Abstract
The ideas in this paper seek to present and defend the founding principles and orientations of the public university as a central institution of social and individual shaping processes. Education and knowledge are public goods and essential human rights and have to show quality with scientific and social meaning. Human rights should never be neglected, nor denied to shares of the population or be restricted to pragmatic and utilitarian aspects of life. Quality for the few is elitism. Quality only for the market is the reduction of the citizen to capital or resource. Higher education, however, is in great part propelled by powerful international organisms and the formal market economy, and tends to replace the essential goals of full human education by competence capacitation and market-based abilities. The operational, neoliberal education provided by today's university has contributed to the amplification of social inequality. The university has a responsibility over social development models. Education and knowledge with scientific quality and social pertinence mingle together in stablishing the university's public responsibility. An institution that drifts away from its social and public responsibilities is not worthy of being dubbed a university.
Keywords
Public university; Public responsibility; Quality; Scientific relevance and social pertinence