Admission to public universities. Disputes around the concepts of justice and equality in Argentina?s influential/national newspapers.

SANTOS SHARPE, ANDRÉS; MARÍA PAULA PIERELLA

Tampa, Florida

Conferencia; 43th Annual Conference for the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE); 2018

Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE)

The purpose of this study is to investigate thedebates that took place in the press regarding two central characteristics ofpublic universities in Argentina: first, the so-called policies of unrestrictedaccess; and second, the policies of full-public subsidy or gratuity for thestudents enrolled at public universities. These two central characteristics/policieswere questioned in various journalistic articles after the enactment of the Lawon the Effective Implementation of State Responsibility at Higher EducationLevel No. 27204 (2015) although they are part of a longer-standing historical debatethat I present in following part of this paper. The main argument of this paperis that newspapers present two antagonistic discursive modalities, and thatthis antagonism is expressed in how the articles frame "justice" assignifier. Conceptions of justice and equality withindiscussions of higher education often appear in the press in dichotomous ways expressingwhat is known in the philosophical-political debate of justice as equal opportunitiesand equal positions. These two different conceptions of representing justice,find in the public debate on higher education public policy in Argentina two excludingmodels. As I will explain in the next part of my presentation, theseantagonistic modes of enunciation are partly explained by the historical inscriptionof each discourse in relation to the Argentinean higher education traditions.For this project I conducted discourse analysis ofthe articles on this topic published in three newspapers that have nationalscope: Clarín, La Nación and Página/12. The corpus of work iscomposed of fifteen opinion articles of the aforementioned newspapers after thesanction, on October 28, 2015, of the Law on the Effective Implementation ofState Responsibility at Higher Education Level No. 27204. Specificities of thecorpus are mentioned in the corresponding section. My interest lies onanalyzing the processes of production, circulation and recognition ofconceptions about justice, equality and education in mass media in order toidentify the traces of different political-philosophical traditions. In thispaper, I will first present the questions that guided this research and explainwhy disputes around the significance of ?justice? are relevant in relationshipto higher education policies. Second, I highlight key aspects of Argentina?spublic Higher education system, identifying core ideas in the media debateslinking traditions framing principles of justice in relation to access to highereducation. After that, I present the data collected, the methodology of analysis of the ideological dimensions of discourse(Voloshinov, 1992; Laclau 2011). In this section I also characterize the period of analysisand how is that connected to the historical debate. IIn the final section I analyze the data collected in relation to: a)the dimensions of unrestricted admission and university gratuity; and b) how positions on these publicpolicies stem from a certain system of values, ideas and beliefs about justice . In the conclusion it is shown how the support of and the rejection of the policiesof gratuity and unrestricted university access? are grounded in the historicalunderstanding of the concept of justice and related to political trends withinArgentina.