ABSTRACT
The scientific research and higher education are necessarily linked together is widespread. The relationship is seen as basic in the formation of educational policies in many countries. A classical version of this idea has been stated by Talcott Parsons, who believes that the modern scientist has a social place similar in many ways to the position of the humanistic scholar in the early universities. Latin America is a living laboratory, a privileged ground in which to examine the interplay among scientific research, scientistic ideologies, and the realities of higher education systems. Postwar optimism was high in the first years after World War II regarding the positive role science and technology might play in raising the levels of social and economic development in Latin American countries. The institutional history of European science up to the beginning of the nineteenth century is a tale of its gradual conquest of a central position in the culture and international outlook of Western societies.
