Argentine Universities Celebrate a Victory In Their Fight For Funding After Overturning Of Milei Veto

Argentina's Lower House voted on September 17 to overturn President Javier Milei's veto of a bill to increase public university funding.

While the veto is expected to be fully overturned on October 2 following a vote in the Senate, university faculty and advocates are already celebrating a rare win against Milei's cost-cutting machine, which has taken a particular aim at higher education, pensions, social welfare programs, and other spending his government has deemed undesirable.

The funding bill's main outcomes will be to update the budgets and staff salaries of public universities for the first time since Milei took power in late 2023, taking into account the inflation of the past two years. Milei justified his veto saying that it would cause a "fiscal imbalance" and "disproportionately increase public spending without sufficient existing resources."

University faculty, however, say that higher education institutions are in desperate need of resources, and many professors say they have been working without pay.

Following Milei's initial veto of the funding bill on September 10, Argentina's largest university, the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), enacted emergency measures to save money.

Daniela Dorfman, a professor of literature at UBA, told The Latin Times that the university "even asked that we didn't turn the lights on because they wouldn't have [enough] money."

Financial difficulties plaguing Argentina's free-tuition, public universities are not new. UBA previously declared a budgetary crisis in April last year, with a dean telling Spanish newspaper El Pais that the school couldn't afford maintenance, cleaning, or plumbing.

However, Dorfman said that "this time is different because we got to a point where the university didn't have the money to open its doors, pay the electricity bill, [or] heating."

According to the National Inter-University Council (CIN), by the end of this year, university budgets will have declined by 30% and staff salaries by 40% since Milei took office in December 2023. Nearly 10,000 teaching staff have left public universities over that time period.

Julieta Fioresta, who also teaches at UBA, told The Latin Times that "it's been two years since I began teaching sociology and I don't receive any salary -- in sociology, the average length of working ad honorem is between eight and 10 years."

A toll on higher education

Many teachers must take on multiple jobs in order to make ends meet; a situation that some students say hampers learning.

Speaking about teachers working for little to no money, Clara Braga, a medical student at UBA, told The Latin Times that "there is no incentive" and "even if passion inspires teachers, it doesn't feed families or provide a roof over one's head."

Others point out staffing shortages and faculty protests as barriers to learning. Dorfman -- who also teaches at two other universities -- said that some students are frustrated because universities can't schedule classes around students' work schedules. "We cannot provide a solution to their request because that would require hiring more professors [...] and there is no money for that," she said.

Alison Mamani Velasquez, who studies design at UBA as well, lamented that she had to take an exam for a course in which she only went class three times because of faculty strikes. Despite this, she can still sympathize with her professors: "We know that the faculty is in conflict, there are people making posters, and organizing everyone to march," she said.

Auditing Argentina's universities

To justify rejecting the funding, President Milei claimed last year that "we don't want to close the universities, we want to take care of them, and therefore they must be audited," and that "if they don't want to be audited, it must be because they're corrupt."

However, UBA itself asked for the General National Audit (AGN) to investigate its finances in 2024, and The National University of la Plata (UNLP) -- the third largest in the country -- still hasn't received any formal notification to initiate the auditing process.

Moreover, AGN, the organism designated by law to audit public universities, is effectively paralyzed. According to Infobae, only one of seven general auditors that make up the agency holds a valid appointment.

Argentina's Chamber of Deputies and Senate are responsible for naming the other six auditors, however, according to the news outlet, Martín Menem, president of the Chamber of Deputies and Victoria Villarruel, Vice President and head of the Senate -- both members of Milei's La Libertad Avanza political party -- have failed to begin nomination proceedings.

Milei's war on higher education

Milei's rhetoric has often turned the university funding issue into a class debate. Last year he argued that "the national public university serves no one but the children of the upper class and the children of the upper-middle class," despite statistics showing that nearly 70% of students at public universities don't have a parent who went to university.

In Argentina -- and broadly in Latin America -- the public university is often upheld as a bastion of autonomy and academic freedom, and any attempts at government or corporate influence are often vehemently rejected by faculty and students.

Some within Argentina's opposition believe that Milei's attacks on higher-ed are meant to privatize universities or to destroy them all together in an effort to re-shape them in a worldview more consistent with his libertarian ideals.

Congressman Leopoldo Moreau posted on X last year that "Milei and his allies [want] to defund public universities in order to empty their classrooms" and "to succeed in closing many of them."

UBA's Fioresta echoed this, saying that "the current strategy of the government is to empty the university in order to advance its privatizing plans."

Dorfman argues "the reason to privatize public universities is not economic" as "the expense of sustaining public universities is not significant in the national budget." The bill's funding would reportedly represent just 0.14% of Argentina's GDP. Instead, Dorfman believes that "this government does not value education, resents the poor and does not believe in community solidarity."

Since taking office, Milei has repeatedly taken steps that align with an anti-science and anti-education agenda. Earlier this year, the president withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO) and expressed his desire to leave the Paris climate accords.

The budget he has proposed for 2026 would see the removal of a longstanding target of spending 6% of the country's GDP on education and 1% on science and technology, causing the head of Buenos Aires Province's Department of Education to claim that "Milei does not invest in education because he does not believe in it."

And, despite expectations that the university funding bill's veto will be fully overturned next month, some educators still worry whether the measure will be effective.

"We have yet to see if Milei will comply with the law," said Dorfman.