriate to national needs, but all universities—at least all that he knew of—engaged professors in teaching at the highest educational levels. Chile, however, wanted to start its educational system with a nucleus of highly accomplished men of letters and sciences—in a country where such men were scarce and, moreover, did not even teach.

Domeyko argued that in order to properly spread knowledge in Chile it was first necessary to turn the university into a teaching establishment. Otherwise, academics would simply look on their positions as honorary appointments not subject to the demands of educational development. “Only as a professor will [the scholar] try to stay on top of his field and follow the progress of the sciences in order not to fall behind his own students. There are just too many new ideas and inventions that come up regularly in the scientific and literary world for him not to do that.”³⁹ As a highly specialized scientist, Domeyko wanted to see a clear connection between instruction and the development of the professions, whereas Bello was more concerned about the larger processes involved in the consolidation of the national state and the role of the university in it. However, Domeyko presented the classic argument for the inseparability of teaching and research in so compelling a fashion that Bello himself conceded the point and declared teaching “a fundamental mission of the university.”⁴⁰ In 1847, the opening of a university teaching section, the Delegación Universitaria, was approved for the IN, although it did not start functioning until 1852. Even before this, regulations for the granting of university degrees had been established by the university council, the highest policy-making body of the institution.⁴¹ Not all the professions required university degrees, but those that did, such as medicine and law, now had to adjust to a university-approved curriculum of studies.

However slowly, the faculties of the UCH participated in the planning and definition of the courses of study required by their respective professions. Domeyko, who was appointed delegado universitario in charge of the university’s teaching section, worked tirelessly to make the professional curricula coherent. Students of the IN prepared for higher studies at the “delegation” by choosing between two major fields of study, humanities and mathematics, while still at the secondary school level. The curso (the term used to refer to specialization in either of these two fields) prepared humanities students for law and medicine and mathematics students for engineering. The teaching section of the UCH, therefore, was developed primarily for the benefit of these professions. In the process, the teaching functions of the institution increasingly blurred the original research aims of the university, which would suggest a certain degree of conflict between the views of Bello and Domeyko; yet in fact their approaches were complementary. Bello was sincerely concerned with the development of the professions, especially law, even if he did not pay close attention to the relationship between the professions and the faculties, or to university teaching. He was simply more concerned with the supervisorial attributes of the institution. Nor did Domeyko wholly disagree with Bello’s emphasis; he merely doubted that the university could survive as an academy if it did not engage in teaching. Both men worked together quite well. And both had a chance to see their specific views implemented. During the rectorship of Bello (1843-65), the university continued to play, above all, an academic-supervisorial role. Under the rectorship of Domeyko (1867-83), the university’s fundamental mission became the training of professionals, as was in fact sanctioned by the law that reorganized higher and secondary education in 1879.⁴²

The 1879 law consolidated the type of university advocated by Domeyko. The role of superintendancy was maintained, albeit with some changes. The university council became part of the national Consejo de Instrucción Pública and included the minister of education, the UCH rector and secretary general, the deans, the IN rector, and three members appointed by the government plus two others appointed by the UCH faculty at large. The powers of the university were maintained, but the institution now enjoyed greater authority, particularly in the selection of public education personnel. Up to that point, the hiring of secondary school teachers or university professors was made by the government through its appointed committees. The government could fire faculty members just as it could fire any other public employee. With the 1879 law, the Consejo, which became predominantly made up of UCH personnel, acquired the authority to appoint hiring committees and submit recommendations that could only be confirmed by the government. For instance, the Consejo could advance the names of three candidates for the post of liceo rector, in the order it wished, for government approval. The selection and appointment of university faculty were made directly by the Consejo. While the government retained the power to fire a faculty member, it still needed the support of two-thirds of the Consejo. With the 1879 law, higher education was, at the same time, formally declared tuition free.

The 1879 law also brought some fundamental changes, particularly in the composition of the faculties. All teaching personnel at the Delegación Universitaria as well as some advanced secondary school teachers appointed by the council became members of the different faculties. Up to 1879, teachers of university-level courses were not necessarily faculty members. Therefore, they had no power to elect university authorities or participate in the design of university policy. The law changed this while also reducing the number of academic and honorary members to 15 and extending the right to vote only to teaching and academic personnel. According to the law, the faculties were to elect their members, appoint hiring committees, and supervise the functioning of public schools. Articles 19 and 26 formally recognized a system of tenure and the principle of academic freedom, respectively. Thus, the faculties and their teaching personnel emerged as major players under the new university regulations. They obtained a greater degree of autonomy, even though the fundamental dependence of the university on the state remained unchanged.

Throughout the period, the university set the tone for an increasingly secular system of national education. Not only were many of the faculty active and outstanding members of the liberal establishment, but they also promoted their secular views in the educational system as a whole. Such activism was bound to conflict with the church, which had grown restive after repeated attacks on its prerogatives during the middle decades of the century.⁴³ Yet, while ideological differences were strong, the evolving conflict between church and state and between their respective liberal and conservative supporters depended less on doctrinaire positions than on the vagaries of Chilean politics during the period. Likewise, the divisions between liberals and conservatives were not as neat as these labels would suggest. And the explosion of the religious issue was precipitated in part by the actions of President Montt, a conservative with an unquestionable commitment to public education. His quarrels with the Catholic church in 1857 had the effect of dividing his own supporters along religious lines.⁴⁴

These larger political tensions were bound to have an impact on the educational system. However, the resulting conflicts had less to do with the larger aims of education than with the university’s control over the examinations leading to the granting of degrees. According to the 1842 law that established the university, all examinations for degrees were to be administered by UCH-appointed committees. In addition, an 1843 decree signed by Montt required students from private schools who wanted degrees recognized by the state to take their exams at the IN.⁴⁵ Problems emerged as private school students, who were mostly law students, appeared before the IN to take their exams in increasing numbers. These students were required to follow neither the plan of studies nor the sequence of examinations organized by the university. As a result, even UCH students found it easier to withdraw from the Delegación Universitaria and be examined as private school students. When the UCH sought to put restrictions on such students, the inevitable result was a developing tension between private and public education. Certainly, there were ideological underpinnings to this tension, as private education was largely Catholic while public education was basically secular. The great distance between church and state that developed during the late 1850s thus provided the background for the tension between private and public education. From the university’s perspective, the differences between the two were due to the UCH’s efforts to rationalize the educational system, but in the new political climate the conflict between private and public sectors acquired a strong ideological character that coincided with the Catholic-secular cleavages that separated educational institutions.⁴⁶

The number of private schools grew from 10 to 25 between 1854 and 1861, while students increased from 782 to 1,810. The greatest number of private school students, and usually the better-prepared ones, came from the Sagrados Corazones and San Ignacio secondary schools. Public secondary schools in 1861 were slightly fewer than private, 18 to be precise, but had more students: 2,567.⁴⁷ To be sure, the combined number of secondary school students was only a fraction of a larger population of somewhat over 300,000 literates in the country, and an almost negligible figure in the context of a total population of 1.8 million in 1865.⁴⁸ But private school growth significantly taxed the university’s ability to exercise effective control and satisfy the demand for degrees. And, as private pressure for the granting of degrees mounted during the 1860s and’70s, ideological arguments became more strident, with Catholic educators demanding “freedom of examinations” and criticizing the state monopoly on education. In the midst of this growing conflict that divided church and state, liberals and conservatives, Andrés Bello died in 1865. Bello had earlier played a fundamental role in keeping the educational issue apart from heated political debates; his passing thus symbolized the end of an era of relatively peaceful relations between church and state on educational matters. Moreover, the national system of education had not only become larger and more complex, but it was increasingly influenced by liberals. A significant landmark was the appointment in 1863 of Diego Barros Arana as rector of the IN, which precipitated open hostilities between defenders of the school’s secular and scientifically oriented curriculum and prominent members of the Catholic establishment, including several academics at the UCH’s faculty of theology.

The conflict exploded when conservative Minister of Education Abdón Cifuentes signed the “freedom of examinations” decree on January 15, 1872 that allowed private establishments to administer their own examinations.⁴⁹ While the UCH retained supervisory powers under the decree, in practice private schools sent perfunctory announcements and reports of their examinations to UCH officials. UCH supervisory powers amounted to little, because the university did not have enough personnel to supervise the large numbers of students taking examinations at their own schools. Soon, students who had failed IN courses moved to private schools to obtain their degrees. Class attendance dropped. By mid-1872, exasperated UCH officials complained that the cause of these troubles was “the relaxation of discipline resulting from the new examinations system; students know that they can take their examinations whenever, however, and before whomever they want.”⁵⁰

Relaxation of discipline, ironically, was cited by Minister Cifuentes as his reason for firing Barros Arana as rector of the IN. It became clear, then, that the conflict over examinations had evolved into a full-fledged attack against the Estado docente and its leading defenders. The very idea of Estado docente acquired a different meaning at this time. Critics as well as propounders of the concept no longer saw it as merely a synonym for national public education but rather as the state’s control, through examinations, of all education, especially private. Conservatives viewed the Estado docente as a state monopoly of education that threatened educational freedom. Liberals, in contrast, came to understand it as the state’s right to standardize national education through effective central controls. During 1873, lengthy arguments for and against the role of the state in education were presented by Barros Arana and Miguel Luis Amunátegui for the liberals, and Joaquín Larraín Gandarillas and Rafael Fernández Concha for the Catholics and conservatives.⁵¹

Just as the conflict had turned into an ideological and political one, the solution was also political. Cifuentes had entered the cabinet of President Federico Errázuriz as part of a liberal-conservative coalition. The explosion of the education issue, as well as larger conflicts between church and state, led to the dissolution of the coalition. In the short run, this entailed the resignation of Minister Cifuentes and the derogation of the notorious “freedom of examinations” decree. In the longer term, the split of the conservatives from the cabinet opened the way for a liberal alliance that took firm control of the reins of the state, and particularly of the education ministry. Taking advantage of this momentum, liberals waived the requirement, at the parents’ request, of Catholic instruction to children of religious dissidents in 1876. This was a particularly touchy subject because Catholic instruction was obligatory for all secondary school students as well as a requirement for the humanities baccalaureate. Additionally, liberals made Latin an elective course the same year and admitted women into the university in 1877.

Moreover, the controversy over examinations provided educational officials with an opportunity to place even more emphasis on a teaching university that still retained the role of superintendancy. The supervisory activities of the UCH had played a fundamental role in the consolidation of the university, yet to maintain the strength of the institution it was necessary to give it a more pervasive educational role. As Domeyko put it, “[T]he best way for the university to direct higher education effectively is to become a teaching university; that is, teaching according to its own plans and methods, and employing its own members as professors and directors of national establishments. ”⁵² Difficult though it may be to imagine a university where the majority of the faculty do not teach, it is indicative of the nature of the UCH up to 1879 that Domeyko would need to insist on this point. Yet, beyond this central proposal, he was also concerned about the basis of university governance, which, in his view, should reside in the teaching faculty. This is what he meant by a “teaching university,” and why it was important that teachers be fully incorporated into the faculties in order to participate in university governance and thus influence the larger course of national educational developments.

The transformation of the UCH into a strong, centralized teaching institution coincided with a period of liberal ascendancy. But the universidad docente was not necessarily a liberal product. In fact, the transformation was led by Domeyko, a conservative Catholic. Rather, the changes occurred as a direct result of the institutional development of the UCH, which was guided by the principal aim of supervising national education. Admittedly, the changes occurred during a decade of exacerbated conflicts between liberals and conservatives, but the roots of the transformation went back to Domeyko’s arguments in the 1840s and involved an extended period of internal debate and administrative changes and discussions.⁵³ In the end, the 1879 law sanctioned a university that was no longer the institution of men who were broadly defined as learned, but an institution of specialists who understood their job to be teaching, in order that they might train the manpower needed by an increasingly secular, urban, and industrial society.

The Creation of a Scientific Tradition

In Bello’s scheme, the purpose of scientific activity was to meet national needs systematically, and this required the creation of a scientific tradition where none existed.⁵⁴ By science, Bello meant what we would call research today—regardless of the field—with particular emphasis on applied research concerning matters of immediate advantage to society. Chile’s position in the international context, which made the country dependent on foreign markets and technology, conditioned to a great extent the research ideals of the builder of the UCH by the end of the period under study. In Bello’s initial design, each faculty of the UCH was to engage in activities responsive to a central national endeavor. The faculty of theology was to assist the church in educational matters as well as oversee the religious education of the entire population. The faculty of law and political science was supposed to help adapt the law and the judiciary to the new republican system, and also to develop the study of political economy and the collection of statistical data. The faculty of medicine was charged with the study of the diseases most common in Chile and overseeing private and public health. The faculty of physical and mathematical sciences was expected to provide technical assistance to industry, agriculture, and mining. Finally, the faculty of philosophy and humanities was charged with the supervision of education as well as the advancement of historical and literary production. As Bello said in summarizing the activities of the university and its faculties, “the program of the university is entirely Chilean. If it borrows from Europe the results of science, it is to apply them to Chile. Every area of research by its members, and learning by students, converges in one center: the Fatherland.”⁵⁵

The results were mixed, particularly in the scientific and professional fields. The role of the FFH was fundamentally supervisory, but a great deal of the faculty’s effort went into developing humanistic fields. Literature and philosophy received a significant emphasis, though history became the unquestionable success of both the faculty and the university. Article 28 of the university statutes called for an annual presentation of works on significant Chilean historical events, “based on authentic documentary evidence” and prepared with “impartiality and truth.” Throughout the period, FFH scholars composed papers that in effect started one of the strongest traditions of historical writing in the continent. They included Miguel Luis and Gregorio Víctor Amunátegui, Barros Arana, and Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, among many others. Bello himself provided strong support and guidance for the development of a national history.⁵⁶

It was more difficult to make strides in the natural and physical sciences and professional fields, primarily because of a lack of trained personnel. The government relied heavily on foreigners to staff the medical and the physical and mathematical sciences faculties. Half of the original members of these two faculties were European, and the government continued to hire academics in Europe in the expectation that they would consolidate the study and development of scientific knowledge. However, many of these academics did not stay in Chile long enough to fulfill the government’s wishes.⁵⁷ An effort was thus made to educate Chileans in the same fields, and in Europe itself if necessary. In addition, the university played a fundamental role in introducing scientific subjects in secondary schools, and in the formation and consolidation of those professions that were based on the sciences. In fact, the development of medicine and engineering was by and large the product of the university’s determination to cultivate these fields, rather than the result of a market demand.

Medicine was the first to become established despite considerable odds resulting from the low prestige of the profession in Spanish American tradition and the lack of human resources and medical equipment.⁵⁸ Foreigners who already had a secure social position, such as the Irish doctor Guillermo Blest, could ignore some of the limitations, however, and even argue the need for medical studies. The first medical courses were established at the IN in 1833, and in large measure they succeeded thanks to the entrance of children from two of Santiago’s most distinguished families—Tocornal and Mackenna—into the program.⁵⁹ With the creation of the UCH, the development of medical studies became a national objective. The UCH introduced formal requirements for the study of medicine, such as a humanities baccalaureate and successful completion of courses in chemistry, physiology, pathology, and so forth. Medical degrees were to be approved by the dean of the faculty. Although only 14 students were pursuing medical studies in 1852, official encouragement greatly enhanced interest in the field.⁶⁰ The number of students had grown to 78 in 1868, thanks to purchases of equipment, expansion of medical facilities, and the fact that two years earlier the government had decreed that only physicians in possession of university degrees could practice the profession. If the period 1844-60 had seen 124 medical graduates holding bachelor’s and licenciatura degrees, the entire period between 1861 and 1879 boasted 465 graduates, although some of the licenciatura degrees were actually accreditations for foreign degrees. Meanwhile, too, dentistry had been established, in 1864.⁶¹ Along with growth came a larger number of Chileans holding advanced medical degrees and professorships. In 1872, the school of medicine had eleven professors, just two of them European. By the end of the period, medicine was strongly established and enjoyed substantial prestige—though more as a profession than as a field of research.

Engineering encountered difficulties similar to those of the medical profession, but not the same degree of success.⁶² The field had no tradition, no teachers, and no prestige. Just as in the case of medicine, foreigners were recruited to establish a teaching program. The UCH also attempted to interest Chileans in the engineering field and to increase the profession’s prestige. As opposed to medicine, however, there was a negligible labor market for engineering. Chile was undergoing fundamental economic changes during the nineteenth century, related particularly to mining, and the development of a mining infrastructure required qualified engineers; but this was largely done by foreign professionals. Furthermore, most small mines continued to use traditional extractive methods that did not require highly trained engineers. As a result, the only market available for Chilean engineers was in the large mines and public works, and usually in secondary roles. Between 1856 and 1879, engineering degrees reflected (very roughly) the available occupational opportunities, as follows: 100 degrees were in geography, which in practice meant chiefly topography and geodesy; 61 in mining engineering; and 4 in civil engineering.⁶³ An additional 11 degrees were in the field of mineralogy, which in the 1860s became part of mine engineering.

In any case, the founding of the UCH represented an important boost to the engineering professions. Just as in the case of medicine, the UCH worked to develop a curriculum in physics and mathematics, and it declared the field a national priority despite the lack of a major market. The establishment of engineering, in this sense, represents a classic example of Bello’s effort to implement educational reforms that were dictated by national needs as defined by the state rather than by the existence of an engineering tradition or even a modest demand for engineers. As in the case of Colombia, studied by Frank Safford, the ideal of a technical education ran into considerable obstacles until the late nineteenth-century market demand helped overcome traditional resistance to such practical endeavors as engineering. Colombia, as he has shown, found additional obstacles in the form of political instability, but in both countries there was a midcentury conviction among political and educational leaders that technical education ought to be encouraged not only to meet practical needs but also to help change the values of the population.⁶⁴ The irony of these efforts is that in both cases the economy was not in a position to absorb graduates, nor were entrepreneurs willing to hire local talent when high-level engineering positions became available. The obvious contradiction between the nature of the economy and the educational programs adopted can be explained in part by the perception of many public officials that an educated elite would produce long-term economic changes while satisfying the more immediate demand for lower- to middle-level technical positions.

Even so, certain concessions to reality had to be made. Bello, for instance, had suggested that engineering students should receive academic degrees. But Domeyko was of a different opinion, shared by the government, that a professional certification was sufficient and would in fact attract a larger number of students.⁶⁵ As a result, requirements for admission were made less stringent, and the socioeconomic background of the students was modest compared to that of others at the UCH. The dropout rate in the mathematics course leading to the field of engineering was also the highest. Most importantly, however, the lack of interest in the field had to do with the fact that an engineering degree was not requisite for any type of employment, as was the case with medicine and law. This relative lack of institutionalization made it difficult for professionals in the field to help create more demand for licensed engineers. It was only after the period under study, with the expansion of public works following the War of the Pacific (1879-83), that demand was strong enough to consolidate the field. Still, the UCH had made it possible for engineering to have a well-developed curriculum of studies when that demand finally came (see Table II).

The creation of a scientific tradition, particularly in the fields of physics, mathematics, and medicine, was a result of sustained efforts. Contrary to Bello’s wishes, however, these fields became more professional than academic. The economic constraints of the nation, coupled with the low prestige of most of the professions, did not allow for the vigorous development of scientific research in these areas. But at least the professions became institutionalized at the university, and it turned out a significant number of graduates.

Law, on the other hand, succeeded tremendously, perhaps even excessively. This was due to the existence of a legal tradition as well as the high esteem accorded to the profession.⁶⁶ In fact, the creation of the colonial USF in 1738 was in large measure a response to the need for the training of lawyers. With independence, the teaching of law was transferred to the IN, although the USF continued to grant the degrees. After the dissolution of the USF in 1839, due largely to the conflict mentioned earlier between Montt and Meneses over the granting of law degrees, the supervision of legal studies was transferred to the UCH. The very concept of such studies thus changed to reflect Bello’s views. As he put it, “the program of legal studies of the Universidad de Chile aims not only at providing the nation with competent lawyers, but also at educating men capable of assuming the highest positions in administration, legislation, and the direction of public opinion.”⁶⁷ The university was so successful in this regard that successive administrations were eager to recruit personnel from the pool of law graduates. As Antonio García Reyes, a lawyer and government official himself, complained bitterly in 1853: “[As] soon as a young lawyer attracts the attention of the tribunals and of his colleagues, the government grabs him and uproots him to perform thankless jobs. . .. [T]he fatherland needs the help of its children, but doesn’t the dedicated [private] lawyer help the country just the same?”⁶⁸ There was clearly more prestige in government service and in politics than in the everyday practice of law.

University authorities had other reasons to be concerned about the demand for trained lawyers, particularly because students chose law careers to the detriment of the other professions. While children of the elite had traditionally opted for law degrees, families of modest means who now had access to education came to view legal careers as a means for social mobility. The increasing number of applicants concerned the university council and Bello himself, to the extent that they sought to restrict the proliferation of legal studies, particularly in the provinces.⁶⁹ The policy of restricting legal studies underscores the supervisory role exercised by the UCH. The university had direct control over the curriculum of public schools. Thus, no school in the country could add courses or degree programs without the approval of the university council. Private schools enjoyed more autonomy, but the university council exercised indirect control by establishing minimum requirements for the granting of degrees. Student demand, however, was not curbed by these restrictions. As Francisco Vargas Fontecilla, the university’s secretary general, put it in 1857, the growth in law enrollments proved “the lack of interest in any profession other than law. This is an evil that requires prompt remedy, perhaps in the form of incentives to those students interested in medicine, physics, and mathematics.”⁷⁰ Not much could be done, as the existence of a strong market for law degrees, combined with family pressure to enter the field, provided a steady and growing stream of applicants.⁷¹ Between 1842 and 1879, 2,197 students received law degrees, compared to 589 in medicine and 176 in engineering (see Table III).

Because of the numbers involved, and the close connection to the state and partisan politics, the legal profession was the most susceptible to political and ideological polarization. This proved to be the case, for example, in 1872, with the implementation of the “freedom of examinations” decree. The decree did not survive long enough to make a dent in the state’s iron grip over the educational system. But the debates and confrontations that resulted from this issue revealed the particularly heavy competition for control of a profession—the law—that had such strong links to the state apparatus. And the state succeeded, in this field more than in any other, in impressing its increasingly liberal and secular character on the profession, if not on the entire legal system.

The legal profession did not require the heavy involvement of the UCH in developing the field, contrary to what happened in the other professions. There were enough trained lawyers from the outset, an oversupply of students, market demand, and great prestige attached to a law degree. Certainly, there were gaps, as the emphasis went to educating public officials rather than legal specialists or private practitioners; and the university’s law faculty attempted to close such gaps through various curricular reforms. The same law curriculum established for the IN in 1832 had been in effect until 1853, when Antonio García Reyes introduced changes that put more emphasis on commercial and mining law as well as other professionally oriented fields. The university also played a fundamental role in introducing law students to the Chilean Civil Code adopted in 1855 (by means of a year-long course changed in 1863 to two years of study) as well as to the Commercial Code of 1866. Members of the faculty were themselves centrally involved in the writing of the civil, commercial, and also the mining codes, and by the end of the period under study, the university had introduced significant changes in the curriculum in order to provide a better understanding of the republic’s legal institutions.⁷² The arrival in 1855 of French liberal economist Jean Gustave Corcelle-Seneuil further gave substantial impetus to the study of political economy, a subject that had been required for law degrees at the IN since the 1820s and that impinged directly on the process of institutional modernization.⁷³

The Lasting Contribution of the UCH

Although in varying degrees, the UCH played an essential role in Chile in the development of the professions. Through its considerable supervisory powers, it made possible the strong link between the curriculum and the professions that ensured the relevance of education to larger societal needs. The university may not have created the sort of scientific tradition envisioned by Bello, but thanks to the UCH and the development of university curricula, the country could now count on its own locally trained intellectuals and professionals.

The UCH underwent a substantial transformation between 1842 and 1879 because of the difficulties inherent in applying Andrés Bello’s views on the university in the social, economic, and political context of nineteenth-century Chile. This does not mean that Bello was unsuccessful in his efforts. On the contrary, most of his plans for the creation of a superintendancy of education as well as a scientific tradition met with impressive success. The UCH retained its supervisory powers, at least over secondary education, until 1931. Moreover, Bello succeeded in strongly establishing the professions and the humanities at the university even though it did not initially engage in teaching.

Bello did not, of course, oppose instruction: he merely conceived of the university in a different fashion, as a supervisory agency and a center for the development of research. But Chile was not in a position to sustain such a university model for long, particularly as pressures from private Catholic institutions for the granting of degrees mounted. As Ignacio Domeyko realized from the start, the university needed to set the tone for public education by becoming a teaching institution itself. The implementation of a teaching university, however, brought its own set of problems. It meant that coordination had to be established not only between the university’s curriculum and that of secondary education, but between the curricula of both of these and the development of the professions. Since it was also felt necessary to bring private education under the control of the public sector, confrontations arose with the church and its conservative allies that heralded the dramatic events of the 1870s. Liberal aims and the institutional development of the UCH were not identical, but they coincided in one important respect: both sought the centralization of the educational system in order to better implement reforms and to establish what authorities considered a modern and rationally organized curriculum. The law of 1879 represented the culmination of this process.

A great deal of reciprocity existed between the university and the state during these years. The UCH provided the state with trained manpower, while the government consistently and generously provided the institution with funding and legitimacy. Such a close relationship had its costs, as it alienated significant sectors of society, among them the Catholic church. However, this was a cost that the state was willing to pay for the sake of creating a national intellectual and professional establishment.