Between Scientific Autonomy and Academic Dependency: Private Research Institutes under Dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983): The Case of FLACSO.

ALGAÑARAZ SORIA, VICTOR HUGO

The struggle for academic autonomy in Latin America

ASHGATE Publishers

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2012; p. 249 - 262

The military government that took coercively the argentine state power on March 24, 1976, so-called “National Reorganization Process” (NRP) sought to restructure the social body considered “misguided” and the National State who was diagnosed as corrupt and demagogic. The central purpose of the military government was to remove the popular and industrial foundations of the previous economic model and establish a neoliberal cumulative pattern in the country. In these circumstances, the argentinean academic world was deeply disturbed between 1976 and 1983, given the imposition of a university and scientific policy according to the political-economic model that was aimed to establish. Taken together, the Argentinean academic institutions were deeply affected by the dictatorial force: state universities interfered, decommissioned, strongly repressed and disciplined; deregulated, whereas private universities were endowed with government subsidies and higher levels of curricular and institutional autonomy. These authoritarian policies were particularly harsh in the social sciences area, emerging as a result of that Private Research Institutes (PRI) constituted as alternative spaces for the development of social sciences, with few empirical researches and sustained by external financial sources. Under the dictatorial subjugation, the PRI developed an “inside” profile, a “mind of catacombs” (Thompson, 1994), becoming study and research spaces apart from the university and marginalized from the scientific field and the State. This isolation allowed them to preserve their autonomy and academic freedom against the national politic situation, generally tending to establish their links in the international area to obtain financial sources. This chapter tries to explore, in general lines, the tensions the PRI undergone  during the dictatorship, focusing the analytical lens on the “Buenos Aires Programme of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO)”, created in 1974 as a survival and preservation strategy for the social sciences to cope with the political instability in Argentina.