Half a century of the UDA

Half a century of the UDA

When the University of Azuay began to operate-fifty years ago-several factors came together. The Church sought for its seminarians a formation that would provide them with complementary studies. The Second Vatican Council put the Church in tune with the new times and a basic line was that of a more direct relationship between religious and society. That they had a secular profession, was a way in that direction.

In Cuenca there was only one University that, although it had a long and outstanding career, was insufficient to meet the growing needs of the city. There were new needs for different schedules-for example-to serve a group of people who had not been able to study after finishing school, but who, after the years, had the time and need to pursue a career.

There was a youthful movement, fleeting but vigorous, as was the French May of 1968. A global wave of protest, also toured Latin America. The old and traditional radical left began to be questioned by its dogmatism, at the same time as the crimes that had occurred in Stalinism and in the Chinese cultural revolution, initiated in 1966, were discovered.

Many of the public universities suffered from an extreme politicization that took many people away from them or made them attend their classrooms unwillingly. A new, more open university was needed that, respecting the right to profess a political line, did not make partisanship, the nucleus of university life.

These and other circumstances marked the emergence of what is now the University of Azuay and that in its origins depended on the Catholic University of Guayaquil, first and, after the PUCE. The founding professors were Claudio Malo González, Francisco Olmedo Llorente, Carlos Pérez Agustí, Rafael Galiana, José Castelví and Nelson Yáñez. Father Alonso Montero Mora administered the nascent institution for many years as pro-rector, as did Claudio Malo, who directed it in the academic part. The UDA owes them a lot.

In 1990 was created as University of Azuay. The University Council appointed as Rector who had been performing the pro-rectorate: Juan Cordero Iñiguez, until the election is carried out by universal vote of the definitive Rector, according to the new Statute. I received the honor of being elected with the universal vote of the professors, students, employees and workers in an exercise of unprecedented democracy in the universities of the country. Public universities chose not directly, but through student representatives and employees, who generally represented more political parties than their constituents. For four periods the community chose me for these high functions, from 1992 to the 2012. The UDA was the first in the country's history to achieve Accreditation, showing that universities should not only say they are good, but show that they are.

This past Saturday, presided by its rector, Francisco Salgado, who made and do the University, paraded through the city that saw it born half a century ago.