La política universitaria de la dictadura militar en la Argentina: proyectos de reestructuración del sistema de educación superior (1976-1983)

The 24th of March of 1976, the Armed Forces overthrew the government of president María Estela Martinez de Perón. In this article we will present and analyze the main policies that were designed and implemented for the universities during this dictatorship, considering the successive directions of the Ministry of Education. We will see that the designed policies of redimensionamiento from 1976 to 1980, introduced a new modality for entering the university, the reduction of the quotas of students per curriculum, the taxation of diverse administrative acts and the suppression or fusion of student halls and of disciplines. To sum up, the policies were aimed at trimming the number of universities and the percentage of registered students. Next, we will observe that after the approval of the university law in April of 1980, the national government had little leeway to introduce new changes in the university system, in a political and social context that began to change. The national State restored that year the collection of tuition for university students and set up mass hiring exams for faculty members to consolidate in their positions professors who had been active between 1974 and 1976, but we will indicate how these measures attracted strong criticism from actors who had been previously silenced, like the students