Student strikes won Mexico's national university its autonomy and shaped its turbulent history
UNAM, with more than 324,000 students, is among the world's largest universities, and its students have repeatedly shut it down. Strikes over exam rules in the 1920s helped win its independence from the education ministry, and a walkout against a fee of about $150 a semester closed the campus for almost a year.
Education minister Justo Sierra founded the modern university on 22 September 1910, during the final months of Porfirio Diaz's rule. Rather than revive the Royal and Pontifical University, created by royal decree in 1551 and finally closed by Emperor Maximilian in 1865, he merged the capital's scattered colleges into a secular national institution shaped by positivism and liberal ideas. Law, medicine, engineering, fine arts and the national preparatory school came together under its first rector, Joaquin Eguia y Lis.
The Mexican Revolution made its early years unstable. The first student strike erupted in 1912 over new exam methods in the law school, and by July most law students had quit for a newly created Free School of Law. José Vasconcelos, rector from 1920, designed its coat of arms in 1921: an eagle and a condor framing a map of Latin America from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, with the motto The Spirit shall speak for my people. Strikes against a new grading system in the mid-1920s, backed by professors, led to autonomy, making the rector the final authority. In the early 1930s rector Manuel Gomez Morin resisted government attempts to impose socialist education.
Its main campus, Ciudad Universitaria, was first imagined in 1928 by two architecture students and built in the 1950s on an old solidified lava field in the south of the city, replacing downtown buildings. President Miguel Aleman laid the first stone on 20 November 1952. The campus, finished in 1954, hosted the main events of the 1968 Olympics and has its own police, transport and even a supermarket. UNESCO listed it as World Heritage in June 2007.
Unrest continued: in 1966 students forced a rector out, and the 1999 to 2000 strike ended only when police cleared occupied buildings on 7 February 2000. Every Mexican Nobel laureate has been an UNAM graduate, and its researchers produce over a quarter of the country's scientific papers.
Source: National Autonomous University of Mexico
