UBA and activism

On Tuesday the lecturer in my Genocides teórico ended class 45 minutes early. He gave students two options: leave, or stay and debate the role students and professors at UBA should play in national politics.

I expected everyone to leave, except for maybe a few weirdoes who wanted to hear themselves talk. It was 9 o’clock at night, and in Argentina students don’t even go to university full-time. Why should they waste their time in class when they could be on their way home to their families, or out to dinner with friends, or clocking a few extra hours at work?

But everyone stayed. For the next hour the 70 or so students in the class discussed everything from whether UBA should help the Argentine government monitor newspapers during times of crisis to how to persuade the University to fix the elevators in the Social Sciences building. The professor looked on from the back of the classroom as people took turns making arguments and responding to each other’s points.

Meanwhile, I sat with another exchange student and tried to get over my amazement for long enough to actually listen. Not everyone was speaking, but even those who didn’t say anything were engaged and paying attention.

In my month so far taking classes at UBA, I’ve learned as much about political and social activism as I have about anything I’ve actually studied in my courses. This is partly because I’ve missed almost as many classes as I’ve had. (My professor was sick or traveling; it was a national holiday; the lecturer’s microphone was broken…)

But a bigger part of it is that activism and protest are central to the culture here. The paro de campo that just ended, for example, had the Americans I know here mystified — how can an entire country just stop producing food? And yet Argentina essentially responded with a collective “Oh, damn. Not this again.” Today my professor was a half an hour late to my FLACSO class because of traffic jams tied to a strike by bus drivers.

The activism is even more pronounced at UBA. I never have a class that isn’t interrupted by a student group making an announcement for a march, a debate or an impending strike. The walls of the buildings are covered with posters that range from fliers advertising a discussion about Argentina’s role in the world economy to hand-painted signs calling for a revolution of the proletariat.

But one of the things my class on Tuesday discussed is whether or not the activism is effective. Students, professors, or teaching assistants at UBA strike at least once a week in one department or another, to the point that a lot of people just roll their eyes and ignore them. Even the paro de campo, while it was impossible to ignore, wasn’t actually successful. Cristina Kirchner, the president, refused to negotiate until the farmers agreed to allow the distribution of food.

I don’t honestly know what I think. I love the activism here, and the political involvement, and just that if there’s something people are unhappy about, they’ll do something to try to change it. But striking is so commonplace that it’s viewed as an annoyance rather than a strong statement.

We didn’t reach any conclusions in my class, either, even though it ran fifteen minutes past the time it was supposed to end. We’re continuing next week, so I'll see what people say then.