The memories of former students of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences echo a feeling of optimism and the perception that they were active participants, even protagonists, of a changing cultural milieu. A former history student recalls his college life by contrasting it to both his secondary school experience and his job as an office clerk. While he uses terms like “monotony” and “boredom” to describe his tenure in the office and the secondary school, he recalls college life as “something exhilarating.” A former sociology student also described “the school and its nearby areas” as places “full of life,” where she and her fellows “felt better than at home.”55 What did that life mean for many of these youths? Probably the prospects of getting professional training in their chosen fields and engaging in theoretical and academic discussions accounted for their perception that school was an exhilarating space. Moreover, the revived sense of life at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences was not exhausted there: a new sociability and cultural consumption produced the representation, and self-representation, of that specific school and its student body as both locus and vanguard of cultural modernization.
In spatial terms, until the mid-1960s, much of the school’s activity took place at the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, which was becoming an ever more cosmopolitan and iconoclastic enclave. Until 1965 the school consisted of a series of buildings spread throughout Viamonte and Florida streets. Especially at night—since a vast majority of the students held part- or full-time jobs during the day—the bars and cafés concentrated on those streets became the privileged sites of the students’ sociability.56 A former anthropology student, for instance, recalled that he arrived at the Coto Bar in the evening, where he read, met his friends, “discussed politics, [and] a bit of the news.” He then went to class, returning to the bar as soon as the class ended so they could continue talking until late at night.57 The bars could act as alternative classrooms as well: some intellectuals organized study groups on authors that were not studied in the formal curriculum, like one devoted to Jean-Paul Sartre.58 Besides a variety of bars and bookstores, the neighborhood featured movie theaters that screened European films and cine clubs, one of which was organized by the student center.59 Moreover, beginning in 1963, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences shared its neighborhood with a modern art center par excellence, the Instituto Di Tella (IDT), which aimed to make Buenos Aires a global capital of contemporary art through encouraging the production and circulation of avant-garde works, mainly in the visual arts, music, and theater.60 A former student stated that her education consisted of classroom experience, a diversified reading program, and visiting the IDT. That “privileged triangle,” she argued, was the basis for the “cultural frame of the early 1960s.”61 The students of the school helped shape and display the modernization of Argentina’s culture as members of a renovated college life, as readers, and as art consumers.
Yet modernization had limits even in that enclave, as illustrated by a major sex affair. In 1959, the student center’s periodical, Centro, published a short story titled “La narración de la historia,” by philosophy student Carlos Correas, which narrates the homosexual encounters of a middle-class university student and a working-class boy.62 Right after the publication of that issue, the school’s governing council complained “that the pages of a publication connected with this school are used against its good name and prestige.” In addition, Catholic students requested the banning of Centro.63 Aware of that request, the district attorney Guillermo de la Riestra—infamous because of his censorship undertakings—initiated a prosecution of Correas and of Centro’s editorial committee. His actions included spectacular raids of the student center’s offices, authorized by the rector who also gave a judge the home addresses of the committee members.64 Finally only Correas and Centro’s main editor, Jorge Lafforgue, were prosecuted for “disseminating obscene materials.” Lafforgue recalls that most “liberal professors just kept their mouths shut.” Although he personally asked professors and students for their solidarity, “they simply didn’t care.”65 The outcome of the affair shows the enclave’s limits. On the one hand, it is likely that no other student periodical, much less a commercial press, would have dared to publish Correas’s story. It was a bold decision that ultimately led to the end of the project of Centro because its financial and political support had been undercut. On the other hand, then, besides the legal prosecution, the students faced the active opposition of Catholic students, the rector, and the school’s governing council, all of whom were theoretically committed to a democratizing rhetoric (including the right to free speech). Correas’s story tested the limits of the acceptable at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences: representing homoerotic desire was unacceptable.
As the 1960s continued, though, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences embodied a vanguard of the sexual and political revolutions alike. When magazines conducted surveys to unravel Argentina’s sexual mores, for example, they regularly interviewed “a student at the School of Humanities,” seemingly because they would discover more radicalized statements. A twenty-year-old psychology student, for instance, showed her “liberality” when she responded to a question about premarital sex by arguing that “virginity doesn’t have any value: if women did not possess a hymen, someone would have invented another taboo.”66 The “girls-of-Humanities” stood for the liberalization of heterosexual mores. Basically, the school epitomized student and professorial political radicalization. The official bulletin of the Episcopal Committee, representing the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, for example, singled out sociologist Germani and psychologist Telma Reca as the “Marxist harbingers” at that school—ironically, neither of them was a Marxist. That representation permeated the commercial weeklies as well. In 1962, a magazine published a report that dubbed particularly sociology students as the tip of the iceberg of the “Communist infiltration” at the UBA.67 With its high profile, the school occupied a prominent place within an intensifying anti-Communist campaign.
In 1964, an episode “confirmed” the suspicions regarding the School of Humanities and Social Sciences’ radicalization. The Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (EGP, Guerrilla Army of the People), a group led by journalist Jorge Masetti and supported by Che Guevara, developed a rural foco in Salta province. The experience proved a disaster: some of the thirty guerrillas died of hunger, while other soldiers killed comrades who tried to leave the project. Still others were killed or imprisoned by the gendarmerie. Two of them were students at the school.68 In a broadly publicized announcement, the school’s governing council (whose members had shifted toward the Left from the time of the Correas affair) deplored “the tragic death of the students in Salta.” The dean, social historian José Luis Romero, stated, “They were not common delinquents, but youths who, wrong or right, have adopted a dramatic solution in response to well-known situations of our country.”69 The press amplified the meaning of those episodes, and a journalist went as far as to conclude that bars near the school hosted a “plethora of real or imagined bearded guerrillas.”70 That perception reached the academic realm outside Argentina as well. In what was perhaps one of the most influential pieces of research on student politics, Seymour Lipset singled out the School of Humanities and Social Sciences as “by far the most radicalized” in Latin America.71 However, neither academics nor journalists mentioned that the EGP had amassed support from other groups as well, notably from students and intellectuals who had recently split with the Communist Party in Córdoba.72 Far from the raucous claims of the press, which the Church hierarchy, politicians, and even academics posited at the time, this episode also signaled profound changes within the student movement.
The “Radicalized Students” and the Demise of Reformism
The most active groups within the student movement participated in the changes that took place across the political spectrum, but particularly on the Left. In this process, left-wing Reformist groups joined others—including Catholic and Peronist g
roups—to criticize what they viewed as faults of Reformist-oriented, university-focused projects linked to notions of development. Former divides between Reformist and non-Reformist, laicos and Catholic, and even Peronist and anti-Peronist began to blur in practice within a student activism gradually becoming more tethered to anti-imperialist and eventually anticapitalist ideas. The activists comprised, for sure, a minority of the student body. And they showed evidence of a deep makeover, epitomized in the figure of the “radicalized student.” To some scholars, journalists, politicians, and professors, the “radicalized students” jeopardized the smooth operation of the university and the fate of the nation as such. Those students and the institution of the university itself became the target of increasing anti-Communist attacks that ended only with the military intervention after the 1966 coup d’état.
Between the laica-o-libre conflict in 1958 and the military intervention in 1966, Reformism underwent both a university-based political success and also continuous splintering. On the one hand, for the first time in a relatively long period, most national universities were ruled in a Reformist-oriented fashion, as student and faculty groups agreed on defending the principles of co-government and autonomy, among others. On the other hand, Reformism split permanently because of disagreements about extrauniversity or even extranational issues, as exemplified in the discussions triggered by the Cuban Revolution. As in other Latin American countries, the Cuban process first awoke expectations far beyond the Left. In March of 1959, for example, the UBA’s rector Risieri Frondizi praised the Cuban students “who accompanied the last movement for the dignity of America.”73 He focused on how the Cuban students had helped oust dictator Fulgencio Batista and reminded his audience of the need to enforce “Reformist ideals” such as the defense of the peoples’ right to self-determination and the possibility of forging a “Latin American unity.”74 As the Cuban revolutionary process unfolded, initial supporters such as Frondizi began to turn away. In contrast, some on the Left interpreted the Cuban process as the final step of the Reformist movement: “only the old Reformist student Fidel Castro,” David Viñas wrote, “is fulfilling the old Reformist project.”75 For left-wing Reformists, attaining “old” ideals meant updating anti-imperialist and radicalized components.
The support of the Cuban Revolution, though, served to forge practical alliances between Reformist and non-Reformist activists. The “Cuban Party,” as sociologist Silvia Sigal has dubbed it, was an imaginary identity that cut across Marxist and nationalist students and intellectuals.76 In April 1961, the “Cuban Party” was the vanguard of the rallies against the U.S. invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Writing about those days, an American sociologist teaching at the School of Humanities narrated how the members of one “pro-Cuban committee” entered the classroom to invite the students to join a march: out of forty-five students, only three remained in their seats.77 In fact, in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba, thousands of students protested, and three dozen spent nights in prison. In addition to repudiating an overt imperialist intrusion like the Bay of Pigs invasion, these activists also conveyed an apparent fascination with the Cuban guerrillas’ epic, something they shared with their peers in Mexico and even the United States.78 In Argentina, fueled by groups that had just split from the “old” Socialist Party, students created organizations of solidarity with Cuba—which served to both discuss the “Cuban revolutionary road” and the unfulfilled goal of preparing brigades to help in situ. In some settings, such as Córdoba, the Cuban “turn” created a clear-cut divide between moderate and left-wing Reformism, with the former refusing to join solidarity organizations.79 More generally, in consolidating the “Cuban Party,” these organizations reframed the prevalent political identities in the student movement, making irrelevant or secondary the divide between non-Reformists and Reformists.
A renewed, more radicalized anti-imperialism became the touchstone for criticizing how university “modernization” was implemented, which generated more fissures among Reformists. In the early 1960s, the initial enthusiasm around university modernization had begun to vanish at its epicenters, like the UBA. The university’s financial problems limited its renewal, which for the left-wing students paved the way for “imperialist penetration” into academia. An ex-president of the FUBA explained: “it all begins by financially strangling our university with the approval of our disciplined government, to then look for the ‘support’ of the ‘philanthropic foundations.’” The foundations would set conditions to the research agenda by imposing topics and creating obstacles to producing “knowledge to liberate our country.”80 Students criticized not only the government for cutting the university budgets but also the professors who received grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. These professors embodied what the students dubbed “scientificism,” or, as one activist put it, “the ideology of those who modernized the university to produce scientists for imperialism.”81 The censure of scientificism introduced tensions among former allies: “old Reformist” professors could hardly agree with students that harshly criticized them.82 Some of these students likewise opted to dispose of Reformism. The Tendencia Anti-Imperialista Universitaria (TAU, Anti-Imperialist University Trend), a tiny yet typical group at the UBA, for example, claimed that the results of the laica-o-libre conflict and scientificism had killed Reformism.83 TAU and other groups linked to what came to be known as “national Left” advocated overcoming Reformism by a working-class based, anti-imperialist bloc.
The renewed anti-imperialist drive and the will to “connect” with the workers became the ideological priorities for the student movement. Although it was not until the late 1960s that the approach of student and labor activism reached broader significance, there were localized encounters before then. In 1963–64, the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT, General Labor Confederation), led by orthodox sectors of Peronism, organized planes de lucha (action plans) to protest against rising costs of living and unemployment rates. They basically wanted to demonstrate to the new president, Arturo Illia (1963–66) how powerful their movement was, even with its leader in exile. That context showed two novelties. First, the CGT, which in the laica-o-libre conflict had refused to support the Reformists, now invited them and all the student groups to participate in the protests, which included building occupations. Second, Reformist and non-Reformist groups did support the planes de lucha. A meeting at the CGT headquarters, for example, joined the Reformist FUA, the Humanist League, and the Social Christians.84 This illustrated that the labels “lay” and “Catholic” were losing their ability to map student alliances. In many respects, though, Catholics were just starting to make inroads in some universities, such as the Littoral, the Northeast, and Córdoba. There, the Integralistas, a “social humanist” group independent from the Church’s hierarchies, gained power after displacing the Reformists from the student preferences in 1960. The Integralistas followed the debates set in motion during the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and endorsed the ideal of a Christian commitment to social change.85 In fact, in the university milieu they and some groups of the “national Left” were the first to think of Peronism as a way of shaping a “national revolutionary road.”
Representing a visible minority, the figure of the “radicalized student” nevertheless awoke notorious reactions. Attuned to Cold War rhetoric, many groups voiced their desire to curb university politics altogether. In conservative quarters, “tripartite government” was a synecdoche for Reformism, which in turn was viewed as only the first step in the passage from “liberalism” to “Communism.” Writing for a forum of the armed forces, for example, an army ideologue assured his readers that the mere existence of a university government shared by professors, alumni, and students entailed a “total subversion of hierarchies and authority,” which, he thought, paved the way for the “disorder that made Communist infiltration possible.”86 For the ideologues of the armed forces and conservative nationalist intellectuals, the solution was to quash the Reformist-oriente
d process. The Catholic hierarchies concurred and repeatedly requested the government to intervene in the “houses of higher education” that were, in their view, “Communist hotbeds.”87 For these voices, the involvement of students in the EGP came as a self-fulfilling prophecy, which they believed to be confirmed once again in 1965. In May, student and labor groups rallied to prevent the government from sending troops to back the United States in the invasion in Santo Domingo, which ended up violently. This context caused rightists to double their critics. The most influential business association asked Illia to “suppress the tripartite government.”88 Some representatives likewise asked the Ministry of the Interior to scrutinize the “Communist penetration” at the Schools of Law and Humanities at the UBA and at its university press.89
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