In an essay published fifteen years ago, I identified three crises facing the university (Santos, 1994). First, the crisis of hegemony was the result of contradictions between the traditional functions of the university and those that had come to be attributed to it throughout the twentieth century. When it stopped being the only institution of higher education and research production, the university entered a crisis of hegemony.The second crisis was a crisis of legitimacy, provoked by the fact that the university ceased to be a consensual institution in view of the contradiction between the hierarchization of specialized knowledge through restrictions of access and credentialing of competencies, on the one hand, and the social and political demands for a democratized university and equal opportunity for thechildren of the working class, on the other. Finally, the institutional crisis was theresult of the contradiction between the demand for autonomy in the definition ofthe university's values and objectives and the growing pressure to hold it to the same criteria of efficiency, productivity, and social responsibility that private enterprises face.>READ FULL CHAPTER