University of Buenos Aires

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The University of Buenos Aires was founded on the 12th of August 1821, born out of a decree signed by Governor Martín Rodríguez just five years after Argentina declared independence. At its inaugural ceremony, a cleric and statesman named Antonio Sáenz was appointed as the first Rector of an institution that would go on to shape nearly every corner of Argentine public life.

  Today, the university enrolls more than 328,000 students across 13 independent faculties. It has educated 17 Argentine presidents. It accounts for roughly 40 percent of the entire country's research output. Four of Argentina's five Nobel Prize laureates studied there.

  And yet, to understand what the University of Buenos Aires really is, you have to look past those numbers. You have to understand a night in July 1966 when state police stormed university buildings and beat students and professors with batons. You have to understand why the university educates prisoners in federal penitentiaries. You have to understand why, since 1949, anyone in the world can enroll at this institution without paying a single peso in tuition.

  This is the story of a university that has been shut down, purged, occupied, and resurrected. A university that produced Che Guevara and Nobel laureates in the same decades it burned its own books.

• 2. Colonial Absence

  ›

  Buenos Aires arrived late to higher education. While cities like Córdoba, Chuquisaca, and Santiago de Chile had universities during the colonial era, Buenos Aires did not. The Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was considered a secondary region; most economic activity was concentrated around the Andes, and the cultural and educational work that did exist in Buenos Aires was carried out by members of the Company of Jesus.

  Following the May Revolution of 1810, that absence became a political problem. The newly independent nation needed an institution to anchor its professional and intellectual class. The push for a capital university grew stronger after independence was formally declared in 1816.

  When the university finally opened in 1821, it did not start from scratch. Courses in mathematics, drawing, nautical sciences, and natural history were transferred from the Consulate of Buenos Aires, the Military Medical Institute, and the Colegio de la Unión del Sud. Law professors and courses came from the Academia de Jurisprudencia. This meant the university could grant degrees in medicine and law from the moment it opened its doors.

  From the beginning, a conflict simmered between those who wanted a secular, laicist institution and those who defended the traditional religious approach to education. That tension, between the church and the liberal state, would shape Argentine educational politics for generations.

• 3. Rosas and Recovery

  ›

  Juan Manuel de Rosas, the powerful caudillo who dominated Argentine politics through much of the mid-19th century, did not treat the university kindly. Under his rule, free access to the institution was suspended. Enrollment dropped sharply. Budget cuts meant professors were no longer being paid, and the Department of Exact Sciences came close to shutting down entirely.

  During this difficult period, Francisco Javier Muñiz began making early strides in Argentine paleontology and eventually became dean of the Faculty of Medicine. His work was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise constrained era.

  The university's fortunes reversed after Rosas was defeated at the Battle of Caseros in 1852. The new government of the State of Buenos Aires made improving the university's conditions a stated priority. Political elites began viewing higher education as essential to the country's stabilization.

  The following decades brought a sequence of expansions. In 1863, the university established the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. In 1869, the first twelve Argentine engineers graduated from UBA; they became known collectively as the "Twelve Apostles." Among them was Valentín Balbín, who later became president of the Sociedad Científica Argentina. In 1881, the federalization of Buenos Aires tied the university directly to the national state.

  The 1880s, a period shaped by positivist and scientificist ideals among Argentina's conservative ruling class, brought meaningful progress in scientific research. They also brought a first: Élida Passo graduated in pharmacy and Cecilia Grierson in medicine, becoming the university's first women graduates in what remained a largely male institution.

• 4. The Reform of 1918

  ›

  In June 1918, students at the National University of Córdoba launched a movement that spread rapidly across Latin America. They were demanding autonomy for universities, democratically elected authorities, co-governance between students and professors, and open competitions for teaching positions. The reform also established the right of universities to set their own curricula and manage their own budgets without interference from the central government.

  For the University of Buenos Aires, the reform granted something that has remained a defining feature of the institution ever since: co-governed, democratically elected authorities. This was not a bureaucratic detail. It meant that professors, students, and graduates all had formal representation in how the university was run.

  That structure works like this today: the Consejo Superior is made up of 29 members, including the rector, all 13 deans, and five representatives each from professors, students, and graduates. Deans and council representatives are elected every four years. The Rector is chosen by a University Assembly composed of all members of the Consejo Superior and all members of each faculty's directive council.

  The students' own unions, the Centros de Estudiantes, are organized into the Federación Universitaria de Buenos Aires, which is part of the broader Argentine University Federation. Since 2022, the Rector of the University of Buenos Aires has been Ricardo Gelpi.

• 5. Free, Then Suppressed

  ›

  In November 1949, through Decree 29.337, the government of Juan Domingo Perón made access to all public universities in Argentina completely free of charge. This was not a minor adjustment. It opened the university to Argentina's working class in a way that had never been possible before. From 1935 to 1955, the number of students enrolled at UBA grew from 12,000 to 71,823.

  But Perón's relationship with the university was contradictory. His government also suspended the co-governance and autonomy that the 1918 reform had established. The university's independence was curtailed even as its doors were thrown open financially.

  The 1955 Revolución Libertadora restored autonomy and co-governance, but it came with its own violence: Peronists and leftists within the university were persecuted, and hundreds of professors were expelled or sent into exile. Blacklists were established, and UBA was among the most severely affected institutions.

  The worst episode came on the 29th of July 1966, during the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía. Students had occupied five of UBA's faculties to protest the coup that had deposed constitutional president Arturo Illia. State authorities forcibly removed students, graduates, and professors from the premises. The event became known as the Night of the Long Batons, or in Spanish, the Noche de los Bastones Largos.

  More than 400 people were detained that night. Several libraries and laboratories were destroyed. In the months that followed, an estimated 301 professors left Argentina, of whom 215 were researchers.

• 6. The Dictatorship Years

  ›

  After the 1976 coup that brought the National Reorganization Process to power, the University of Buenos Aires entered its darkest chapter. Professors and students were disappeared regardless of their political affiliations. Public universities were treated as suspected breeding grounds for subversives.

  Up to 90,000 books published by Eudeba, UBA's own university press and Argentina's largest, were burned. Research programs and curricula were subjected to systemic censorship. Entrance exams were reinstated, entry quotas were reduced, free tuition was eliminated, and entire degree programs were suspended. Every building and facility at the university was placed under surveillance by state security forces.

  A preview of that repression had come earlier, under Isabel Perón, who in 1974 appointed Alberto Ottalagano as the university's interventor. Ottalagano was a professed fascist, and his administration targeted students and professors suspected of sympathizing with the Peronist Left. During his time in office, up to 4,000 professors were fired. Among those dismissed was Luis Federico Leloir, who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the metabolic pathways in lactose.

  With the return of democracy in 1983, the university's autonomy and co-governance were restored. In 1985, it introduced the Ciclo Básico Común, a fixed set of preparatory subjects all incoming students must complete before enrolling in any faculty. The CBC replaced the entrance exams that the dictatorship had imposed and was designed to create a more level starting point for students from different educational backgrounds.

• 7. What the University Produces

  ›

  Four of Argentina's five Nobel Prize laureates studied at UBA. Carlos Saavedra Lamas, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936, earned his law degree there and later served as rector from 1941 to 1943. Luis Federico Leloir, Nobel in Chemistry, took his medical degree at the Faculty of Medicine in 1932. Bernardo Houssay, Nobel in Physiology or Medicine in 1947, conducted his research at the UBA-affiliated Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. César Milstein, who shared the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine in 1984, received his degree from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences.

  The list of notable alumni extends across an extraordinary range of fields. Mathematician Alberto Calderón co-created the Chicago School of hard analysis. Luis Caffarelli focused his work on partial differential equations. Physicist Juan Martín Maldacena and computer scientist Cecilia Berdichevsky both studied there. Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in 1948.

  On the literary side, Julio Cortázar, one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, began a philosophy degree at UBA at age 18, though financial difficulties prevented him from completing it. Novelist and biographer Alicia Jurado earned a degree in Natural Sciences from the university.

  In architecture, Clorindo Testa, who pioneered brutalism in Argentina, graduated from the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism in 1948. The rationalist Alberto Prebisch graduated from the School of Architecture in 1921 and later became dean of that same faculty in 1955. Rafael Viñoly, the Uruguayan architect who designed the Cero+infinito building at the Ciudad Universitaria complex, also studied at UBA; that building was finished in 2022.

  The university's alumni in business include the founders of unicorn startups that raised the most venture capital funding in Latin America in 2020. Engineer Horacio Anasagasti, who created the first Argentine-produced car, graduated from the UBA Faculty of Engineering at age 23 in 1902.

• 8. Open Doors

  ›

  Since 1949, undergraduate study at the University of Buenos Aires has been free of charge for everyone, regardless of nationality. That policy has made the institution one of the most internationally attended in Latin America. Just over 4 percent of undergraduates are foreign nationals, while 15 percent of postgraduate students come from abroad. At the Faculty of Economic Sciences, the international share of postgraduate students reaches 30 percent.

  The university also reaches inside Argentina's federal prison system. In 1985, UBA signed an agreement with the Federal Penitentiary System that eventually became the UBA XXII program, which allows all people held in federal prisons to enroll at the university and study graduate courses while detained.

  The QS World University Rankings placed UBA 66th in the world in 2021. Times Higher Education's World Reputation Rankings for 2020 placed it in the 176-200 range.

  Its campus is not a campus in the conventional sense. The 13 faculties, 6 hospitals, 16 museums, 13 scientific institutes, 5 high schools, the Cosmos Cinema, the Symphony Orchestra, Eudeba, and the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas are scattered across the city of Buenos Aires. The closest thing to a unified campus is the Ciudad Universitaria complex in the Núñez neighborhood, along the banks of the Río de la Plata, which houses the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences and the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism.

  Radio Universidad de Buenos Aires, which broadcasts on FM 87.9 MHz and launched on the 20th of December 2005, carries the motto el saber está en el aire, meaning knowledge is in the air.