Argentine University Reform of 1918: being and knowing, identity and science

FACUNDO BEY

Köln

Congreso; Global South Studies Center of the University of Cologne Autumn School 2017: Student Protest(s) in the Global South; 2017

Global South Studies Center of the University of Cologne, Department of Iberian and Latin American History de la University of Cologne

On June 15, 1918, the University Reform broke out in Cordoba. It was a student?s Reform against the conservative groups and the power of the Jesuits inside the University. The Reform extended first across the country and then throughout Latin America, during the decade of the 1920s and 1930s. It is not my intention here to make a historical analysis of the 1918?s Reform, to speak of its sociopolitical prerequisites, nor am I going to explain the institutional transformations to which it gave rise. This does not mean to ignore that the Reform can not be reduced to a controversy of ideas and to forget that it was a true Revolution that, by way of direct action, changed the university right, the whole way of organization of the University. Rather, I want to emphasize how much the Reform as a Movement, in general terms, sought to define a new model of man, of University and science and, therefore, of politics, from a point of view that is beyond the strict institutional structure of the political parties, trade unions and traditional leaders, as well as the programmatic models of the ideologies then in vogue among students. In fact, among the Reformists there were supporters of socialism, anarchism, communism, radicalism, liberals and Catholics. My position is that the claim of Americanism as an identity, and its consequent assumption in the face of the whole process of University Reform, is inseparable from the search for a new model of knowledge and understanding of the world.