Julio La Sala, prominent UNCo sociologist and public university advocate, dies at 82

Julio La Sala died at eighty-two, and the news moved through the Alto Valle like a quiet closing of a door that had been open for decades. He was a sociologist, a professor, a former dean and vice-rector of the Universidad Nacional del Comahue—the kind of figure who shapes a region not through headlines but through the slow work of teaching, building, and standing firm on principle.

Born in September 1943, La Sala came to Roca in the early 1970s, just as the city was establishing its first foothold in the university system. He had studied sociology at the University of Buenos Aires during a time when the discipline itself was still considered unusual, even eccentric, in Argentina. Most people pursuing social sciences chose social work, which carried a clearer name and purpose. But La Sala chose the harder path—the one that asks questions rather than simply provides services. When he arrived in Roca, he threw himself into the local struggle to bring higher education to the region. In 1973, the Comahue opened its doors there, and La Sala was among the first to teach, offering courses in the introduction to social sciences and in historical theory and interpretation.

Over the decades, he became woven into the institution's fabric. He held the title of full professor of sociology. He served as dean of the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, where he oversaw the completion of the Ernesto Sábato library building—a physical monument to his tenure. He was vice-rector from 1998 to 2002, during the administration of Jorge Rabassa. He also helped establish a regional campus of the Universidad de Belgrano. But the achievements that seemed to matter most to those who knew him were quieter: he pushed for the creation of a formal sociology degree program at the faculty. He organized the Bosque de la Memoria—the Memory Forest—on the faculty grounds, where trees were planted to honor those who had disappeared during Argentina's military dictatorship. It was a visible, living commitment to human rights in a region that had suffered under that regime.

In the classroom, La Sala was known as charismatic and unafraid. He taught the Frankfurt School with particular intensity, and he became a leading voice in the region on Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher and sociologist whose work on critical theory, deliberative democracy, and public space had shaped intellectual life worldwide. La Sala brought that rigor to his students. He also brought argument—he never shied from debate or controversy, and those who encountered him either felt energized by the exchange or unsettled by it. There was no middle ground with him, no polite indifference.

His colleagues and students remembered him most often with a book in his hands. He was always reading. He would sit in bars with a volume or two, absorbed. For a time, he even owned a café called the Viejo Molino after returning from Spain. He balanced his intellectual life with a passionate, almost fanatical devotion to Deportivo Roca, the local football club. He was a man of contradictions held in easy tension—the serious theorist and the devoted fan, the rigorous academic and the person who preferred to read in public spaces rather than in solitude.

But perhaps what defined him most was his unwavering defense of public universities. He believed in education as a right, not a commodity. He served as godfather to Antena Libre, the university radio station, helping to amplify student voices. In a region where public institutions are often fragile, often under pressure, La Sala stood as a consistent advocate for their preservation and expansion.

His death leaves a gap in the Alto Valle's intellectual and educational landscape—the kind of gap that is felt most acutely by those who sat in his classes, who worked alongside him in faculty meetings, who saw him reading in a corner café and knew they were in the presence of someone serious about ideas and about the world.