Universities and democracy in the face of libertarian confrontation: Argentina 2024

Latin American universities have been one of the main strongholds in the construction of democracies. Their contributions to national development, to the formation of a public ethos, to mobility and social cohesion, to the production of knowledge and technologies and their transfer, legitimize public universities as a structural condition for the sustainability and development of the State itself, and of the citizenship that sustains it. The first libertarian government in Argentina, led by President Javier Milei, that took office on December 10, 2023, is jeopardizing the relationship between university on one side, Citizenship and the State on the other.

What is the focus of the confrontation defined by the libertarian government with the Universities? Is it just a fight between opposing political power players or is it that and much more?

The old and the new: expenses and the “caste”

The governments of the far right tend to establish an explicit struggle with public universities, on the assumption that they gather demographics that are highly reactive to their positions -very few votes are obtained there-. They also constitute a not to be underestimated budget for the social and educational investments supported by the national states. This last factor makes sense when societies vote for governments that are ideologically extreme right-wing and economically extreme liberals: the economicism with which they evaluate the State and society itself collides with the high valuation that society itself has of universities. The statements made by President Milei and various national officials materialize this perspective, which is willing to directly confront the role and relevance of universities in the shaping of a democratic Argentina. This process is nothing new, by the way.

The precedents of the libertarian view of public universities have at least three political processes of relevance: 

1) The recently created party supporting the libertarian project, La Libertad Avanza (Freedom moves forward), expressed positions against the financing of science and public education. In 2022 they already pointed out that universities were “centers of indoctrination” (Interview with Javier Milei, 2022), while one of their flagship deputies already declared in 2021 that politics should be banned in universities (post by José Luis Espert, 2021). All this is complemented by a constant discourse that questions the sense and value of having public universities. In the dispute for common sense, the libertarian platform tries to associate social rights with privileges, spurious investments that increase the social “expenditure” of an unnecessary State for a caste that wastes its time in politics and ideologies. In this imaginary, each person should be able to take care of his own interests and acquire “goods” not so much according to his social conditions, but according to his “effort”, his “merits”. An imaginary of contestation of the public sphere with recent precedents…

2) The national government of the “businessman” and former mayor of the City of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri (2015-2019). In the wake of the discourse of efficiency, on the one hand, and “meritocracy”, on the other, public universities were questioned because “no one born in poverty in Argentina today gets to university?” -as stated in 2018 by the governor of the province of Buenos Aires of the same period and of the same political party, María Eugenia Vidal-. At the same time, a valuation of the public was performed stating what the same budget cutting policies sought: the persistent idea that the public is and must be of worse quality than the private, synthesized in Macri´s statement  in 2017 that public education (he was referring then to basic education) was a place of lower quality to which one “falls”, that is to say, that one does not choose.

The regional context of recent years has been hostile to universities and university students: cuts in university and scientific funding and in the educational system in general; construction and legitimization of anti-scientific and negationist discourses -on climate change, gender inequalities proven by social research, ethnic-indigenous and gender identities, among many others, which in turn find in the university academic field a strong ally-. Attacks by the political authorities on the teaching staff also emerge -accusations on teaching, the invocation of “communism” that they would propagate, “ideologization” and “indoctrination”-, which regionally acquire the grammar of the struggle against “cultural Marxism”. All this shows a mode of political construction that denies the value of participation in university life and negativizes its social contribution, thus producing a double-edged challenge: to the democratic life of the university and to what universities do in terms of training, research and extension. This refers to a broader process…

3) The tendency to question the autonomy of universities, both in political and economic terms. One of the axes of higher education reforms implemented in Latin America at the end of the last century focused on the opening of “markets”, the growth of the private sector and the expansion of the logics of efficiency and accountability. Although this process did not come to a complete halt, it was merged with another process that vindicated and refinanced higher education in the first decade of the new century, materialized in the creation of new public institutions -in Argentina, Brazil-, the expansion of supply -in Uruguay, for example- and mechanisms such as scholarships and quotas that favored access and permanence of students coming from lower backgrounds.

Universities and politics in Milei's Argentina 2024

Is it just a public discourse or does the dispute have concrete material bases? Does it endanger the democratic habitus of the Argentine Society or is it an exaggeration -as libertarians say- of university progressivism? 

The cultural dispute of the right wing with authoritarian overtones builds a novel figure, a “caste” that, in contexts of deprivation and persistent economic crisis permeates the sensibilities of a citizenship. The caste is supposed to be privileged sectors that seize taxes to live high on the hog. All this, while the university budget is being cut at record levels: during 2024 (until October) it was estimated that the real cut was 30%, reaching almost 25% of the university salary cut.

In Argentina, public universities -with open access and no fee- account for 80% of university enrollment and do so in a sustained manner. This situation gives a particularity to Argentine higher education in the regional framework: the university field is eminently public in demographics, in the configuration of the higher education system and, certainly, in legitimacy. The quality of public higher education is appreciated by the population as a whole, by the field of party politics -which also plays its political game in university government- and even by the global university evaluation devices, the rankings, which measure the prestige and recognition of the institutions. The main public universities are in the lead.

The democratic life of the universities, that which makes possible the participation of students, teachers and non-teaching workers in the election of authorities and in the definition of institutional policies since the 1918 University Reform of Córdoba, is marked by the presence of traditional political forces with ramifications and memberships in the student organizations, in the alignments and positions of professors and authorities, as well as in the teaching unions. Peronism -with its different variants-, radicalism (Radical Civic Union, a more than centennial party of the center) -dominant especially in the more traditional and larger universities-, and the leftist forces -from the socialist party to the Trotskyist left- and independents who align themselves with one or the other. The presence of libertarians in the university is incipient and well reduced.

Therefore, in view of this conformation of the university system and its politicization, what are the effects of the cultural and economic attack of the national libertarian government on public universities?

During 2024, the universities called for demonstrations in their defense that surprised by their demography: on April 23 and October 2, each time they gathered more than 1 million people (estimated) in each of them, in the City of Buenos Aires and in the interior of the country and with the occupation of Faculties by the student body during the months of September and October. The demonstrations were called by all the university actors (rectors, unions, student groups and federations) and had the support of a large number of unions, trade unions, political parties, social movements, cultural institutions, human rights organizations and had expressions in favor of communicators, journalists and media of different ideologies and political positions.  

Have legal and political limits been constructed in the face of an attack on an institution of democracy?

Faced with these limits, the struggle was redirected by the libertarian forces towards “inefficiency + caste”: public universities should be audited because they execute public funds. This led the national government to try to intervene on university autonomy, distorting the current legislation which, respecting the constitutional autonomy of universities, establishes that they can only be audited by the control bodies of the Legislative Authority, i.e. the General Audit Office of the Nation, and not by other bodies directly dependent on the Executive. The normative prevention is logical: if an authoritarian government wanted to discipline or eliminate the Argentine public university, it could do it very easily, being the administrator of the funding and at the same time the one who controls it, gathering an excessive power that would lead the institutions to be subject to the whim of the government authorities. The fact that the nation's budget and the control of certain public institutions is deposited as a power in the Legislative Power marks the balances that the libertarian government seeks to force.

In the middle there is a political process: a good part of the political parties with parliamentary representation, until then facing each other in a very polarized way, approved in the National Congress a university budget law that reversed and limited the national government's budget cuts. The same day of the second university march in October, President Javier Milei vetoed this law, which had been approved with the votes of Peronism, part of Radicalism and other political forces. The attack on public universities in their politicization thus produces signs of a more articulated political construction between parties that until then were more confrontational in the National Congress than in the public universities, where coexistence and democratic participation -which Milei wants to annul- between different forces is customary, a public ethos forged there. The limits to authoritarianisms are thus stopped with more democracy and political articulation. And in the streets.

The recent report by Gradin et al. (2024) indicates that social conflict in the first year of the libertarian government has been high, with protests and demonstrations that in some months averaged around two events per day. Demands for social services and social rights were among the most frequent and the demonstrations with the highest volume, as we have indicated. 

The challenge to the field of public universities by the new Argentine government is not new: The libertarian attack is based on the questioning of an institution and a way of linking with knowledge, with society and with politics, which are contrary to their discourse order based on fake news, attacks on social networks and the avoidance of any space for discussion that can be based on facts. The libertarian political construction not only dispenses with the university space, it also challenges it because it raises systematic ways of linking with knowledge, with information, and even with the partisan political dispute that escape the merely outrageous, angry and corrosive dynamics with which they challenge all the democratic institutionality also built in public universities.

Dr. Sebastián Fuentes is a researcher at CONICET, based in the Education Area at FLACSO, Argentina. He holds a degree in Philosophy, a Master’s in Social Sciences with a focus on Education, and a PhD from IDAES/UNSAM, where he studied education and sports sociability among elites in Buenos Aires.

His research explores socio-educational inequalities, youth experiences, and gender relations, with a focus on educational policies and social inclusion.

Dr. Fuentes has contributed to various academic groups, including NEPEC-Grupo Viernes, NEEDS, and RIES, and participated in international projects such as the GLOBALSPORT initiative at the University of Amsterdam. He also coordinates NEGESEC, a hub for research on gender, education, and sexuality.

The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of EU-VALUES Network.