In recent decades, the University, as an object of study, has received assiduous attention; not too much, and always diverse according to the specific problems that today’s university has gradually accumulated. In Spain, although not only here, it has become a profitable historiographical field in which, above all, there has been the study of its legal and juridical dimension (paying attention to the laws that regulate it, its changes, and its rules of internal organization), the processes of consolidation of the nation states with the university as one of its pieces, its changing structures, its reforms and its refusals to reform... (Rodríguez-López, 2005, p. 1Rodríguez López, C. (2005) “La historiografía española sobre universidades en el siglo XX. Líneas de trabajo y tendencias historiográficas.” Revista de Historiografía, 3, año II (2), pp. 28-41.; Kintzinger, 2017Kintzinger, M. (2017) “Historiography of the University. A New Filed for an Old Topic in German Historical Scholarship.” CIAN, 20, pp. 97-140.; Moulinier, 2017Moulinier, P. (2017) “A Review of Recent Research on the History of Universities and Students in France.” CIAN, 20, 140-162.; Pomante, 2017Pomante, L. (2017) “Las investigaciones sobre historia de las universidades en Italia. Un balance historiográfico del siglo pasado.” CIAN, 20, pp. 163-192.). The internal organization of its staff, the processes of recruitment of new professors, the tasks expected of them, their preferred profiles in relation to political times, the specialties of their training and their ability to create schools have also been addressed. The academic biographies of important personalities and their scientific and technical contributions have escaped the attention of historians. Students have also been, to a large extent, major protagonists, as we have observed both their training and, sometimes and again in line with political times, the mobilizations and conflicts that have always transcended mere student and/or youth grievances. Our work in this dossier focuses specifically on problems and phenomena of the 20th century and we know, following Rüegg, that many of the issues raised are not exclusive to Spanish historiography but also feature in European and other historiographies. Rüegg detects three main themes that give the university its specific character. The first is the notion of reform, the second is how its faculty has been constituted and consolidated, that is, in his words, the destruction and reconstruction of the ivory tower and, finally, in what would be, in principle, basically a European problem, the provincialization of universities, that is, the loss of their world dominance and prestige in both research and teaching (Rüegg, 2020Rüegg, W., ed. (2020) Historia de la Universidad en Europa. Volumen IV. Las Universidades a partir de 1945. Vitoria-Gasteiz: Universidad del País Vasco.).
Starting from this scenario and this production to which we have referred very schematically, this issue seeks to broaden the possibilities of looking at and studying the university institution. We do so in an attempt to transcend national borders that have generally had such a strong influence on approaches that have prioritized the study of national models and university models in each country. We also seek to understand the exchanges of ideas, projects, readings, controversies and experiences that have had and still have the university and its actors as the main protagonists. To explore these fields, our issue is based on three fundamental concepts. The first is cultural transfer, the second is cultural diplomacy and the third is the global campus. With these, we believe that the task of investigating the circulation of ideas, authors, works and theories, academic models, exchange travel experiences and the formulation of new projects from the university is facilitated.
We define the aforementioned concepts based on well-known perspectives. From transnational history in the most classical sense formulated by Kiran Patel to the views of G. Lingelbach and W. Schmale in relation to cultural transfers, comparative history and agents of cultural transfer. Following Michel Espagne, we understand cultural transfers as the transformations that take place during the transmission of concepts, norms, images and representations from one culture to another. This type of transmission can take place through emigration, exile processes, meetings, visits, readings, specific programs, or institutions devoted to scientific and cultural exchange. The University, in its very essence, in its structures, in its dimensions of reception and mobilization, appears to us as an ideal space to host and promote this type of transfer. As such, as a container full of content, it positions and extends itself as a kind of global campus, without a specific place, but always identifiable (Patel, 2010Patel, K. K. (2010) “Transnational History.” In: European History Online (EGO). Mainz: Institute of European History (IEG). Available at: http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/theories-and-methods/transnational-history ; Lingelbach, 2011Lingelbach, G. (2011) “Intercultural Transfer and Comparative History: The Benefits and Limits of Two Approaches.” Traversea, 1, pp. 46-59.; Schmale, 2010Schmale, W. (2010) “A Transcultural History of Europe - Perspectives from the History of Migration.” In: European History Online (EGO). Mainz: Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz. Available at: http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/theories-and-methods/transcultural-history ; Espagne, 1994Espagne, M. (1994) “Sur les limites du comparatisme en histoire culturelle.” Genèses, 17, pp. 112-121. and 1999Espagne, M. (1999) Les transferts culturels francoallemands. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.).
The university is also approached here from a “new diplomatic history” or new history of cultural diplomacy, which has sought to revise and transcend the strictly institutional histories propitiated by the foreign services of nations and to include new organizations and formal platforms as well as informal exchanges such as those that take place in groups, teams, networks. In the context of these renewed research agendas, studies on the relations between diplomacy and education have been emerging, and cultural transfers, the circulation of scientists between different latitudes, educational internationalization programs, cultural visits of intellectual figures, international entities with specific sections or programs aimed at educational cooperation, among other objects of inquiry (Schweizer and Schumann, 2008Schweizer, K. W., and Schumann, M. J. (2008) “The revitalization of diplomatic history: Renewed reflections.” International Journal of Phytoremediation, 19 (2), pp. 149-186. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09592290802096174 ; Mitchell, 2015Mitchell, J. M. (2015) International Cultural Relations. London: Routledge.) have been added to their catalogue of issues of interest.
Thus, this issue seeks to analyze the social, cultural, political and diplomatic dimensions of university life, taking the space and the notion of the campus (real, symbolic or imagined) as a solid scenario for these developments. We understand the university campus from a double dimension: as a container of content and meanings. The university campus, as a unit that allows us to understand the dimensions of the activity of the academic community, is presented in this issue as a space for political and cultural expression, as a terrain for proposing new models of university, as a stage for cultural transfers, as a nucleus for intercultural relations and as a real and emotional community for experts and academics in all parts of the world. Our approach observes in this global campus the collaboration and expectations of philanthropists and investors in the development of cities and university projects; the use of university spaces for scientific exchanges and the celebration of cultural events and academic diplomacy. Our concept will enable us to understand the campus in its symbolic and communitarian dimension.
The articles contained in this issue of Culture & History are good examples of the global dimension of the university as a campus and of the activities that have connected different actors among themselves and with the world in which they lived. With the work of Paula Bruno, we begin a 20th century in which cultural diplomacy and cultural visits had a preferential place in the university. Her text analyzes Georges Clemenceau’s visits to Buenos Aires in 1910 and their connections with Paul Groussac’s visit to Paris in 1911. Through the dynamics established between the two events and focusing on the specific content of the visits, she studies the transatlantic intellectual connections in a moment immediately before the interwar period, which has been studied in historiography with categories such as scientific or academic exchanges and mobility, intellectual cooperation, etcetera. In other words, she attempts to show how links between France and a Latin American country were consolidated in circumstances not yet clearly institutionalized and formalized by state entities or organizations, but in which the university welcomed and staged these visits. The notion of “cultural ambassadors” is suggested to address the role played by the visitors, following the proposal made by the literature in reference to the overlaps between official and non-governmental missions in the processes of building exchange ties, intellectual relations and other forms of contact between nations.
With the work of Leandro Losada we enter into the University and explore its teaching tasks, observing the appearance, reading and impact of Machiavelli’s texts. His article studies the reception and interpretation of Machiavelli in the Spanish-speaking Atlantic world (Spain and Latin America) between 1914 and 1945, focusing on the considerations that prominent Argentine and Spanish professors of Political Law and Philosophy deployed on the thought of the Florentine author, among them: Mariano de Vedia y Mitre, Faustino Legón, Tomás Casares, Adolfo Posada, Luis Legaz y Lacambra and Francisco Javier Conde. Through this analysis, two problems are addressed: the academic and university reception of Machiavelli, and the characteristics of liberal and illiberal political thought during the selected period.
Francisco Morente takes us to the years of the Second World War and to a consideration of the university space that is also very new. The political and cultural relations between Germany and Spain during the Second World War have been the subject of considerable attention in recent years. This article is part of this field of study and analyzes the role of the Deutsch-Spanische Gesellschaft (DSG) in a hitherto little explored aspect, namely the establishment of its links with important Falangist political leaders who were also prominent figures in the Spanish university world. It shows how academic diplomacy helped to strengthen political ties between the Third Reich and Francoism. It also explores how these Falangist professors tried to introduce some aspects of the Nazi university into the organization of the Francoist university system. The work focuses on the study of some particularly relevant cases (Pedro Laín and Antonio Tovar, mainly) and is based on archival documentation from the DSG (Bundesarchiv-Berlin Lichterfelde-) and the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (Geheimes Staatsarchiv-Berlin-), among other primary sources.
Sarah Lemmen’s presentation of an institution that places the Spanish university at the heart of the Cold War also focuses on the international dimension of Franco’s regime. With the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, Franco’s Spain succeeded in establishing new international relations that permitted the country’s integration into the Western Bloc. This strategic shift towards participation in the anticommunist struggle was also visible in the academic sphere. The founding in 1946 of the Colegio Mayor Santiago Apostol as a refuge for those fleeing “religious persecution by communism” was just one example of the early opening of the Spanish academic system to foreigners and, indeed, the active recruitment of academics (both students and professors) from Eastern Europe. The article focuses on scholars from Eastern European countries in Spanish universities during the first two decades of the Cold War and their dual roles as intellectuals and emigrants. While the university system encouraged these academics to engage in academic exchanges under the authority of Franco’s dictatorship, their status as emigrants forced them to perform a cultural mediation task with which they explained Eastern Europe to the Spanish public and, to a lesser extent, Spain to an Eastern European public.
Consideration of Franco’s regime, in a far-reaching tour, is also present in Carolina Rodríguez-López’s study of the University. In 1929, Gregorio del Amo, a Spanish businessman based in California, created under his name an American Foundation dedicated to the promotion of scientific and academic projects between Spain and the United States. Its first objective was the creation of a University Residence on the Madrid campus, but the project also included student exchange programs, financing of scientific projects linked to Spanish companies and promotion of Spanish culture in the United States. This article presents the main activities developed by the Del Amo Foundation throughout its 50-year history (1929-1979) to learn about the transfers, links and expectations with Spanish culture, university and administration that the institution maintained. Special attention is paid to the type of political and academic relations that the Del Amo Foundation promoted during Franco’s regime as part of the new position that Franco wanted to occupy on the international scene.
Finally, in thematic and chronological range, the work of Giulia Quaggio delves into the role played by Spanish universities in shaping civilian and popular diplomacy in the final stage of the Cold War. To this end, after analyzing the ideas on peace and the end of the Cold War that circulated among Spaniards in the first half of the 1980s, this article considers the extent to which the reflections of the historian E. P. Thompson on extremism and the overcoming of bipolarity to embrace neutrality were disseminated among professors and students from different disciplinary areas. In addition, the work investigates the civil commitment against the Cold War of many professors through their relationship with the European nuclear disarmament campaign. In this way, the work attempts to overcome the stereotypical view of Spanish democratic consolidation as a stage without political commitment even in the university environment. In fact, between 1981 and 1986, the Spanish university also became a global campus for reflecting on the effects of the Cold War and the logic of deterrence: for the first time, studies on peace and war, the logic of security and armament entered directly into the lives of millions of Spanish students. In particular, this text takes into account how this debate would be assumed in national and local terms by the Spanish academic world.
The pillars that support our notion of a Global Campus are well established, we understand, with the contents that this issue offers, and will be expanded in future developments of the research project from which this publication originates. We must conclude with our thanks to the management and editorial team of Culture & History for the opportunity and facilities to bring our proposal to fruition.