“The renown Borges enjoyed during his lifetime, documented by a slew of monographs and controversies, still astonishes us today. We know that he himself was astonished, and that he always feared being declared an impostor or a bungler or a peculiar mixture of both.” Thus reads the entry devoted to Jorge Luis Borges in an Enciclopedia Sudamericana dated 2074. With irony, typographical errors and anachronism, it was written, of course, by Borges himself, a century before its hypothetical publication. Forty years after the death of the author of Ficciones and El Aleph, which occurred on June 14, 1986, that fear — if it ever existed, if it was not pure imposture or shy modesty or a blend of both — could be declared abolished. The passage of time has raised his stature even higher and enriched both his figure and his work: Borges has long been ranked among the greatest authors of world literature, and undisputedly occupies the throne of Argentina’s greatest writer.

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After months of conflict and strikes, Javier Milei’s government yielded to the demands of Argentina’s university community and on Wednesday ordered a pay increase for professors and other higher education workers. It also announced it will allocate funds to boost universities’ operating budgets and those of their hospitals, though it will not increase grants for financial-aid scholarships for low-income students. The announced raises represent a partial reversal of the president’s budget-cutting measures, but remain below the university-financing law passed by Congress that Milei refuses to implement. For that reason, universities warned that the measure is “an important step but by no means definitive or sufficient.”

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The demand over funding and salaries at public universities in Argentina shows no signs of abating. Protests and strikes resumed this week to demand that the government of Javier Milei respect the university financing law, while the academic community awaits a ruling from the Supreme Court of Justice on the government’s noncompliance. Since Tuesday, schools affiliated with the country’s largest university, the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), have been occupied by students. And faculty unions are staging strikes across the country all week.

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