Here's why Argentina's public universities are paralyzed by protests

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — After 11 months in office, Argentina's right-wing President Javier Milei has fulfilled his flagship pledge to eliminate the country's monumental deficits by shrinking the public payroll, slashing subsidies and suppressing already low wages of state workers.

The austerity has spawned misery. But with the country’s left-wing opposition in disarray after delivering the economic disaster that Milei inherited, Argentina hasn’t seen the kind of widespread social unrest that has characterized past economic crises.

That could change. The country's teachers are fed up.

Milei’s recent veto of a bill boosting spending on university budgets struck a collective nerve in a nation that long has considered free education a critical engine of social progress, drawing the broadest demonstrations since the libertarian leader took office.

Last week's open-air classes held in Plaza de Mayo, the main square home to government headquarters, marked the latest in a new wave of protests supporting public universities that has gripped Argentina over the past month. Students are taking over college campuses in the coming days ahead of another mass protest.

Here’s a look at what students are protesting and what it means for Milei's effort to transform crisis-prone Argentina into an economic success story.

What do protesters want?

Professors and non-teaching staff at public universities across Argentina are demanding a pay raise to compensate for sky-high inflation that they say has shrunk their purchasing power by 60% this year.

After a student-led march mobilized a half-million protesters in April, Milei's government compensated universities for operational costs but not for teachers’ salaries.

The average salary of an associate professor is now $320 per month. For teaching assistants, it’s just $120 a month.

The university funding bill that Milei vetoed would have increased staff salaries to make up for 2024 annual inflation — which now tops 200% — and adjusted them for inflation going forward.

Even if Milei’s drastic measures have recently dragged month-on-month inflation below 5%, the number of Argentines in poverty has swelled to more than 50%.

The public university system hasn't seen this kind of budget shortfall since 2004, according to the Civil Association for Equality and Justice, an Argentine nonprofit.

“Our living conditions have visibly worsened,” said Nicolas Jose Lavagnino, a researcher in the philosophy of biology at Conicet, Argentina's leading research body that reported losing 250 scientists this year due to budget cuts.

Unions reject the government's 6.8% pay raise offer as inadequate. The University of Buenos Aires — one of Latin America's biggest and most prestigious — has warned of mass resignations over depreciating salaries. At least 30 teachers have quit at UBA's Faculty of Agriculture alone.

Milei has vowed to block any measure that jeopardizes the budget balance. In September, he vetoed a bill raising pensions — which would have cost his government over 1% of Argentina's gross domestic product — for the same reason.

But the education bill would have cost only 0.14% of GDP, stirring doubts over the economic significance of Milei’s battle.

“We see this as a direct attack on the philosophy of public education in our country,” said Matias Busi, a 25-year-old student at Argentina's University of La Plata.

What does Milei say?

The irascible president has lambasted universities as leftist indoctrination camps.

“What productivity do scientists have?" he said in 2023 on the campaign trail, advocating for the defunding of research institute Conicet. While promising not to get rid of free public education, Milei demands that universities undergo a government audit and do more to clean up corruption.

“If they don’t want to be audited, it must be because they are dirty,” he said.

Milei’s party in recent weeks has also revived an unpopular attempt to charge tuition for foreign non-residents, who make up nearly 4% of total enrollment.

The public education system in Argentina is rare in that there are no bars to entry — foreigners who can’t afford a bachelor’s degree in their own countries can enroll free of charge at first-rate public universities like UBA, where all five of the country's Nobel Prize winners studied. Half of Milei's Cabinet even graduated from public universities.

Some say Milei is justified in requesting more financial transparency, pointing to the alleged misuse of funds and creeping politicization of what was once a universally respected institution.

“There were contracts with public sector figures where absurd things were funded," said Argentine political consultant Sergio Berensztein, referring to scandals that erupted during the tenure of former leftist President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner over big-budget research projects that audits later revealed had never existed. "They were simply mechanisms to divert funds for political interests,”

What is the political context?

After Milei's government mustered just enough votes to prevent the opposition from overriding his veto of the university funding bill on Oct. 10, over 250,000 Argentines — spanning the far-left to center-right — flooded the streets.

The student-led movement drew a range of Argentine protesters stung by austerity that has deepened the recession and pushed poverty to its highest level in 20 years — retirees desperate for better pensions, doctors furious over meager pay, artists against closure of the national film institute, scientists angry over gutted funds, pilots worried about Milei's plans to privatize Argentina's flagship airline.

Santiago Gándara, a social sciences professor at both UBA and the University of La Pampa, said he believed Milei miscalculated in going after Argentina's proud symbol of publicly financed education for the masses.

“It is like someone coming and saying, ‘We are going to get rid of the Plaza de Mayo,’” he said, referring to the historic Buenos Aires square that filled with protesters last week. “Milei understood this too late. … You can’t decide the fate of Plaza de Mayo. It belongs to all of us.”

The question of whether the demonstrations morph into a real threat for Milei remains open.

“I think these protests are not at the point of being life-threatening to Milei, but it's obviously damaging,” said Ana Iparraguirre, an Argentine analyst and partner at Washington-based strategy firm GBAO. “When students mobilize, you really never know where that movement is going to end."