In 1957, as Juscelino Kubitschek's administration surveyed the state of higher education in Brazil, it looked with dismay to the university system, which it feared was underdeveloped and marked at best by an “incomplete autonomy” for research and education. Ten years later, when Brazil's military dictatorship entered into an agreement with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), students took to the streets, protesting against the regime's “manipulation of the university, the use of the university for imperialism,” and its sacrifice of “liberty and university autonomy, the self‐formation of the university.”1 At the same time, the regime defended its actions as finally creating an “autonomous” university that could work toward national development. By the early 1980s, as Brazil was transitioning from dictatorship to democracy, university professors mobilized, insisting on the “autonomy and democratization of the universities,” viewing autonomy and democracy as mutually dependent in order to challenge “the structure of power in force” in the military's twilight.2

Collectively, these moments capture the diverse meanings and uses of autonomy to different social actors, and how different groups deployed the concept of university autonomy to very different ends. Traditionally, the question of autonomy has been one that has focused either on student movements or on national education in the face of international influences.3 Complicating this narrative, this paper draws on the Brazilian case to expand the social and political understandings of university autonomy in Latin America, revealing the ways different social groups deployed university autonomy as a political and discursive tool in the contestatory process of defining what constituted a democratic society.

This article moves beyond the idea of university autonomy as just an institutional issue or student demand to explore the different ways the state, students, and faculty considered and utilized autonomy in political struggles over the social function of education. For the state under both democratic and military regimes, university autonomy was the path toward particular visions of state‐led development; for students, it was the means to challenge authority and socially and intellectually democratize campuses; for professors, it was a key tool in mobilizing as a labor force and shaping political democratization in Brazil. While each of these groups understood autonomy in very different ways, their insistence on university autonomy as the path to advance Brazilian society rendered the question of university autonomy a fraught, but shared, discursive field in which different groups attempted to shape Brazilian society. In understanding the multiplicity of interpretations and deployments of university autonomy as both a policy and a discursive ideal, this article explores how issues like university autonomy shed light on the heterogeneous discourses of development, democracy, and resistance in both democratic and authoritarian regimes, even while complicating our understanding of education, society, and development in Brazil, implicitly suggesting a reconsideration of struggles over university autonomy in Latin America.