Abstract
This work aims to draw attention to an aspect of the life and history of the university that is not commonly approached and perhaps not even recognized by those who deal with it: the fact that it is, and has been, an institution that since its reform in the 19th century, it participated in the program of social transformation and domination of capital. That its structure, its academic programs and its forms of government respond to the forms, structures and purposes of the expanded reproduction of capitalist values, and that, therefore, its current crisis is nothing but a consequence of the general crisis that, since the seventies of the last century, affects the capitalist system as a whole. Likewise, it highlights both some of the processes that exemplify that condition, as well as some episodes of resistance and fight. Concluding that in the current times, perhaps it is already in the terminal phase of its existence.