Introduction
According to the leading decolonial thinker Walter D. Mignolo, the accumulation of capital went – and still goes – hand in hand with the accumulation of knowledge.Reference Mignolo1 This is tantamount to saying that European colonial expansion made the university a key institution for colonial domination of non-Western cultures by Western cultures. In the case of the Americas, for instance, universities were created by English and Spanish migrants and their Creole descendants by replicating the model of the Renaissance university. Therefore, since the 16th century, the Western version of higher education has been instrumental to the imposition of the colonizers’ patterns of expression and beliefs; a process that, according to Aníbal Quijano,Reference Quijano2 took place in three stages. First, non-Western modes of knowledge and meaning were repressed. Second, colonizers imposed a mystified image of their patterns of knowledge and meaning, which were set apart from the colonized. And third, these patterns were later taught – in a partial and selective way – to those whom the colonizers sought to co-opt into their power institutions. This three-stage process resulted in the transformation of European culture into a universal cultural model, and a seductive one, for it facilitates the access to power.Reference Quijano2
While colonialism is over as a dominant political order after 1945, coloniality3 – as the most widespread method of domination across our world – remains; hence, it is interesting to see how the Western university mutated along this process. Mignolo does not aim to provide a complete history of the university as institution, but one concerned with its replication in the Americas, and in this context the exclusion of the medieval university may be considered acceptable. However, his subsequent history in three stages (the Renaissance university, the Kantian-Humboldtian university, and the corporate university) is highly debatable. According to Mignolo, the Renaissance university was organized around the trivium and the quadrivium at the service of the Crown and the Church. This model changed in the 19th century into the Kantian-Humboldtian university, which was organized around philosophy and sciences at the service of the emerging nation-states. As only one further model remains – the corporate university – which emerged in the late twentieth/early 21st century, this would mean that current faculty members were thus far trained in the Kantian-Humboldtian university model. But Mignolo is overlooking a previous mutation of the Kantian-Humboldtian university, namely, that represented by the chrestomathic university.Reference Young4 This university model is best represented by the founding of the University of London in 1825, along the lines of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘useful learning’ and as a reaction against the Oxbridge model. While the University of London and other reformed German and American universities offered a comprehensive range of ‘useful’ subjects, elitist Oxbridge was criticized precisely for reserving an important part of the curriculum to ‘useless knowledge’: the humanities.
Although the consequences of neglecting the chrestomathic university in Mignolo’s discussion of the role of the humanities in the corporate university deserve further discussion, it suffices to consider here the corporate university as a recent mutation of the former, and not directly of the Humboldtian-Kantian university. The corporate university receives ever more overseas students and expands across the world by establishing branch campuses abroad. The corporate university is at the service of global capital and organizes around what neoliberalism classifies as ‘immediate-profit’ disciplines. Obviously, humanities are not among the latter. Humanities have become supplemental within ‘an education geared increasingly toward training experts in practical knowledge’.Reference Mignolo5
The aim of my paper is twofold. First, I will discuss how a university in the Southern European periphery, founded during the Renaissance at the service of the archbishopric of Santiago de Compostela, participates in this process of corporatization, in which the reception of Chinese students who want to learn Spanish is crucial. This is despite the fact that the Universidade of Santiago de Compostela (USC) is a bilingual institution in which Spanish is not the first, but the second language. Second, from the perspective of the humanities in crisis, I will deal with the possibility of turning to comparative literature – not as part of training for specialists, but simply as pedagogy. Finally, drawing on the previous two parts, some concluding remarks will follow in relation to intercultural learning at the interface of multicultural societies.
A university in the European periphery goes corporate
During the last two decades Spanish universities in general and the USC in particular have increasingly internationalized, the largest share of this internationalization is today represented by students. Much less important is the international composition of research networks and less still the presence of international faculty members (including foreign language departments), which is kept to a minimum. As a matter of fact, academic and research jobs in Spain are, as yet, not being advertised in international online recruitment services, nor is there a single national online recruitment service. This is in spite of the pervading governmental discourse about excellence in order to boost Spanish universities in international rankings. This form of internationalization is the result of two major events: first, the entry of Spain in 1985 into the European Economic Community (EEC), (now European Union, EU); second, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009. Although both events had opposing effects, they achieved the same result – internationalization.
The entry into the EEC was nationally celebrated as the end of the Transition to Democracy and the achievement of modernization. This was publicized worldwide by way of two simultaneous global events – the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona and the Universal Exposition in Seville, which tellingly reunited in a single package the two cities in Spain with high cultural capital value: the former due to its connections with the international avant-garde and the latter for being quintessentially national. The entry into the EEC–EU had a major impact not only in economic terms, but also on the higher education system, due to the Erasmus Program and the development of the European Higher Education Area. According to the latest report published by the European Commission in November 2013, Spain remains the leading destination for European university students in the Erasmus exchange scheme, welcoming some 15.5% of all students who take part in the program.6 Furthermore, Spain hosts 2% of all international students across the world.7 From the mid-1990s to the first years of the 21st century, Spain also became a host country for migrants in general. According to the 2009 census, migrants represented 12% of the total population, while in the mid-1990s migrants represented only 2.5% of the total population. Booming Spain was Europe’s largest absorber of migrants from 2002 to 2007.
In contrast, the Global Financial Crisis proved that Spain does not belong to the core of modern Europe, but to the Global European South, together with Portugal, Italy and Greece – the PIGS, as derogatively called by British media. From 2011, the number of migrants from Spain began to decrease for the first time in 20 years. While the number of EU students migrating to Spain has not decreased, the opportunities for Spanish students to enrol at other European universities are significantly decreasing as the result of financial cuts in the Erasmus Program; not to mention the decrease in enrolment of domestic students due to higher fees and fewer available grants.
In this context, the corporatization of Spanish universities is not only a belated phenomenon in relation to what has been happening among US universities since the late 1970s but, in the main, a result of the perceived magical solution of neoliberal policies in times of crisis and risk. Before proceeding any further, it is worth defining what we mean by a corporate university (CU). Originally, CUs were set-up as educational entities designed to assist parent organizations, typically corporations. Key examples are Hamburger University, the training facility of McDonalds’ Corporation, Apple University, the training facility of Apple Inc., and Goldman Sachs University, the training facility of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Therefore, CUs originated as a tool for providing company-specific training. Interestingly, while CUs operate in competition with ‘traditional universities’, the latter are embracing many of CUs’ tenets and are hence going through a process of corporatization. This process may be more or less extensive, ranging from branding corporatization and adoption of a highly technical-oriented profile to the creation of a partnership between a university and a corporation. In the following, ‘CU’ will refer to a traditional university that goes corporate. The defining feature of a CU is the conception of students as ‘consumers’ and of education and research as ‘products’. Like multinational corporations, corporate universities aim at targeting an increasing number of students-consumers, not only local, regional or national, but mainly international.
To my knowledge, within the EU only a few British universities are in the process of replicating the US model of CUs, by both receiving more overseas students and establishing branch campuses abroad. However, unlike British universities, Spanish universities can neither go corporate by establishing branch campuses abroad, nor attract non-domestic students on the basis of league tables. But what Spanish universities can do in order to become corporate is take advantage of Spanish as both the second language in the world with a wide geographical distribution, and one of the most popular languages learned as second language (L2). This explains why, even amid the current Spanish economic turmoil, Spain remains resilient as a study destination. For the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel García-Margallo, the Instituto Cervantes – a government agency that is the largest organization responsible for promoting the study and the teaching of Spanish – is ‘one of the crown jewels of Spain’s foreign actions’.8
The corporatization of the USC follows this path as a way of overcoming financial cuts by both the regional and national governments. There is, in addition, a new phenomenon to contend with, namely, the decrease in the number of domestic students, not as a result of the endemic aging of Galician population, but due to the financial crisis, the increase in fees and the decreasing number of available grants, as mentioned above. As non-domestic students cannot be attracted on the basis of league tables, they are attracted through exchange programs. And it is here that China excels. Between 2007 and 2011 the USC had only six exchange programs with Chinese higher education institutions, but the number of programs has tripled since 2012, resulting in a constantly increasing number of Chinese students. This led the board of trustees to develop, on 2 May 2013, a program called ‘PATEX’, which aims at making it easier for non-EU students to enrol at the USC.9Figure 1 shows how successful this program has been in targeting Chinese students.
Number of Chinese students enrolling at USC between 2010–2011 and 2014–2015 (source: USC International Relations Office).
Statistics from the USC International Relations Office also show that what attracts Chinese students to the USC is Spanish as L2: 66.7% in 2013–2014 and 90.1% in 2014–2015 chose the BA in Spanish, meaning that they concentrate in a single school (the School of Languages) and receive training provided by faculty staff affiliated to either the Department of Spanish or the Department of Spanish Literature. Thus far, there are no signs of corporatization. However, a different narrative emerges when one considers that PATEX students are charged €70 per ECTS-credit, while EU students are charged €9.85.10 As the fee for Chinese students is around 700% higher than for EU students, one may wonder how this translates into the education they receive. Typical of a corporatization process in the age of neoliberalism, profits are being maximized without a single investment in the field of education. Investments, if any, are restricted to the field of ‘services’, the new brand product of CUs.11 Thus, PATEX highlights how smoothly non-EU students may enrol at the USC and receive their diplomas as a result of managerial support; while nothing is said about the studies they are offered.
The education story is as follows. Although only one of the 19 schools and two of the 76 departments receive the overwhelming majority of Chinese and other ‘Spanish as L2’ students, higher fees have not translated into additional funding and support for either the school or the two departments. Until 2011–2012 Chinese students shared the same seminars as domestic students, even if they wanted to learn Spanish as L2, which is quite a different aim from that pursued by the seminars, namely, training students as specialists in the Spanish language. Since 2012–2013, a new procedure has been implemented, whereby Chinese students are distributed in accordance with the learners’ divisions of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. A1 students have to attend beginner Spanish seminars at the Centre of Foreign Languages during the first semester. A2 students have specific seminars both in Spanish language and literature. B1 students may choose only some seminars from the BA in Spanish, while B2 and upper level students may choose any seminar they wish. One may think that higher fees have been instrumental to instituting a change such as this, but it is not the case, for the implementation of this new procedure has been made possible due to a reduction of the percentage allocated to research within the overall workload of faculty members in exchange for an increased teaching load. This situation is, of course, in line with the supplemental nature of research in the humanities and the business-oriented role of L2 acquisition.
Comparative literature as pedagogy
Of the several situations Chinese students may experience at the USC, I will focus here on A2 students, who may only choose some specific seminars, especially devised for them, namely, three language-oriented seminars and two literature-oriented seminars. Of these five seminars, I will focus here on the literature-oriented ones – G5041121 ‘Introducción a la historia de la literatura española’ (Introduction to the history of Spanish literature) and G5041442 ‘Comentario literario de textos hispánicos’, where ‘comentario de texto’ (literally, text comment) stands for a typical Spanish reading exercise that draws on the French tradition of the explication du texte. As both seminars are offered during the first semester, Chinese students attend two survey seminars devoted to Peninsular Spanish literary works from the Middle Ages to the present.
Teachers of these seminars agree on the difficulties they experience with Chinese students. Although their linguistic competence may be restricted to understanding literary texts at the beginning of the seminars, they achieve impressive linguistic progress very soon. And yet such progress does not allow them to fully grasp the texts due to lack of knowledge of the cultural background, especially for premodern texts, despite the fact that the seminars start with contemporary texts and then re-track to the Middle Ages. This recurrent comment leads me to wonder why comparative literature, instead of being considered a research-oriented discipline, is not applied as a teaching method, a kind of propaedeutics of which both domestic and foreign students – Chinese included – may take advantage. As far as I know, this pedagogical aspect of comparative literature has not been taken into consideration, not even in discussions of its role within the humanities.
In this article I can only give one example. Teachers of the above-mentioned seminars agree that one of the most difficult texts for Chinese students is the late 15th- early 16th-century dialogue-‘novel’ Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, also known as Celestina, a work that is included in the seminar due to its canonical importance in Spanish literature. Notwithstanding this canonical importance, other factors need to be stressed when teaching Celestina, such as the fact that the work was written during the short period of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, the union of Castile and Aragon, the conquest of Granada, and the expulsion of the Jews. Be this as it may, the linguistic difficulty of the text is undeniable, and this explains why Celestina is sometimes read by domestic high school students in a modern Spanish version. Besides these linguistic difficulties, the cultural specificity remains, particularly when one considers that Celestina is one of three mythic characters that Spanish literature provided to world literature alongside Don Quixote and Don Juan. As a result of interviews with some Chinese students who have attended the seminars I am dealing with here, I have learned that they seem to especially enjoy the love affair between the youngsters Calisto and Melibea in the style of Shakespeare’s later Romeo and Juliet, and the behaviour of their servants. What is more challenging for them to understand is how the character of the go-between, Celestina – the true central character of the work – is built, especially regarding the dominant reception that reads the character as intrinsically wicked.
And it is here that comparative literature as pedagogy could be extremely fruitful. What would happen if, instead of reading Celestina as a quintessentially Spanish literary work, it was read comparatively with equally canonical Chinese works? I am obviously thinking of 
(Xixiang ji – The Story of the Western Wing).12 Like Celestina, The Story of the Western Wing tells the story of a secret love affair between two youngsters, the scholar Zhang Sheng and Cui Yingying, the daughter of a chief minister of the court. Like Calisto, after the initial refusal by Melibea, student Chang also falls ill when the young girl upbraids him for his lascivious designs. And like Celestina, Hong Niang, Cui Yingying’s handmaid, serves as the catalyst for the actions of the other characters, ingeniously tells half-truths, and manipulates the youngsters to action. However, unlike Celestina, The Story of the Western Wing has a happy ending with the lovers finally united in marriage, whereas in the Spanish work, Melibea commits suicide after Calisto’s ‘accidental’ fall when leaving her house. This difference can obviously be related to the opposing values of the character of the go-between – an old licentious woman in Celestina, in contrast to the sympathetic Hong Niang. Interestingly, the similarities between these two works include not only thematics, plot construction and characterization, but both depend on previous shorter works; the issue of collaborative authorship has been discussed in both cases, both include dramatic lyrics, and both have become the basis for innumerable later adaptations. To The Story of the Western Wing one may add another important work of Chinese literature, although less known among young adults due to its ‘pornographic character’, namely, 
(Jin ping mei – The Plum in the Golden Vase). Here, the character of the go-between, Wang puo, presents features much closer to those of Celestina, for Wang puo (literally, the old Wang) is a witty old woman, a kind of female jack-of-all-trades, including matchmaker and witch doctor.13 Like Celestina, Jin ping mei includes explicit depictions of sexuality and Wang puo manipulates all the other characters as puppets. Hence the reading of the work as depicting a morally corrupt world in which greed, perversity, lust, and hypocrisy dominate, which is exactly the way in which Celestina has been read.
Conclusion
Turning to comparative literature as pedagogy in the specific case I am dealing with here means making use of one of Earl Miner’s canons of comparability, namely, ‘alienation’; that is, ‘a deliberate introduction of something kindred but unconnected historically with the issue or matter at hand’.Reference Miner14 But in contrast to Miner, who alienates the known element – linguistically, the etic – by introducing an unknown element – the emic – what I am advocating here is a ‘reverse alienation’. This places Chinese students at the centre of the learning experience, for what they alienate is the etic point of reference (here, Celestina) of both the teacher and ideally, domestic students, who in this way would be reintegrated in a single intercultural learning site. Furthermore, as both Chinese works – Xixiang ji and Jin ping mei – have been translated into Spanish,15 Chinese students could improve their skills in Spanish by contrasting specific passages of these works with the Chinese original texts and, hence, bring into the classroom translations issues worth discussing. Meanwhile, domestic students could put into practice Miner’s exercise of alienation and test the meanings which Spanish literary criticism has attached to canonical works such as Celestina. An issue of key importance may also be discussed, namely, the connections between Celestina and the so-called Mudéjar context: on the one hand, the similarities between the Spanish go-between in the Libro de buen amor (Book of good love) and Celestina and, on the other hand, Indian and Arab models – not to mention the possible intermediary role of Indian and Arab texts between China and Spain.
As the history of the university as institution shows, it has always been a contradictory site, a location of conflict between an external source of power and an internal pursuit of academic freedom. Jacques Derrida persuasively captured this conflict in the image of mochlos, ‘a wooden beam, a lever for displacing a boat, a wedge for opening or closing a door, something, in short, to lean on for forcing and displacing’.Reference Derrida16 In the situation I have described here, it is clear that such a mochlos is represented by higher fees in exchange for ‘better’ managerial services, which faculty members counterbalance by applying their academic freedom and performing their professional tasks as well as possible, despite the lack of any support. My example regarding the use of comparative literature as pedagogy goes some way to resolving some of the resultant issues. However, this does not mean that the conflict between external interests and internal autonomy has been solved; indeed, an external/internal divide is a demagogic phenomenon that introduces further confusion, for the PATEX program has been implemented by university authorities. Furthermore, there are other serious issues that have not been taken into consideration, among which the linguistic ecology stands out. In contrast to other Spanish universities that are leaders in the offer of Spanish as L2 and are located in monolingual Spanish areas, for instance, the Universidad de Salamanca, the USC is a bilingual institution, whose first language is Galician, and not Spanish. The bid to attract international students of Spanish as L2 places at serious risk the normalization process of Galician and poses new problems for which there are no easy solutions, such as the decreasing use of Galician in seminars attended by international students.
In The University without Condition, Derrida imagines a university-to-come in which the humanities will play a key role.Reference Derrida17 Returning to my initial reference to Walter D. Mignolo, it is my contention that such a key role may be achieved if ‘[t]he humanities, as a disciplinary configuration, would become a trans- (rather than inter-) disciplinary space for both a positive production and transformation of knowledge and understanding and for critical reflections on the production of knowledge and understanding’.Reference Mignolo5 This requires gearing literary studies towards transculturation rather than as an epiphenomenon of language competence, an aim for which comparative literature and translation studies are crucial. In the corporate university this may mean offering the role philosophy had in the pre-chrestomathic university to the humanities – but an enlarged concept of humanities in which the growing relevance of non-Western languages and knowledge finds a place of its own. Somewhat paradoxically, this may result in CUs becoming less corporate, provided that academic freedom – understood as both critical distance in relation to outside forces and interrogation of our own performance as teachers – persists in contesting the neoliberal mochlos.
Acknowledgements
A first and shorter version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences, Globalization, and China, which was held at Tsinghua University on 15–17 May 2014. This paper forms part of the research activities of the Jean Monnet Chair ‘The Culture of European Integration’ (no. 528689).
César Domínguez is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain, where he holds the Jean Monnet Chair ‘The Culture of European Integration’. His teaching and research focus upon the theory of comparative literature, comparative literary history, comparative European literature, and world literature. His latest books are World Literature: A Reader (Routledge, 2013, co-edited with Theo D’haen and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen), Literatura europea comparada (Arco/Libros, 2013), Contemporary Developments in Emergent Literatures and the New Europe (USC, 2014, co-edited with Manus O’Dwyer), and Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications (Routledge, 2015, co-authored with Haun Saussy and Darío Villanueva).
