Smith, Rosi. Deepening Participation. The impact of Cuba's local university centers

In all studies there is an interaction between the content of the study in the sense of the results reported, and the methodology of the study.The importance of understanding the latter to being able to appropriately understand the former, which is the very purpose of doing studies, is underlined by the typical requirement for master's and PhD theses to have a methodology section, and for the number of academic articles in many fields that include methodology sections.The author of this work considers the methodology used to be particularly important and consequential to the results that the study is intended to generate.The heart of her methodology for this study is that "much of this account of the local university centres is in the words of those involved in the programme in six municipalities in Granma" (p.3).As per this quote, this methodology determines that "much" of the results of the study will consist of the words "from 240 semi-structured interviews with students, teachers, policy-makers and community leaders" (p.3).But, appropriately in the view of this reviewer, not all.Her "authorial role goes well beyond that of mediator" (p.5).The narrowest statement of the subject of study of this work would be the experiment in municipalisation of higher education by the Cuban government.By 1999, enrolment in higher education in Cuba had fallen to just over 100,000 from its historical high in the late 1980s of 300,000.Then at the very beginning of this century small university sites were set up in every one of Cuba's 169 municipalities.By 2007-8, enrolment in higher education was over 700,000, with 610,000 of those studying part-time in their local communities (pp.2, 182).There has been almost nothing written about this in any language other than Spanish, and very little outside of Latin America.Even in Cuba, beyond the many hundreds of published articles and conference papers on this, there are only a couple of edited books and "no overarching account of municipalization or a meaningful analysis of the subjective impact of mass access to higher