This article examines the emergence of the School of Sociology at ARCIS University between 1984 and 1991. Its disciplinary project constituted a critical alternative in clear continuity with the commitment sociology of the sixties, and against the drifts that the discipline was taking in the eighties: its horizon was to articulate theoretical and methodological rigor with social and political commitment, including party militancy in the context of the anti-dictatorial struggle. Based on a documentary review and interviews with directors, teachers, and students, we reconstruct the origins of the Sociology degree, camouflaged under the label of Research and Social Planning, which functioned as a protected space for the discipline and its practitioners amid the dictatorship.