Science during Argentina´s Military Didtatorship (1976-1983): The Contration of the Higher Education System and the Expantion of CONICET

BEKERMAN, FABIANA

The Politics of Academic Autonomy in Latin America

Ashgate

Lugar: London; Año: 2012; p. 227 - 248

This chapter intends to propose an insight into the evolution of the scientific field during the most recent dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), focusing on the geometric expansion undergone by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET, for its Spanish acronym) during those years. This growth was not consistent across the whole scientific field: while some institutions were promoted, others, such as public universities, experienced a sudden downturn. In fact, once the initial disciplinary purge swept the field, the Army in office intended to deprive higher education of any part in scientific research development, streamlining exclusively CONICET. In previous works I have demonstrated that this expansion was the result of a policy conducted by the military regime by increasing budget allocations for scientific research and transferring resources from the universities to CONICET. This policy also included the creation of new CONICET research centers located outside the public universities (especially in the metropolitan area) while constraining the university domain (budget cuts, teachers layoffs, program cancellations, decreased enrolment, and so on). Thus, scientific and university policies were closely related and should be analyzed as part of the same process (Bekerman 2009). Directly associated with the increased number of institutes, we found that the military government and, therefore, CONICET´s intervention officials emphasized system decentralization. In 1976 the Regional Center Creation Program was launched in the nations hinterlands and, by 1979, this program gathered momentum with a sizable loan from the Inter American Development Bank (IADB). However, CONICET also put in place a set of decentralizing measures to grant benefits to researchers who wished to leave mhemetropolitanarea, movingto the provinces. Thus, it is safe to assume that one of the goals in these militar policies was to dismantle political activities held at the most populated public/national universities located in the metropolitan area, curtailing their operations while expanding and decentralizing CONICET. The development of disciplines in this expansion process proved somewhat mixed. A strengthening of exact, natural, and technological sciences characterized this period, both in terms of creation of new institutes and in grant allocations. Nonetheless, medical sciences held a privileged spot while social and human sciences experienced a turnover process. We will see further that the latter did receive large grants and a group of institutes were created, but their scientific development remained stagnant. All these processes gradually ended up building a new structure for the public/national scientific  field, reshaping the links between the institutes and universities.