Abstract

This article exposes the link between political and disciplinary ideas regarding the functioning of Chilean universities. During its early stages, the role of universities was shaped by political ideas from a liberal-conservative synthesis that prioritized the focus on the inspection and regulation of segmented education. This liberal-conservative consensus dwindles at the beginning of the twentieth century and opens the way to the strengthening of disciplinary ideas in several units within the universities. The methodological strategy used in this study was qualitative design. Elements of semantic analysis and discourse content analysis were used to analyze and interpret primary and secondary sources.