The corporization of a public university with free undergraduate education: endangering autonomy at the University of Buenos Aires

CECILIA RIKAP

WORLD SOCIAL and ECONOMIC REVIEW of Contemporary Policy Issues

World Economics Association

Lugar: Bristol; Año: 2017 vol. 8 p. 44 - 59

2049-3517

The University of Buenos Aires (UBA) is the biggest university in Argentina, both in terms of students (262.932 undergraduate and 14.441postgraduate students, according to the UBA´s 2011 Students Census, latest available) and faculty (28.232, according to the UBA´s 2011 Faculty Census, latest available). Considering national research indicators and the UBA´s tradition,it has been placed as Argentina?s flagship university (García de Fanelli, 2007). Four out of the five Nobel prices won by Argentina corresponded to the UBA´s professors. This university?s importance continues to grow. In 2014, it ranked second among Latin American institutions in the Shanghai World Universities Ranking, and first according to 2015?s QS World Universities Ranking. As all the other public universities in Argentina, the UBA offers free undergraduate education in all its faculties. Maybe this is why this university has not called the attention of the economic literature when analyzing the development of what has been called academic enterprise (Larsen,2011), academic capitalism (Slaughterand Leslie, 1997), market-university (Berman,2011) or entrepreneurial university (Etzkowitz,2008; Etzkowitz et al., 1998). Nevertheless, in this article we will tryto show how, despite offering free undergraduate education, the UBA has become anacademic enterprise or market university. This transformation not only affected its autonomy, orienting teaching and research, but it has also reduced the UBA´s researchers time to perform new or creative research encouraging them to sell technical assistances and other routine or repetitive activities.In order to analyze the UBA´s transformation into a market university or an academic enterprise, the article will be organized as follows. Section 2 will briefly present our theoretical framework considering the contributions of the academic capitalism, market-university and academic enterprise approaches. Section 3 will deal with the UBA´s budget constraints between1998 and 2012 and with the general argument that this is the only reason why the UBA accepted to get its own resources from market exchanges. By studying the UBA´s block grant public budget and own (market) resources during that period, we will show that even if insufficient budget helps to understand the beginning of the academic enterprise transformation at the UBA, it is not enough to explain the growth of this university?s own resources since 2004because public block grant budget has been constantly increasing in real terms since 2003. Section 4 will explain the most important types of the UBA´s sales:internships (the UBA works as a human resources agency), postgraduate education and technical assistances. Finally, we will discuss how the UBA´s transformation into an academic enterprise or market university affected teaching and research autonomy. We will emphasize how new creative research is being jeopardized due to the increase in technical assistances and the reduction of full-time positions.