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The 200 years of the UBA: from being the socialization place of the ruling classes to an almost unnoticed anniversary

2021-08-16T10:29:47.231Z


Researcher Juan José Mendoza takes a historical tour of the traditional house of studies and its 'many conflicting university profiles within the same university'.


Juan mendoza

08/16/2021 7:01 AM

  • Clarín.com

  • Culture

Updated 08/16/2021 7:01 AM

Hard to believe that the University of Buenos Aires was ever founded.

We imagined that it had existed forever.

But it was not like that.

It was founded on August 9, 1821

, by a decree of the Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Martín Rodríguez.

And inaugurated on the 12th of that month, in an act in the Church of San Ignacio.

They were very intense times.

It had been a decade since the May Revolution, and a few years since the Independence.

The inhabitants of Buenos Aires claimed the foundation of a university from 1770, since before the founding, in 1776, of the Viceroyalty.

The university students of Córdoba were against it.

Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires citizens,

aspiring to a university degree, had to travel for long periods to Córdoba, Lima, Chuquisaca or Spain.

We might wonder why, apart from isolated official acts and selfies of graduates and students with inscriptions of the type #soyuba on social networks,

the bicentennial of the university is going almost unnoticed.

The intellectual Beatriz Sarlo is a graduate of the UBA and was at the act on Thursday.

Photo Fernando De la Orden

As Paul Valery would say: "The problem of our times is that the future is not what it should be."

The UBA itself, in fact, today is many universities in one.

Today it is no longer possible to speak of a unified university system,

like the reformism of '18;

or that of the "Flor de Ceibo University" from the 1950s;

or that of "the university of normalization" of the '80s.

Nor can one speak of dichotomies, such as that of 1958 that divided the University into "Free or Secular."

The Argentine university system is atomized, with many university profiles in conflict within the same university.

The young lawyers.

In this photograph of recent graduates of the UBA Law School, from 1895, two of the most famous graduates in the entire history of the UBA are seen: second from the right, Macedonio Fernández appears.

And fourth, from the left, appears the lawyer and professor of philosophy Jorge Guillermo Borges, Georgie's father.

Bicentennial of the UBA: 1821-2021.

Brief history of the UBA

Students are chased by "policemen".

They enter and exit through different doors of a university.

If we were to represent the history of the UBA in a play of the absurd, we could think of a scene like this: with a prop building in the middle, and students and policemen circling around, entering and leaving through doors other than the caricatured building.

Numbers of different years and changes in clothes and hairstyles would perhaps give indications of historicity.

The history of the university can be thought of as a strange case of oscillation between advances and setbacks, longed for modernity and tragic obscurantisms.

The modernity of the first student centers of 1900, contrasts with the interventions of the uriburismo coups in the '30;

of La Libertadora in '55;

of Onganía in '66;

of the Military Junta in '76.

It contrasts with the interventions of some constitutional governments even, such as those of '46, '52 and '73.

In 1943, Osvaldo Loudet - President of the FUA at the time of the Reform of '18 -, already being Vice Dean of Medicine, recognized that many of the ideals of reformism had been distorted by "intervention of politics."

University City.

Photo Diego Díaz

During the 19th century, the UBA was, in practice, a

place of socialization for the ruling classes.

The history of the UBA is deeply marked by the history of the country.

After the Battle of Caseros and the fall of Rosas, the UBA also began its statutory and modernizing process.

In 1861 Juan M. Gutiérrez was appointed Rector –co-author, for some, of the version of

El Matadero

by Esteban Echeverría that reaches us.

Gutiérrez gave the university a scientistic boost.

Around those years, a curious event also took place: a law student committed suicide after failing an exam.

The event is striking.

More worthy of a history of an American university - in the manner of what Piglia novelizes in

El camino de Ida

(2012) - than of an Argentine university history, in which dropouts are more common than academic suicides.

The episode forced heavy fighting.

And it accelerated a new legal order.

In 1881 the nationalization of the UBA took place, granting it the rank with which we know it today.

Paula Pareto, a double Olympic medalist, is a doctor trained at the UBA.

Photo Juano Tesone

The challenge of changing (but slow)

“The dogmas of tranquility of another age have expired in this stormy present.

As our case is new, our thoughts must be advanced ”.

They could be actual words.

They were pronounced by Abraham Lincoln on July 2, 1862, at the time of signing the Morrill Law, which donated state lands to universities in the United States.

The rapidity of the changes is such that today the university faces the challenge of training students who, once they graduate, will act in a totally different world from the universities in which they were trained.

The future, when he enters college, does so loaded with a stale and suspicious whiff

.

The university is no longer the place of the latest news.

On Thursday at the Faculty of Law of the UBA a ceremony was held to award medals to prominent personalities for the anniversary of the University of Buenos Aires.

Photo Juano Tesone

Hence the realization of the apothegm of the university of permanent training.

Or of the demands of training in skills: to learn the new.

In 2010, only 4.19% of the country's population had a university degree.

And 0.41% had postgraduate degrees.

Interestingly enough, today many college students with graduate degrees do not easily stumble upon a good job. And when they do, they do it in freelance or moonlighting conditions. This data also tells us not only about the inbreeding of the university or its difficulties in accepting innovations. But, above all, of its own limitations - this is chilling, due to the level of institutional cynicism involved - to give recognition and value to what it produces.

Even with the excellent research standards in the country, many doctors consider themselves underemployed: "Formulas 1 on dirt streets", a Doctor of History recently reflected with irony, without certainty about their future work in the country.

Meanwhile, in the context of the general degradation,

the great part of the political class does not have postgraduate degrees or experience of working abroad.

A graduate of the UBA.

In the background the Faculty of Medicine.

AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko

The National Buenos Aires, the university college


For Diego García, counselor for the Graduate Cloister at Nacional Buenos Aires, there are challenges and problems that the College shares with the University: “The College has a tradition of Illuminist inspiration, formed with Europe in mind, especially with France. Today all that ideology has been replaced by another agenda: that of technologies, permanent training ".

"And also - he adds - for other geographies: those of Asia. From

Nacional Buenos Aires students leave with a very robust training in European tradition: Latin, cultural history, physics, chemistry,

but without knowing if Beijing is north of Shanghai or vice versa. They do know, on the other hand, that London is west of Paris. This is a problem for the entire West and for Argentina in general. The National College should think more within that new agenda. "

The Nacional Buenos Aires does not have, for example, a Computer Programming Department, or does not include subjects such as programming within its contents.

This is a remarkable vacancy area, given that programming is considered a key subject of the 21st century, which is taught in primary schools in other countries.

As a color data: only seven blocks separate the Faculty of Engineering from Nacional Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires National School.

Photo Germán García Adrasti

Another of the problems that García finds in the School is given by the normalizing and homogenizing nature of the educational culture: “Homogeneity covers up differences, makes many differences invisible and underestimated. If there are students whose families are from other countries, the school tends to make these differences invisible. The school finds a value in homogeneity. There has been a diversity agenda in the world for many decades. But the College does not produce wealth from diversity ”.

For Nicole Castillo, psychology student and General Secretary of FUBA, the Bicentennial of the UBA is an excellent opportunity to analyze the path of subjectivities in history: “See, for example, how in the 19th century only certain elite subjects entered social, essentially male and white, with all that this means, and today after 200 years we can see how that panorama has changed. Today the subjectivities that are part of the UBA are diverse. Since 2015, which was the year of the first Ni Una Menos, there has been a feminist agenda at the UBA ”.

Meanwhile, the UBA is today the university attended by thousands of foreign students.

Year after year, students from distant countries, not only from neighboring ones, enroll to study undergraduate and graduate degrees at the UBA.

They see in the non-collection of fees of the Argentine university system an opportunity that other universities do not give.

The first female graduates

Elida Passo was the first university graduate of the UBA

and one of the first university graduates in all of South America.

He was born to a pharmacist father in 1867. After studying Humanities and Exact subjects, he finally completed a career in Pharmacy at the Faculty of Medicine, where he graduated in 1885.

After graduating, and despite the examinations he received, he managed to enroll for a Doctorate in Medicine.

But he died of tuberculosis in 1893.

As María Clementina González points out in her profile on the place of women in the history of the UBA, women not only had difficulties entering and graduating from university, but also, in the few cases in which they managed to enter the university, university teaching, they did it as assistants, in the lowest places of the academic scale.

Elvira López.

One of the first graduates of the UBA.

Her thesis on the feminist movement is truly a precursor of gender thinking in the country.

Bicentennial of the UBA: 1821-2021.

The titles of the final theses of some of their careers demonstrate the degree of advanced for their time

of their work, and the concerns and sensitivity for the knowledge of the female body:

  • Cecilia Grierson: "Hystero-ovariotomies executed in the Women's Hospital from 1883 to 1889" (1889).

  • Elvira Rawson: "Notes on women's hygiene" (1892).

  • Lola Úbeda: "The Argentine woman in puberty" (1902).

  • Julieta Lanteri: "Contribution to the study of the malignant deciduoma", dedicated to the memory of her sister Magdalena (1906).

  • Adelcira Agostini: "Contribution to the study of pseudometritis" (1910).

  • Antonina Freuler: "Uterine inversion" (1910).

  • Isabel Kaminsky: “The weak and sick children.

    His education ”(1911).

  • María Teresa Ferrari: "Contribution to the study of pituitary medication in obstetrics" (1912).

  • Rosario Berón: "Clinical study of malignant degenerations of the uterus" (1914).

  • Alicia Moreau: "The endocrine function of the ovary" (1914).

* Juan José Mendoza is Doctor of Letters from the UBA and researcher at Conicet.

Pc

Look also

The UBA turns 200: its achievements, Houssay, Leloir, Milstein and a special visit

The 200 years of the UBA: emotion, memories and thanks in the Bicentennial celebration

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2021-08-16

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