While we received information from Buenos Aires about the massive and peaceful mobilization of hundreds of thousands of students, academics and officials of Argentine universities, who marched with books in their hands, we learned with emotion and impact the official statement of the National Interuniversity Council (CIN). ), of the Guild Front of National Universities and that of the Argentine University Federation. His judgment was very clear: “The Argentine public university is going through a critical period as a consequence of the policies implemented by the national government”; in circumstances that “public universities are one of the engines of democracy, production and social ties.”
We can only share your considerations. “Education is a fundamental human right because it prevails over the unpleasant chance of inequality.” (…) We assume the task of unwaveringly defending access to education for the vast majority,” he says. the declaration of the trans-Andean university communities.
“We don’t want our dreams to be taken away from us: our future does not belong to them. We are proud sons and daughters of the Argentine university; We are the public university, free and unrestricted in admission, of excellence, with freedom and equity. We are the university for the great Argentine people. Therefore, heWe will fight in an inalienable democratic and peaceful resistance, for the education we want, for the country we long for,” they say.
Likewise, they emphasize that science and technology are substantial aspects for the production of “sovereignty, development and progress”, and that “a country that does not invest in science renounces its sovereignty.” They add that “The defunding of the university and the scientific system is detrimental to the proclaimed objectives of achieving economic growth.”
They conclude: “We defend access to public higher education as a right. We believe in the equalizing capacity of free public education, in the transformative power of the university as formidable tool for upward social mobility and in the differential and substantive contribution that scientific production makes to the knowledge society. All the problems we have are solved with more education and public universities, with more investment in science and technology. We want our institutions to be the device that allows Argentina to retrace structural inequalities and embark on the path of development and sovereignty. Education saves us and makes us free. “We call on Argentine society to defend it.”
On behalf of the Consortium of Universities of the State of Chile (CUECH), I was responsible for signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the CIN of Argentina, in the context of the International Education Fair (FIESA), held in November 2022 in the city of Mar del Plata, a world-class event in which some 200 higher education institutions from America and Europe participated. The CIN, on the other hand, is the main space for articulation of trans-Andean higher education, bringing together 72 university institutions.
The signing of the Memorandum was preceded by a Conversation on “The challenges of higher education in Chile and Argentina”, which was part of the official FIESA program. We had the opportunity to express our conviction in the need to strengthen state higher education in Chile and the imperative to “consecrate it as a universal social right.” We were able to expose the historic efforts of the educational communities in our country to overcome the market education project imposed in times of authoritarianism and its negative impacts on Chilean society.
Everything indicates that in Argentina the illusory idea has emerged that the market can be a better regulator of education, and that the notion of education as a public good and a social right guaranteed by the State must be abandoned… The communities of the public universities of Chile we say a resounding No! We have experienced firsthand what it means to resist the attacks of higher education mediated by the interests of a market that benefits few. and not to society as a whole, and a production of knowledge limited by what is traded in the market, which continues to leave our communities, our country, on the limits of underdevelopment and the weakening of the path to the horizon of good living.
As we pointed out in a recent statement from the Consortium of Universities of the State of Chile (CUECH), In our country, after 50 years, “we have not managed to overcome a paradigm based on commercial conceptions to understand public education.”
“The restrictions and precariousness that underlie the university fee models based on subsidizing demand or the forced privatization of scientific and technological knowledge, through the strangulation of the fiscal contribution to Universities and academic research institutions, inevitably leads to the loss of national sovereignty over scientific data and reduces the possibilities of using the advancement of science and technology for the benefit of people,” stated the CUECH statement.
For this reason, “we join as the System of State Universities (of Chile) to the voices that warn about this bad path that Argentina is taking.”
From this side of the Andes Mountains, we express our solidarity and friendship with our colleagues from the National Interuniversity Council (CIN), as well as with the entire university communities of Argentina. We have no doubt that, as in other moments in history, this gray and bitter moment that the land of the Liberator José de San Martín faces today will be left behind.
Marisol Durán Santis is Rector of the Metropolitan Technological University. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Consortium of Universities of the State of Chile (CUECH).
