La investigación universitaria en tiempos de la sociedad del conocimiento

if the "ivory tower" metaphor best described the university in its early history, nowadays it is called on to renew its links with society and respond to a varied list of demands in order to legitimate itself and justify the funds that keep it alive. the university must be able to mobilize its intellectual capital in order to respond to urgent national problems, within a context of increasingly globalized competition. however, these new demands come at a time when the public university has been losing its traditional epistemological and organizational monopoly over knowledge, as our society generates and divulges new knowledge by way of more ubiquitous and diverse actors. what then is its role in a situation in which it has lost part of its control within the new institutional ecology, when we can observe a marked tendency towards the privatization of the knowledge that has become an essential capital within the new economy? in the face of this challenge, the university, especially the public university, must prove capable of strengthening its critical function, its independence, its autonomy and its condition as a space open to all, of vital importance in a knowledge society that is, at the same time, a risk society.