Last Wednesday’s massive march on behalf of state university financing was the opening act of a renewed confrontation finding both sides totally adamant with President Javier Milei bent on a veto of the Congress law exempting higher learning from his chainsaw and a united opposition equally determined to overturn the presidential ban while academics are in no mood to relax their pay demands but there is nevertheless a common denominator between the two sides – both reduce the issue to basically a question of money with the quality of university education entirely secondary. In Milei’s book it is all about balanced budgets – if Argentina’s university system retained all its many defects except making a hole in the national pocket and even added others, he could not care less. With at least 70 percent of public opinion behind them in the entirely valid belief that education is the key to the 21st century, academic authorities are not inclined to yield in their insistence on the financing of an unreformed archaic university system being fully updated to inflation, clinging to the autonomy enshrined in the 1918 University Reform Law without offering any accountability.
But no mention of any reforms from the other side either. When presenting the 2025 Budget in mid-September, Milei defined his fundamental fiscal principle as first defining the available revenue and then adjusting the spending to it – modernising the university system to that end could be an interesting.
