Universidad y sociedad: una relación paradójica.

Abstract

This paper addresses an aspect in which universities and society exhibit a notable similarity and which has always been an inadequately resolved problem: the tension between conservationism and innovation which, in universities is reflected in teaching and research, respectively. The author shows how both diverging forces produce the interplay that makes society possible and hence, its institutions. The tension in which universities live reflects that of society as a whole. Therefore, universities will not be able to exist if they obstinately insist in differing substantially from what society æthat sustains and shelters themæ wants them to be. If studies -the universities' duty par excellence- engenders the tensions of conflicting tendencies between the conservation and the creation of knowledge, that same tension produces movement and the changes that maintain society in motion, and provide feedback to the universities themselves in their inherent duties.