Hugo Aboites*: Temporary academics, single exam: UAM and UNAM

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to UAM and the The academic and administrative union (Situam) is about to deal a major blow to academic precariousness, because, if everything goes ahead, the professors temporary Those who have lived for years on three-month contracts could finally reach a permanent position. And for UNAM and other institutions, virtual president Sheinbaum has already announced the end of the single Comipems exam, which means an important change in the horizon of admission at the metropolitan and national level. It is true that the urgent modifications required by a General Law of Higher Education are missing, whose conception and drafting, in large part, was in charge of the PAN and its private vision of the right to education, but both decisions are very significant.

In the case of UAM, after 40 years of insistence by the unions, authorities and the workers’ union have decided to build a path whose first step, already completed, consisted of preparing a bilateral report on the subject and proposing a procedure to respond to the human and academic precariousness that the UAM has experienced for half a century. With prior agreement between the general secretaries of the UAM and Situam, and if the academics, students and authorities that make up the Academic College (university council) do not object, the temporary workers who, in general terms, in addition to having at least four years at the UAM, have a number of consecutive contracts in the same department, will be able to have access, first of all, to occupy the position in a competitive examination.

The above is an excellent way to celebrate the five-decade anniversary of the Autonomous Metropolitan University and also a way to repair the blow that in 1985 meant for the university itself and for a number of academics bilaterally preselected when the then rector retracted before the Academic College the bilateral agreement already signed and thus the point was eliminated from the agenda.

In the case of the single exam, virtual president Sheinbaum also responds to an insistent 30-year demand from teachers and students of the Trinational Coalition in Defense of Public Education and students grouped in the MAES (Movement of Applicants Excluded from Higher Education), who since 1996 have taken up the indignation of mothers and fathers against this test, as well as the anguish and hope of nearly 9 million young women and men who graduated from high school and were forced to take it.

A classification exam of the best or also chickpeas by the poundas the then director of Ceneval called them, a private entity in charge of designing and administering the exam that young people attribute the name of multiple confusion and that, due to its origin in the dark 20s of the last century in the United States and due to the supremacist affiliation of the then called science of human measurement again and again identifies as top either more suitable young people (and not so much young women) from fine private education, from well-off families and from residential areas. Thus, for being a woman, from the periphery, from a popular background –as they say– and from a public school, for the majority this exam guarantees that they will not cross the class line and instead of going to UNAM or the Cop They will be sent to a Conalep, to some College of Bachelors that is academically and professionally deprived, or to a Cetis to study air conditioning. Ending the class-based classification and distribution device of demand that is this metropolitan exam is an excellent start in public education today, but it is not the end. It ends a business that was concessioned to Ceneval (until now run by SEP officials), but not its effects on millions of students.

Discrimination in access to the schools of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and IPN will continue if nothing is done to change it. The Poli depends directly on the SEP, and can stop using them. The National Autonomous University of Mexico, in turn, has just announced seriously and with a special appointment, that it will make institutional changes. With the disappearance of the single exam, the commitment of the UNAM with Comipems to use a similar standardized test ends.

And it becomes possible then to re-evaluate at UNAM whether it is convenient to continue with this practice, when it has been extremely traumatic, especially for young women (suicides in 2003) and to reread the norm with another perspective. To value that the university regulations do not require the use of the standardized exam and, on the contrary, exclude it. It asks that a written test and in the standardized form nothing should be written, not even the name, circles are filled in. Changes, of course, within the quota limitations.

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Farewell to our colleague Francisco Piñón, founder and leader of Situam, brilliant and always committed philosopher and academic.