Victor Ballinas
The newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, September 22, 2024, p. 10
The Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM) celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. The general rector of the Open House in Time, José Antonio de los Reyes Heredia, highlights: This institution was created to bring quality education to young people from the outskirts of Mexico City who did not have a place at UNAM and IPN. Its design was exemplary.
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De los Reyes highlights in an interview: The convergence of scientists, humanists and great thinkers of the time gave shape to the project that the first general rector of the UAM, the architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, had and which consisted of establishing an institution with an original model, where teaching and research are intertwined from a new organization: instead of faculties, a departmental model with academic divisions and quarters
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The UAM academic units were originally located in Azcapotzalco, Xochimilco and Iztapalapa. Today it has two more: Lerma and Cuajimalpa. The first great success
The institution’s main objective, he stressed, was the creation of new degrees in the areas of engineering: environmental, energy, hydrological and biomedical, four degrees that did not exist in other universities.
Since its inception in 1974 and throughout the 1980s, it has consolidated a social approach to healthcare linked to society. It is a way of what is reflected today in the new Mexican school, which means a construction of knowledge based on learning from a real problem.
said the general rector.
In the architecture part, he details, We proposed from the beginning that we were not going to design houses or build buildings, but rather a habitat with a social concept that still exists today. Also, between the 80s and 90s, we started with community care units with our dental clinics in the eastern part of the metropolitan area of the country’s capital; in the northern area, a law firm that allows us to advise people who do not have legal defense and, also in the northern area, an industrial consulting office. In the 90s, we started with the first supercomputing laboratory, with the UAM at the forefront.
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Also in that decade, adds De los Reyes Heredia, human development programs emerged in Chiapas, in Ocosingo, Palenque and the Lacandon jungle, on issues of health care, even in Zapatista areas.
The rejected ones
Asked about students who are rejected from admission to undergraduate programs, the rector emphasizes: It is a difficult situation, because there are courses that are limited, for example, the course with the highest demand is medicine, but in that degree the number of students cannot be increased indiscriminately because they have practical training in hospitals and capacity depends on that, and another part of their training is in laboratories, which limits access.
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However, he points out that the Metropolitan Autonomous University is reviewing how to expand enrollment in that degree, although it is also considering creating degrees that respond to new trends related to the relocation of companies: We are, for example, involved in projects with the pharmaceutical area or in materials and semiconductors, which are areas that are seen as areas of opportunity and have to do with this mutation of the offer.
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For the UAM, he states, 100% virtual education is not in their proposals, we have rather thought of hybrid models, so we recognize that the presence of students is essential, although we must also recognize that the new generations have developed new ways of establishing virtual communities that 30 years ago we were unable to do.
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The student population in the UAM academic units is 46,512 students and the budget for this year was 9 billion 969 million 834 thousand pesos.
