▲ In the image, a protest held in November.Photo Alfredo Dominguez
Laura Poy Solano
La Jornada Newspaper
Monday, December 8, 2025, p. 3
The deterioration of the infrastructure and equipment of the National Pedagogical University (UPN), the lack of attention to the needs of students and the loss of working conditions for teachers have led the institution to a crisis.
“We have spent seven years of a management that has not responded to the needs of the students, on the contrary, it has been taking away and ignoring their rights,” warned professors-researchers from that university.
In interview with The Day They maintain that since the arrival of rector Rosa María Torres Hernández in December 2018, the institution faces an accelerated process of abandonment of both its infrastructure, its academic life and its administrative management.
The professors-researchers Virginia Casas, general secretary of the D-II-UPN3 delegation; Marcela Santillán, academic advisor, and Samuel Ubaldo, academic representative, who make up the liaison committee of the teaching staff with the UPN student movement, which has been on strike since last October 28, affirm that there is a “deep fatigue” of students and professors due to the abandonment of the institution.
Therefore, their main demand is the dismissal of the rector.
Marcelino Guerra, academic advisor, and José David Alarid, professor-researcher at that university, add that in the current six-year term, the UPN lost the “strategic position that we had as an institution in the National Educational System, the product of terrible management, which has been dedicated to personal issues, of privilege. For this administration, students are on an unknown level, they are invisible.”
Added to this, they say, is the loss of working conditions for teachers, while the administrative management of the university “has become a black box.”
The above, they express, is reflected in the accelerated deterioration of infrastructure. For years “we have taught classes in classrooms without benches, computers, overhead projectors and sufficient televisions, in addition to poor electricity and Internet service.”
Among the unaddressed problems are the insecurity faced by students in the evening shift and the absence of competitive examinations that allow the allocation of 150 vacant academic positions that, teachers estimate, have not been filled since 2008 in all UPN units in Mexico City, and since 2013 in the Ajusco unit.
The above affects students and teachers, since the number of interim professors with five and a half month contracts has increased, “who cannot provide continuity to collegiate work, which has impacted the academic life of the university,” the teachers point out.
Faced with this scenario, the UPN authority “creates a fantasy world, where everything is fine (…) and this makes students feel mistreated, ignored, by an authority that, within the Fourth Transformation, would have to guarantee the right to education, but in dignified conditions,” declares Professor Ubaldo.
Santillán highlights that another of the negative impacts of Torres Hernández’s management are the changes to the regulations of the Academic Council, since its sessions “have become closed, which had not happened in 38 years.”
