Symposium and humanism at the University of Azuay

The University of Azuay held the debate meeting 'Thinking about the University', a meeting place in which the institution thinks of itself and encourages a constant dialogue about the work it carries out from the theoretical perspective.

The universities of the country met to think of the University as a human institution, its meaning, its criticism and its prospective.

 

 

Diego Jaramillo, president of the permanent Symposium, announced the objective of this meeting and argued that the essence of the university is knowledge, what it means to study itself, that it gives meaning to its processes of generation and transmission of knowledge and integration with society.

 

 

"It is essential to update and specify the place of enunciation of academic practice, in addition to deploying the view on itself, in order to make its self-criticism and retrospective," he said.

He proposed that thinking about the University means thinking, in the first instance, of the need for the current value of understanding the world and the place of the human being.

 

 

To generate this space for debate, five conferences on various topics were raised about the university that is needed, with emphasis on the territory of Latin America.

 

 

 

Call for papers

Francisco Salgado Arteaga, rector and speaker of the Universidad del Azuay, spoke about 'University, meaning and prospective', whose fundamental axis was research on the alma mater, as a human institution and understanding its meaning.

"Foresight does not mean forecasting the university in a few years, it means building the university we want today; Therefore, prospectiveness does not make sense without contemplating a proposal for change, without defining a trajectory, "he explained.

 

 

The rector stressed that optics should present ideas in the form of scenarios, which have as reference the present, indicate a possible or predictable path and build mechanisms to achieve the desired objectives.

Arturo Villavicencio Vivar, the lojano who was coganador of the Nobel prize of the Peace of 2007, was part of the meeting with his presentation on behalf of the Simón Bolívar University, 'The university evaluation, new challenges'.

Among these challenges, he spoke about the new scenario in which the University undergoes a period of evaluation to the race, which forces it to enter the circuits of knowledge commercialization and compete or submit to the agendas of research institutes.

 

 

Fernando Ponce León, speaker of the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, Carlos Rojas Reyes and Iván Carvajal Aguirre, discussed topics such as' Challenges of the Ecuadorian Catholic universities in the face of the transformation of higher education in Ecuador ',' University, Reason and Autonomy 'and' The University, a horizon of perplexity '.

 

Proposal

"When we talk about the University, we talk about reason and the truth. The University must have a sufficient reason, that is, a sustenance, a foundation; but also the University is the place where we argue: where we must give and demand reasons, "said Salgado, at the end of the analytical academic meeting and debate.