Monday, December 3, 2007
Mexico’s
Flagship University Gets a New Leader
By Allan
Wall
On November 20th, 2007, Dr. Jose Narro
Robles was inaugurated as the new president of Mexico’s Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, known by the acronym UNAM.
Replacing Juan Ramon de la Fuente, who served the
past eight years, Dr. Narro’s term is scheduled to run from 2007 to 2011. Previously he was head of UNAM’s College
of Medicine.
Not only is the UNAM the biggest, most influential,
and most prestigious university in Mexico, it’s the biggest in Latin America.
It has over a quarter of a million students.
It’s also Mexico’s oldest university,
founded in 1551 as the Real y Pontifica Universidad
de México. It was almost the first university in the hemisphere, but was
beaten to that honor by a university in Lima, Peru, by only four months.
The university’s main campus, University City,
is located in southern Mexico City, and is notable for its architectural and artistic merits.
The UNAM has its own police force, and any other law enforcement agency is forbidden from entering campus without permission.
The “autonomous” part of the university’s
title was granted in the 1920s, and means that the institution manages its own budget and curriculum, and it did so even throughout
the many years of the one-party state.
In recent years the UNAM has faced controversy
over academic and admission standards, and the low cost of its tuition. A proposed
tuition increase in 1999 sparked off a general strike and campus shutdown that lasted until early 2000.
Campus radicals took over the University City campus,
and the protestors’ demands kept getting more and more demanding, sorely testing the institution’s principles
of autonomy and its relationship with the federal government. Finally, in February
of 2000, President Ernesto Zedillo sent in the recently-formed PFP (Federal Preventive Police). The PFP attacked University City at dawn, nabbed the sleeping protestors, and took back
the campus without casualties. Classes were resumed.
Even during the strike though, some of the research
for which the UNAM is noted was continued.
The UNAM carries out wide-ranging research programs
in various areas, including astronomy, biotechnology, nuclear science, ecology, physics, cellular physiology, geophysics,
engineering, genomics chemistry, optics, nanosciences, alternate energies and medicine.
Currently, 60% of Mexico’s scientific publications
are produced by the UNAM. The university’s research institutes practice
an open door policy, allowing anybody in the world to use them.
The UNAM is also famous for its sports teams.
The Pumas soccer team competes in Mexico’s First
Division professional soccer league, and their home stadium is the Olympic Stadium.
Another UNAM team is the Pumas Dorados (Golden Pumas)
fútbol americano team (what Mexicans call the sport we Americans call football). The sport has been played at the UNAM since the 1920s.
The UNAM numbers among its alumni a dizzying (and
diverse) array of famous personages.
Recent Mexican presidents who graduated from the UNAM
are Carlos Salinas, Miguel de la Madrid, Jose Lopez Portillo and Luis Echeverria. So
did presidential wannabe Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Manuel Gomez Morin, a founder of the PAN (National
Action Party) was a graduate (and UNAM president). Another graduate was Mexican
diplomat/politician Alfonso Garcia Robles, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. Apparently, so is Chiapas rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos.
Non-Mexican politicians who have called UNAM their
alma mater include U.S. senator Alan Cranston, Bolivian Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera, Costa Rican president Abel Pacheco,
Guatemalan president Alfonso Portillo and, from across the pond, Kosovo politico Veton Surroi.
Mexican literary giants who are UNAM graduates include
Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Fuentes, Enrique Krause and Carlos Monsivais.
UNAM graduates notable in the scientific world include
Rodolfo Neri (the first Mexican in space), Mario J. Molina, (winner of the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry, 1995), astronomers Guillermo Haro and Carlos Frenk, and physicists
Marcos Moshinsky and Miguel Jose Yacaman.
Mexican magnate Carlos Slim, who according to Forbes
is the richest man in the world, graduated from UNAM.
So did current Mexican national soccer team
coach Hugo Sanchez, who actually earned a degree there in dentistry while also playing soccer.
Famous UNAM students who
didn’t graduate include Octavio Paz (1990 Nobel Prize for Literature) and American conservative elder William F. Buckley,
who studied there in 1943.
That’s only a small sample, but it gives you an idea of the diversity of the UNAM’s graduates
and former students.
And that’s the university – with all its challenges – of which Dr. Narro now takes the
reins.
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Allan Wall, a MexiData.info columnist, recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.
He currently resides in Mexico, where he has lived since 1991. He can be reached via e-mail
at allan39@prodigy.net.mx.
