By Juan S. Larrosa-Fuentes (November 2, 2026)
After a long period of uncertainty, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled on various elements of the General Law on Humanities, Sciences, Technologies, and Innovation, enacted during the previous presidential administration. The discussion is broad, involving legal, economic, and public policy issues. One topic that has attracted the most national attention concerns the National System of Researchers, the well-known SNII. I write this text from two very particular positions. The first is that I work at a private university and belong to the SNII. The second is as a researcher interested, from the perspective of political philosophy, in the concept of the public.
The 2018 change of government, under the self-described Fourth Transformation, or 4T, proposed various changes to how science should be funded. Those who now form part of the government, when they were in opposition, denounced opaque and poorly traceable management of resources allocated to this field. They also pointed to investments intended to favor private interests and to corrupt practices in fund allocation. The diagnosis was plausible and, in many cases, identified important issues that needed to be reviewed and that were, in fact, taking place.
The problem, however, came with the new vision that was proposed and the solutions derived from it. One key element in understanding this is what the government means by “public,” who defines it, and how that definition is implemented. In its discourse, it suggests that science should be oriented toward problems relevant to the country, a plausible understanding of the public: what is of collective interest. It also seeks to make resource allocation transparent, another relevant notion of the public, understood as the opposite of what is hidden. Finally, it argues that science should be accessible to everyone, so everyone can participate in it and use it. All three elements are commendable; nevertheless, in practice, they have not been fully developed.
The orientation toward relevant problems has been implemented vertically and has not been the subject of broad, participatory discussion. Transparency, as we know, has been weakened by the elimination of the institutions that protected Mexicans’ right to information. And access to science has been more demagogic than real. Institutions and researchers are asked to make their work public. Still, public policies fail to provide greater access to research positions for new generations or to increase the budgets allocated to science.
In particular, the way the government defines the public to decide who can access the SNII’s financial incentives is highly problematic. Private universities are part of the country’s educational, research, and technological development infrastructure. Mexico is far from a situation in which its public institutions alone can fully meet these three needs. It is therefore contradictory to exclude private universities from state resources solely on the basis of a binary classification. In public discussions, it is important to distinguish, rather than conflate, the origin of resources, the legal nature of institutions, and the character of the knowledge they produce. Researchers who work at private universities also produce public knowledge.
The problem of the public in relation to science is not resolved by eliminating financial incentives drawn from public resources for researchers at private universities. The problem lies in understanding and debating what we mean by public science and who has the right and legitimacy to define it. Only then would come the long process of building public policies aligned with this conception of the public.
This was a production by Juan Larrosa for NTR Radio News. If you would like to read this commentary, visit my blog at triple double u dot juan hyphen larrosa dot com. Until next time.
This text was originally broadcast on NTR Radio News on November 2, 2026, hosted by journalist Sonia Serrano.