A landmark work of critical theory about the Western university from the Southern Cone

Renowned Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer’s La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna, first published in 1996 and in an updated edition in 2019, is a landmark work of critical theory from the Southern Cone. Presented in English for the first time, The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University rewrites the idea of the Western university while also diagnosing the ills of postdictatorship Chile through a philosophically informed dismantling of its neoliberal institutionalization of higher education. Bret Leraul’s translation advances the vital work of globalizing critical university studies by disseminating theory from the Global South. If the university helped to construct Chile’s neoliberal society, Thayer’s polemical deconstruction of both will help readers reconstruct the cultural politics of the era to better understand the global hegemony of neoliberalism today.

WILLY THAYER is a professor of philosophy at Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación in Santiago, where he founded the Program in Critical Thought and directs Ediciones Macul. His many books include Tecnologias de la crítica (2009; translated as Technologies of Critique in 2020).

D. BRET LERAUL is an assistant professor of comparative humanities and affiliate faculty in Latin American studies at Bucknell University.

“Originally published in the wake of Chile’s brutal dictatorship and during the questionable transition to democracy, this deft translation of Thayer’s work for a new reading public is unexpectedly timely. The university is (again, still) in crisis, and we in the so-called Global North need to read and listen to our colleagues in the Global South, whose geopolitical realities often anticipate fissures that may have been latent or eclipsed but that are exerting ever more pressure as they come to the surface."—Erin Graff Zivin, author of Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading