Victor Ballinas
The newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, August 21, 2024, p. 13
At the opening ceremony of the 2024-2025 high school and undergraduate school year, UNAM rector Leonardo Lomelí Vanegas highlighted before hundreds of students and academics: Our commitment to the freedom of knowledge is firm and unwavering.
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He asked the university students Always keep in mind that university autonomy has been a fundamental pillar, for 95 years, to promote the existence of the most valuable principles of the institution: academic freedom and research.
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He stressed that UNAM currently serves about 380 thousand students, thanks to a budget that, although is insufficient due to various structural factors
is used efficiently and transparently, allowing for robust programs and capacity expansion, he stressed.
Over the past two decades, he said, the university has made a continuous and extraordinary effort to expand its enrollment, which Today it registers an increase of more than 50 percent compared to 2001, which also proves the willingness to multiply access to more Mexican students.
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Lomelí, who was accompanied at the ceremony by former rectors Francisco Barnés de Castro, José Narro Robles and Enrique Graue Wiechers, told the university students that These actions not only demonstrate our ability to adapt and grow in the face of the country’s changing educational needs, but also strengthen our management to be a catalyst for progress and social renewal.
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In the Juárez Hall of the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center, the rector explained that this year there are about 35,000 new students enrolled in high school, more than 48,000 in undergraduate programs, and approximately 12,000 in graduate programs. UNAM has more than 24,000 professors, he said.
In welcoming the university, he said that it is one of the best universities on a global scale and one of the best in Latin America. Autonomy has allowed us to value a diversity of positions and beliefs; to draw up and materialize proposals that, from academic rigor, aspire to create a more prosperous, fair, peaceful and egalitarian reality.
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The public, autonomous and secular university opens its doors and offers professional and social mobility opportunities to young people from the most vulnerable groups, many of whom are the first in their families to access higher education.
The president of the Governing Board, Enrique Cabrero Mendoza, and the general secretary, Patricia Dávila Aranda, as well as academics and researchers, also accompanied the rector, to whom he pointed out that Tolerance is essential for harmonious coexistence and building consensus, strengthening collegial work and the fabric that unites us.
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