Higher education, what for?

The text proposes to reinstitute the democratic university as an ethic reference, given the challenges of the globalized world. It discusses the universities' current situation, which is characterized as a global crisis in higher education, taking as reference American and Canadian higher education institutions. Three aspects of such characterization are highlighted: 1 - the consequences of the globalization movement, which affects all spheres of human life, including education, and which demands the exercise of the "educating future generations to meet the challenges of global democracy" function, therefore avoiding the adoption of the practice of inducing to the instrumentation and the immediacy, which undervalues the critical knowledge. 2 - the retake of the universities' goals of knowledge and autonomy, leading to positions against exploitation, commodification and militarization. The latter, informed by the author, as a movement to be problematized in social subjects' formation in the United States and in the authoritarianism exercised over the higher education institutions in the same country. For that reason, an inclusive collaboration is proposed as one of the main ways to spread the importance of freedom and autonomy of Higher Institutions in their decisions and actions 3 - the university accessible to all, which adopts enjoyable, exciting and enabling methodologies, valuing teachers, and extinguishing the "alternative employment contracts" which contribute to the impoverishment of higher education quality.