National identity and higher education: From the origins till 1974

Abstract

In his chapter, Sobral sets out to reconstruct the connection between national identity and higher learning from Portugal's beginnings as a political identity in the Middle Ages until the democratic revolution of 1974. Assuming that the Portuguese nation is a product of the founding of the Kingdom of Portugal, the author traces the links between its history and that of the establishment of a Portuguese university. Though there is a connection between the kingdom's prestige and the university, only later was it assumed that the university should have a central role in the development of the nation, a role that continued under the liberal regime and the Republic. The dictatorship of the Estado Novo marked a break in the expansion of higher learning almost to the end, when policies changed the better to put Portugal in a position comparable with more developed countries.