Students and the Political System of the University of Buenos Aires

In: Journal of Inter-American Studies, Band 8, Heft 4, S. 633-656

Abstract

The National University of Buenos Aires, the largest and for many years the most prestigious in Latin America, is today more commonly taken as the archetype of the political Latin American university—and the connotations of "political" are wholly pejorative. This notoriety may be due in part, as Kalman Silvert suggests, to the high visibility of the University, especially to touring North American newsmen. Nevertheless, as its numerous critics allege, there seems to be abundant evidence to link politics to the manifest disarray of the educational process: in the well-publicized brawls among contending student factions and confrontations between demonstrators and the police, student strikes in opposition to procedural reforms desirable on grounds of efficiency, the reputed "terrorization" of heterodox professors, several student homicides in recent years, the distressingly high incidence of abandonos (for it is assumed, erroneously, that many withdrawals from the University are motivated by disgust with its politics); student political behavior as in the abusive reception tendered W. W. Rostow by a student group in Economic Sciences in February 1965, may have international repercussions. Such depressing phenomena have led even temperate and knowledgeable observers to speak of the "failure" of the University, and to call for a thoroughgoing structural overhaul, conducive, among other things, to depoliticization.