INCIHUSA   20883
INSTITUTO DE CIENCIAS HUMANAS, SOCIALES Y AMBIENTALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
capítulos de libros
Título:
The BID-CONICET loan: A case of financial dependency of Science public policy during the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983).
Autor/es:
ALGAÑARAZ SORIA, VICTOR HUGO; BEKERMAN, FABIANA
Libro:
Academic Dependency: The challenge of constructing autonomous social sciences in the South.
Editorial:
EDIUNC-SEPHIS
Referencias:
Lugar: Mendoza-Amsterdam; Año: 2011;
Resumen:
This chapter is part of a bilingual book that will be published twice a Spanish version and another in English. Abstract: On March 24th, 1976, the Argentine Armed Forces perpetrated a coup d‟état against the constitutional government, launching a violent takeover of state institutions at their different levels and the imprisonment, and even disappearance, of union leaders, political activists, journalists, and intellectuals who were considered “suspects.”  Up to that moment, scientific research was mostly concentrated in public universities and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET). During the dictatorship there were actions aimed at shrinking universities and selectively expanding other spaces of research within CONICET. In a short time, public universities were occupied by the military and their research activity was decimated. The military government implemented actions tending to shrink university enrollment and reduce teaching staff, accompanied by ideological persecution and mass layoffs. The result was the expulsion of thousands of teachers, a sudden reduction of the student body, and closure of research institutes/centers and undergraduate departments. There were also processes of purification/expulsion of researchers and internal reorganization at CONICET; there was a process of staff renewal after which the leadership of the institution fell in the hands of researchers who accumulated executive positions at different administrative levels.  However, once the entire field was disciplined, the Armed Forces sought to remove every line of research from higher education institutions and to channel it through CONICET. Our empirical and bibliographic survey has allowed us to show that there was a transference of resources from national universities to the Council, causing the shrinking of the former and the expansion of the latter (Bekerman, 2010; Bekerman, 2009). CONICET increased its staff, multiplied the number of institutes, and implemented a decentralization program based on the creation of Regional Centers of Scientific and Technological Research in the interior of the country. This authoritarian scientific policy was supported, to a large extent, by a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) obtained in 1979. The general goal of this work is, therefore, to analyze the role played by foreign aid to consolidate the institutional expansion of CONICET to the detriment of public universities. We argue that this policy of decentralization of the national scientific system was based upon a direct intervention on the scientific field implemented with funds received through foreign aid. This analysis inevitably brings us to discuss the endogenous capacity of academic fields from the periphery to determine their own science policy and, for this reason, the question about—financial—dependency will be the thread of this work.