ABSTRACT
Universities all over the world are experiencing intense pressures from governments and private organizations to change their goals, functions, and organizational structure. Two main contending parties in the present university conflict in Argentina can be observed in the early nineties: autonomists and modernizers. The former are grounded in the principles of the 1918 Cordoba Reform, which emphasize internal democratization and eventually a democratization of the entire society. Marketventionists and autonomists understand the university-state conflict from different perspectives. For marketventionists, particularly government officials, this conflict is rooted mainly in the university’s own shortcomings. The core of the conflict lies in the efforts undertaken by marketventionists to implement a thorough university restructuring more in line with the heteronomous model, and the eagerness of autonomist to remain loyal to the reformist model. The pressures to abandon the autonomist model is apparent in a variety of aspects, such as tuition fees, admission policies, student participation in governance, responsiveness to societal demands and state control.
