Ways of students and graduates’ intervention during the “desperonización” of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Rosario, 1956)

Abstract

In this article we analyse one of the several ways in which students and graduates activism took part in the “Facultad de Filosofía y Letras” (Universidad Nacional del Litoral) during the period opened by the military coup d’état on September 16th of 1955. Once the strategy of pacification held by general Lonardi was aborted, it started a policy of “desperonización” of the argentine society stimulated by Pedro E. Aramburu, who looked forward to eliminate all trace of the peronist party by proscription and exclusion of its symbology, practices and main figures. At University, that policy was expressed in two different dimensions. On the one hand, by the revocation of University laws created during the peronist government and the restitution of University autonomy; on the other hand, by the discharged of professors and specially by the called to faculty selection at all the Argentinian universities. The “Centro de Estudiantes de Filosofía y Letras”, the “Agrupación Humanista” and the “Colegio de Graduados de Filosofía y Letras” had an important participation at the faculty selection celebrated in the early 1956 by impugning many candidates. Because of that, in the following pages we analyse this case as “at ground level” dimention of the process of “desperonización”. Nonetheless, we affirm that this research allows to leave aside the antinomy peronism-antiperonism, by considering the inpugnements as ways of political intervention and identity makers.