Reframing higher education through alterity: Toward a decolonial normative framework from Latin America

Higher education is increasingly shaped by tensions between competitiveness, global rankings, and demands for social justice, interculturality, and inclusion. In Latin America, these tensions are intensified by persistent inequality and by colonial legacies that continue to structure knowledge production and institutional life. Although contemporary debates in the philosophy of higher education address justice, citizenship, and ethics, they have not systematically developed alterity as a normative foundation for rethinking the university. This conceptual article advances a decolonial normative framework that brings alterity to the center of higher education theory and institutional reflection. Drawing on Levinas's ethics of the Other, Freire's critical pedagogy, and Latin American decolonial thought, the article develops three interconnected pillars: alterity as an epistemic lens for challenging hegemonic knowledge hierarchies; mesoaxiology as a value-oriented basis for institutional practice and governance; and comprehensive-edifying pedagogy as a way of integrating ethical responsibility and intercultural dialogue into teaching, assessment, and community engagement. The article contributes to educational philosophy by offering an integrative framework that connects ethical, institutional, and pedagogical dimensions of higher education. While grounded in Latin American debates, the framework is proposed as a transferable conceptual resource for examining universities in other unequal and plural contexts.