University Governance and the Culture of Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Charcas

Abstract

The article analyzes how the University of Charcas participated in public affairs in Chuquisaca (present-day Sucre) during the late colonial era. I show that following the Jesuit expulsion in the 1760s, the claustro (academic senate) became a center of university life. This body held annual elections to appoint the rector and passed governing rules for the university that allocated academic chairs based on public tenders. The faculty forcefully defended their newly gained autonomy from ecclesiastical and royal authorities, and its representative practices were instrumental in consolidating a culture of dissent that helped destabilize the unanimity principle underlying the monarchical imaginary, a principle that deemed nonconforming opinions a societal pathology incompatible with the sovereign’s will and the common good. The rise of this contentious politics helped set the conditions for Chuquisaca’s general uprising after the French invasion of Spain in 1808.