This blog post aims give a general outline of the history of university autonomy and academic freedom in Mexico since 1917. My objective is to highlight the importance Mexican governments have given to higher education and higher education institutions as integral part of their political projects. As I will show, Mexican universities are important to political society because they educate future public servants and politicians; they are places where long-standing friendships, alliances and networks are formed. Moreover, in Mexico, universities are important as a political locus of student activism: there is a long tradition of student protest breaking the bounds of campus life and engaging with politics directly. As a result, governments have always been interested in maintaining universities and their students under control. These attempts employ three main strategies: control of university appointments, control of students and teaching curricula, and control of university finances.
During the early twentieth century, public university faculty and students believed that attaining autonomy and academic freedom would protect universities from governmental interference. This essay will show how this has not been generally the case. In the first section, I will analyse the circumstances in which the National University attained autonomy in 1933 and was weakened as a result. In the second section, I will address the successes and failures of the state’s attempts to absorb universities and their communities into the corporatist system of one-party politics development during the rule of the Institutionalised Revolution Party or PRI. In the third section, I will look at the legacy of this system for the present-day relationship between public universities and the state. Finally, I will discuss the attitude of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s towards higher education and the dangers he represents to academic freedom in Mexico.
University Autonomy in Mexico and the Revolutionary State (1920-1940)
The state’s obligation to provide education as a public good has been recognised by Mexican governments since its independence in 1821. All nineteenth-century governments believed that the success of liberal institutions and representative government required educating its citizens.[1] Since colonial education had been an exclusive preserve of the Catholic Church, many governments also identified the church as the chief enemy of this project. Civic education which trained citizens to participate in public life was opposed to religious education which rejected liberalism in favour of despotism and superstition. In this sense, the educational policy of all nineteenth-century governments was always political. It was hostile to historical universities such as the Real y Ponitíficia Universidad de México (Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico) in Mexico City, which was under the control of the Church. In 1868, positivist politicians founded the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP or National Preparatory School), as an alternate secondary education institute under control of the Ministry of Education,[2] which was later incorporated into the Mexican National University when it was founded to replace the Real y Ponifícia in 1910.[3] Both the ENP and the National University were expected to scientifically train male citizens in the positivist tradition to become public servants and responsible professionals.
Similar conflicts between the Church and positivists for control of public education occurred in other Latin American countries at the start of the twentieth century. In Argentina, these produced the first calls for university autonomy.[4] But what did this mean? As part of a rebellion against what they considered to be the illegal designation of their rector in 1918, students from the National University in Córdoba, articulated three main demands:
1. Co-government or the participation of students in the university’s governing bodies.
2. Academic freedom no governmental interference in matters of research and teaching (libertad de investigación y libertad de cátedra).
3. Autonomy for university government, understood as the non-intervention of the state in the designation of university authorities.[5]
The young male students of Córdoba believed their movement was part of “the supreme fight for liberty” which posited “university democracy” against “tyrannical and obstinate” university authorities.[6] As such, theirs was a continuation of the nineteenth-century fight for liberalism against religious conservatism and authoritarian government.
In Mexico, however, the Revolution (1910-1917) meant that the defence of academic freedom and autonomous university government encountered a different enemy: the revolutionary state and its programme to adopt socialism as the defining feature of public education.[7] Proponents of socialist education believed that dialectic materialism was a scientific methodology which allowed students to correctly analyse the social, economic and political moment they were living in.[8] As the director of the ENP, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, argued during the sessions of the first Mexican University Congress of 1933, it taught that Mexico has arrived at the capitalist stage of historical development in the nineteenth century. Mexican society was now progressing to the next historical stage of communism. He argued that “the [capitalist] state has not been neutral before the struggles of the workers, instead […] it has served the interests of a single class, the capitalist class; and teaching in official [state] schools has been nothing more than vehicle to prop up the consciences of the prevailing regime’s men […]” It was time, therefore, that the revolutionary state made use of this tool to educate students in the scientific principles of dialectic materialism and thus further the ends of the revolutionary state.[9]
In this context, the National University of Mexico rapidly entered into conflict with post-revolutionary governments. The positivist ideals of science which had guided its creation were now seen as contradictory to the Revolution, while its faculty was condemned as reactionary: simply a group of out-of-date intellectuals whose political loyalties lay with the old regime. Revolutionaries wanted to transform the curriculum and take control of teaching positions to ensure that the University could serve the new political order. As José Vasconcelos argued in his speech after being appointed by Venustiano Carranza’s government to the rectorship of the University in 1920:
At this moment, I am more a delegate of the Revolution than a new Rector following in the steps of his predecessors. I am not looking to take sanctuary and mediate within the calm atmosphere of the classroom, rather I want to invite you to leave it behind and take up the fight with me […] I have not come to work for the University, but to ask the University that it work for the people.[10]
In response to government efforts to impose a socialist curriculum on the National University, opponents defended the idea of autonomy, academic freedom, and critical inquiry. For example, Antonio Caso, a former rector of the National University’s pre-revolutionary existence, questioned Lombardo Toledano’s ideas about the scientific veracity of dialectic materialism at the University Congress I mentioned above. He rejected the idea that the University should adopt a socialist curriculum with the following arguments:
I offer my respects to the distinguished leaders who are in the hall, but I beg them to consider the danger of having the [National] University adopt a defined creed, because the University is research and the University is teaching, and science is not made, and it does not continue eternally in one point of view, and it keeps acquiring truths it did not have before […] [N]o man has the right to impose a dogma, because all dogma, after being imposed […] runs the risk of being the target of discussion and an object of dispute tomorrow.[11]
Both Caso and Lombardo Toledano believed the University had an obligation to educate the workers, but Caso insisted that this education should teach them to analyse the political questions of the day and arrive at their own conclusions.
Despite governmental interest in controlling the National University’s curriculum and faculty, the confrontation between the University and the government resulted in the former being granted partial autonomy in 1929 and full autonomy in 1933. This “achievement” was not in response to the numerous proposals for the University’s autonomy formulated by academics and their political friends during that period,[12] but rather was the governmental response to student strikes and political protest. In 1929 students from the National University called strike against changes to evaluation procedures. The strike led to violent clashes between students and the Federal District police force, demands for the resignation of the Minister of Education and the Rector, and the occupation of various university buildings by the police. In a move to defuse the political tension, President Emilio Portes Gil removed the University from the direct administrative control of the Ministry of Education. He put University government into the hands of a Council made up of academics and students but reserved the right to appoint the rector for himself. He hoped partial autonomy might reduce the potency of student opposition to his government, or at least render it irrelevant.[13]
In 1933 the National University’s students and professors were polarised around the idea of socialist education. Opponents of the idea in the School of Law called for the resignation of the two figure they associated with the proposal: ENP’s director, Lombardo Toledano, and Rector Roberto Medellín, eventually calling another strike which was supported by the Philosophy and Literature School and others. After students invaded the Rector’s Building and forced Medellín to resign, President Abelardo Rodríguez opted to grant full autonomy to the University. As had been the case in 1929, in 1933 Rodríguez wished to neutralise the protests and limit the impact of student opposition to his government.[14]
Full autonomy for the University meant that it was demoted from its national status and placed on the same level “as the other professional education centres” and henceforth known as the Autonomous University of Mexico. The state renounced all its former attributes: all university government would be in the hands of University Council, who would now name the rector rather than present a list of three candidates to the President has had been the case after 1929. In the different schools, academies of students and professors would govern. It also cut off all funding to the University leading to severe financial hardship during the next twelve years.[15] The incoming president Lázaro Cárdenas went even further during his term (1934-40). He introduced a constitutional reform which redefined state education as obligatorily socialist and tried unsuccessfully to impose this on the Autonomous University of Mexico. Faced with the stubborn opposition, he also curtailed public funding and dedicated his higher education budget to founding a new university -the National Polytechnic institute or IPN- which was entirely without autonomy and formed part of the Ministry of Education. The IPN was to take up the baton of educating the workers to participate in revolutionary objectives, and to that end provided its students with free dormitories, dining rooms and transportation.[16]
This section has argued that Mexican governments firmly believed that universities should educate citizens and future public servants in such a way as to be useful to the state. Liberal governments of the nineteenth century championed positivist sciences against religious dogma; post-revolutionary governments pressed for dialectic materialism against “capitalist” science. One basic feature of governmental policy was to control academic appointments: putting allies in key positions, such as (in the case of the National University) the ENP, the rectorship and the heads of the different faculties. It was hoped that these allies would be able to promote a more desirable curriculum for the academic programmes. These efforts to interfere in university affairs often provoked opposition from student groups and led to demands for administrative autonomy and student participation in university government. Using the National University as an example, it is possible to see that postrevolutionary governments came to regard autonomy as a measure of neutralising student political protest. But, as I shall contend in the next section, this did not mean that the control of university education, academic appointment and students lost its political importance. Quite the reverse was true.
The Political Control of Higher Education During the PRI Regime (1940-1982)
Lázaro Cárdenas’s socialist education agenda did not survive his administration. After 1940, a gradual renovation of the political class meant that the control of government passed out of the hands of the Revolutionaries and into those of a new university-educated generation. During the government of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-1946), the constitutional reform imposing socialist education was withdrawn there was a distinct thawing of relations between the Autonomous University and the government, leading to the publication of a new Organic Law for this institution in 1945. The Law returned the title of “National” to the Autonomous University and was recognised as public corporation, autonomous in teaching and investigation but the beneficiary of public funds.[17] The most obvious example of this détente was the election of President Miguel Alemán in 1946, the first (of six) graduates of the Autonomous University’s Law School to hold this office.[18] During his administration (1946-1952), the University was relocated from its traditional buildings in the centre of Mexico City to University City, an ample campus (of some 730 hectares) in the south of the capital.
During Ávila Camacho’s presidency, the postrevolutionary regime also began to develop the necessary political tools to ensure that its party -the Institutionalised Revolution Party or PRI- could effectively control all levels of government. Since the days of Cárdenas, the party -then called the National Revolutionary Party- had been organised on organic lines around different “sectors” of society: workers, peasants, and soldiers. In this way, formally independent worker and peasant unions were accommodated into confederations affiliated to the official party and led by men of the president’s confidence. Ávila Camacho removed the military sector, replacing it with a new confederation of “popular organisations”, by which the professional middle classes (teachers, small business-owners, shopkeepers, for example) plus students and women’s groups and other organisations that were not explicitly of working-class or peasant composition, could be integrated into “PRI family”.[19]
The PRI operated as a vehicle for clientelist patronage distributed via the leaders of each sector, the politicians who controlled the executive committee of the party at national, state and municipal level, and elected officeholders (federal and state legislators, state governors and municipal presidents). At the top of its pyramid-like structure was the president who made all the key appointments and could assign state funding at will; however, actors at every-level had the ability to offer positions, procure favours and (obviously) to boycott opponents. As analysis of the PRI system has consistently shown, the secret of its success was founded upon the constant renewal of patronage-holders via regular elections in which no-one was allowed to remain in office beyond one term, starting with the president.[20]
Between 1940 y 1982 the National Autonomous University of Mexico or UNAM, state universities, the IPN and all other public higher education centres were deeply embedded into the political system of one-party government. The UNAM, for example, consolidated itself as the favoured centre for higher education amongst political and economic elites. As Roderic Ai Camp has amply documented, it educated three out of every ten members of this class.[21] The ENP performed a similar role at the level of secondary level and was the place that key political friendships (such as that between Luis Echevarría Álvarez and José López Portillo) were forged. Influential academics, such Mario de la Cueva, were leaders of important networking groups that found his favoured students positions within the PRI as functionaries, elected-office holders, or as PRI officials.[22] At a state level, local universities performed a similar role and boasted academics able to stand as political “godfathers” (padrinos) to generations of students.[23]
University offices themselves were also absorbed into the clientelist system. While many of state universities gained their autonomy from their local state governments during the 1950s and 1960s, rectorships were usually disposed of as part of the governor’s personal patronage, while other key academic appointments would be made by the rector amongst his own clients and political allies within the university. Once teacher and university worker unions were established in the universities these also became vehicles for clientelism and patronage.[24] All this was true of the UNAM, although observers generally thought the University’s governing Junta named the rector with little overt intervention from the President. Within the context of one-party rule, it was tacitly understood that these appointments would be made from candidates acceptable to the president in turn.[25]
In this context, academics in state universities and the UNAM exercised the freedoms of research and teaching with care. During the 1950s, Marxist and socialist professors gained dominance in the Economics Faculty in the UNAM; by the early 1960s, the same was true for the Political Science and the Philosophy and Literature Faculties. This pyrrhic victory for Cárdenas did not mean the UNAM students (or indeed many of its professors) were more likely to support PRI governments unconditionally than their predecessors had been.[26] Instead, it meant that these faculties increasingly housed the dissidents who would populate Mexico’s New Left Movement.[27] While a number of these professors and students were inclined towards social democracy, the Cuban revolution of 1959 was a galvanising moment for student politics leading to a resurgence of student groups affiliated to Mexican Communist Party.[28] In the context of the Cold War, the Mexican State regarded these groups with growing suspicion and alarm.[29]
As a result, during this period, PRI governments attempted to absorb student federations and political groups into its orbit. As Jaime M. Pensado has noted, the general aim was to limit student participation in politics. In the 1950s and early 1960s, key student leaders were taken under the wing of academic patronage-holders and awarded access to favours for themselves and their groups: this often came in the form of free entertainment (alcoholic drinks and billiard games, for example), support for sport teams (especially the American Football teams) and the ability to procure better grades for the students. When these tactics failed, as during the 1956 strike by IPN students or the 1968 student movement, the state opted to use force: sending police and army to occupy IPN classrooms, dormitories, and offices, for example and undertaking the infamous massacres of protesting UNAM-IPN students in Tlatelolco Square in 1968 and at the Casco de San Tomás in 1971.[30] Following these episodes, overt political interference in university student life was more obvious. A key feature were the “porros”, groups of students or pretend students, paid by their political patrons to violently attack dissident student groups.[31] Other porro groups would adopt radically Communist or Maoist positions to infiltrate student groups, take over their leadership and attempt to destabilise them from within.[32]
In this way, during the heyday of the PRI regime, university autonomy in Mexico was very often little more than a dead letter. The diffuse clientelist political system tried to absorb both academics and students into its orbit, whilst ostensibly permitting the outward administrative autonomy. Even so, as the examples of the 1956 UPN strike, and the protests in the UNAM in 1968 demonstrate, clientelism and patronage were never enough to prevent organised student protest. As had been the case in the 1920s and 1930s, the state was also willing to employ (sometimes extreme) violence to quell their protest movements.
University Politics and Student Protest During the “Transition to Democracy” (1982-2018)
As has been hinted at in the previous two sections, what made universities uncomfortable for the Mexican state was student capacity for taking internal protests to the streets. During the twentieth century (as today), students regularly invaded and occupied university buildings during protests, they commandeered buses and organised marches on the busiest streets. Divisions amongst student groups, the presence of porros, as well as inter-university rivalry, also meant the student protests were often violent, even on those occasions in which the police remained at a distance. Moreover, university politics were usually misaligned with government priorities. In the first section, I documented academic opposition to the project of socialist education. After 1940, as we saw in the previous section, the problem was paradoxically reversed: that student groups and faculties inspired by Marxism and the Cuban revolution led to fears that students wished to overthrow the PRI regime.
Both these observations also explain why academic freedom and university autonomy were crucial elements in the eventual disintegration of the PRI regime. As studies of the 1968 student movement indicate, students were one of the driving forces behind opposition to the governments of Echevarría and López Portillo during the 1970s and many were “disappeared” and tortured as a result during México’s “dirty war”.[33] UNAM academics, for example, also became pivotal figures in the design and implementation of the various electoral and political reforms which were undertaken between 1977 and 1996. Many became important members of the Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD, in whose ranks left-wing parties coalesced in 1989. José Woldenberg, the first president of Mexico’s Federal Institute of Elections (or IFE) was a case in point: a sociology student the UNAM’s Philosophy and Literature Faculty in the 1960s, who later took his Ph.D. in Political Science in the Faculty of the same name. Woldenberg was union leader and member of two Mexican socialist parties in the eighties before joining the PRD.[34]
Even so, Mexico’s “transition to democracy” as it was often optimistically labelled, brought new challenges to ideas of academic liberty and university autonomy. PRI corporativist practices within public universities left a strong and enduring legacy: the UNAM, state universities and other public higher education institutes remain homes for diverse political groups -labour unions, student federations, research groups- arranged around political godfathers and academic mentors who dispense favours to their disciples and seek to attack their rivals. As a result, they can provide trampolines to political power outside the university. Unsurprisingly therefore, university politics are often also public politics with ramifications far beyond the classroom.
In this respect, the recent history of the University of Guadalajara (in the state of Jalisco) is illustrative. During the PRI regime, the University had the monopoly of higher education in Jalisco and was an important cog in the corporativist regime. The most important padrino figure was Carlos Ramírez Ladewig, who had come to prominence as the first leader of the Guadalajara Student Federation (FEG) in 1951, and who controlled university appointments until his assassination in 1975. His brother Álvaro replaced him in this position, until a former ally turned rival, Raúl Padilla López was able to leverage himself into the rectorship in 1989 with the help of new student association: the Federation of University Students (FEU).[35] Although he only served one term as Rector (1989-1995), Padilla López has managed to preserve political dominance in the institution ever since. As such, he is an important political figure in Jalisco whose protégés have occupied numerous positions within the state and municipal government.[36]
The current governor of Jalisco, Enrique Alfaro Ramírez of the Citizen Movement Party,[37] was elected with the support of the padillista group within the University of Guadalajara in 2018. However, in the two years his name has been associated with a new political party Let’s Make Jalisco (Hagamos Jalisco) in whose ranks feature former members of the FEU as well as academics from the University. The reaction of the governor has been to retain 140 million pesos (7.6 million dollars) of university funding; to order an official audit of the University project to build a Climate Science Museum; and to issue an arrest warrant against the director of the University’s Cultural Centre (of which the museum is part) for non-payment of 42 airfares at a local travel agency.[38]
In short, despite their autonomous status Mexican public universities remain today part of the political realm. As this section argues, the two most contentious issues between public higher education institutes and governments are those relating to university appointments and finance. A general aim of state and Federal governments between 1982 and 2018 has been to prevent university politics spilling into the public domain. To do this they have usually forged alliances with existing university political groups. As the example of the University of Guadalajara suggests, when these break down the withdrawal of public funds can be used as a form of political pressure.
Final remarks: New Attacks on University Autonomy under the Andrés Manuel López Obrador Administration
The election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as President in 2018 has brought ideological arguments not seen since the 1930s back into the debate around the role of higher education in Mexican society. From a historical perspective this is interesting, especially as his party – Morena or the National Regeneration Movement- is an off-shoot of the PRD and it counts amongst its ranks ex-student leaders from 1968 and more recent student movements, such as the UNAM strike of 1999-2000. Nonetheless, López Obrador cut his teeth as a more traditional príista politician in the 1970s, and considers himself less a part of the rebellious generation of 1968 and more of a heir to Cárdenas’s postrevolutionary politics.
In fact, the President interprets the “democratic transition” of the eighties and nineties as a perversion of Revolutionary ideals. As such, he regards the role that academics played in this transition as a terrible betrayal. A close reading of his speeches since 2018 shows he considers them to be the principal architects and beneficiaries of the neoliberal economic reforms enacted by governments since 1982. For López Obrador, academic life is one of undeserved privileges, huge financial rewards (gained from working on projects for private companies), and little relevant service to the public good. As a politician who has always disliked criticism, he also questions the value and intentions of any research which does not support his policies or political statements. From his point of view, all criticism of his actions comes from privileged minorities who are defending their own selfish interests.[39]
As a result, López Obrador believes that academic institutions need to be reformed to root out privilege and force them to work for the public good. Their research and teaching priorities need to be refocused so that they contribute to his government’s goals, and above all, academics should refrain from criticising him or his government in political debate. This is evidenced, for example, in the bill for a new Science and Technology Law which proposes that the government should establish a “state agenda” and impose these research priorities on public higher education institutions.[40] Similarly, the National Science and Technology Council (CONACYT), which oversees scholarships, fellowships, research grants (amongst other things), has reorganised its distribution of scholarships and research grants around ten “National Problems”. All postgraduate degrees that receive funding from CONACYT must demonstrate their commitment to one or more of these problems.[41]
Perhaps one of the most concerning illustrations of López Obrador’s policy towards higher education centres has been the circumstances surrounding the recent designation of the new General Director at the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE). Here the candidate favoured by the Director of CONACYT and the President was imposed on the Centre in a designation process which openly flouted the Centre’s by-laws and procedures.[42] To justify this attack, supporters of CONACYT and the President denounce the CIDE as an institution of self-interested academics whose research and teaching only serve private interests.[43] They hope the new Director will force the recalcitrant professors and students to abandon their “neoliberal inclinations” and make its research and teaching programme more palatable to López Obrador and his Morena Party.
In this way, López Obrador’s government attitude to academics and academic institutions appears to suggest that the situation in Mexico is now similar to that of the 1920s and 1930s. Attacks on academic freedom and university autonomy are being carried on in the name of the public good, and academic communities are being stigmatised as being hostile opponents of the government and allies of previous regimes. As I have demonstrated in this paper, during previous conflicts between universities and the state student protest has often been the deciding factor. The conflict in Guadalajara and in the CIDE have already provoked student protests. It will be interesting to see what role they will play as the situation develops further.
[1] A good introduction to the history of education in nineteenth-century Mexico can be found in: Anne Staples “Panorama educativo al comienzo de la vida independiente,” in Josefina Zoraida Vázquez et al., Ensayos sobre historia de la educación en México (México: El Colegio de México, 2013): 101-144.
[2] Charles A. Hale, Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Mexico City: Princeton University Press, 1989).
[3] Javier Garciadiego, Rudos contra científicos. La Universidad Nacional durante la Revolución Mexicana (México: El Colegio de México/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996).
[4] “La juventud argentina de Córdoba a los hombres libres de Sudamérica (Manifiesto del 21 de junio de 1918) (Córdoba, 1918)”, en La reforma universitaria: desafíos y perspectivas noventa años después (Buenos Aires: CLASCO-Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2008), http://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/clacso/gt/20101109083227/20juve.pdf.
[5] Ángel Díaz Barriga, “Autonomía universitaria. Orígenes y futuro en la realidad mexicana”, Revista de Educación Superior 33, núm. 129 (marzo de 2004): 41–48; Darcy Ribeiro, La universidad necesaria (Mexico: UNAM, 1982).
[6] “La juventud argentina”.
[7] Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940”, The Hispanic American Historical Review 74, núm. 3 (1994): 393–444.
[8] Francisco Arce Gurza, “En busca de una educación revolucionaria, 1924-1934,” in Vázquez et al: 145-188; Victoria Lerner, “La educación superior”, in Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, 1934-1940 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1979), 147–74.
[9] Lombardo Toledano cited in Javier Mendoza Rojas, Los conflictos de la UNAM en el siglo XX (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Plaza y Valdés, 2001): 76-77. All translations in this text are my own.
[10] José Vasconcelos, cited in Mendoza Rojas, 51.
[11] Antonio Caso, cited in Mendoza Rojas, 75-76.
[12] A list of those made between 1917 and 1928 can be found in Mendoza Rojas, 56.
[13] Mendoza Rojas, 65-9.
[14] Mendoza Rojas, 63-5.
[15] Mendoza Rojas, 80.
[16] Lerner, 170-2.
[17] Mendoza Rojas, 100-02.
[18] Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), Luis Echevarría Álvarez (1970-1976), José López Portillo (1976-1982), Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988) and Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a graduate of the UNAM’s Political and Social Science Faculty. To put this into perspective only one fomer president -Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994-2000)- is a graduate of the IPN.
[19] Rogelio Hernández Rodríguez, Historia mínima del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (México: El Colegio de México, 2016), 32-34.
[20] Hernández Rodríguez, 43-46.
[21] Roderic Ai Camp, Mexico’s Mandarins: Crafting a Power Elite For The Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 129.
[22] Camp, México’s, 131.
[23] More details of the relationship of universitarios and intellectuals with the Mexican state see Roderic Ai Camp, Political Recruitment across Two Centuries: Mexico, 1884-1991 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Roderic Ai Camp, Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).
[24] Hernández Rodríguez, 46.
[25] The following article from 1979 examines the limits of the UNAM’s autonomy in the appointment of its rectors: Daniel Levy, “University Autonomy in Mexico: Implications for Regime Authoritarianism”, Latin American Research Review 14, no. 3 (1979): 129–52.
[26] Mendoza Rojas, 143-164.
[27] A good introduction to the idea of a “New Left” in Latin America and Mexico can be found in Eric Zolov, “Expanding our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to a New Left in Latin America”, A Contra Corriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America 5, no. 2 (2008): 47–73.
[28] Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013): 147-162.
[29] Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the legacy of the Mexican Revolution, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 202-218.
[30] Tlatelolco Square is in the centre of Mexico City. The Casco San Tomás is an IPN building. The massacre there is generally referred to as the Halconazo because of the participation of an elite army unit –los Halcones-. Since it took place on 10 June, Corpus Christi in the Catholic Calendar, it is also referred to as the matanza de Corpus Christi.
[31] Pensado, 181-200.
[32] The tactics employed were very similar to the way that “charros” had invaded independent workers unions in the 1950s, taking over their leadership structures and transforming them into loyal members of the PRI system. See, Norman Caulfield, Mexican Workers and the State: From the Porfiriato to NAFTA (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1998), 101-103.
[33] Dolores Trevizo, Rural Protest and The Making of Democracy in Mexico, 1968-2000 (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 57-89.
[34] “José Woldenberg,” Wikipedia, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Woldenberg, page consulted 31 January 2022.
[35] Adrián Acosta Silva, “Poder político, alternancia y desempeño institucional. La educación superior en Jalisco, 1995-2001”, Estudios Sociológicos 22, núm. 64 (2004): 53–73.
[36] Adrián Acosta Silva, “La crisis en la U de G”, Nexos, 1st November 2008 https://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=12792, page consulted 31 January 2021; and Adrián Acosta Silva “Jalisco: autonomía universitaria y crisis política”, Distancia por tiempos. Blog de educación-Nexos, 13 September 2021, https://educacion.nexos.com.mx/jalisco-autonomia-universitaria-y-crisis-politica/, paged consulted 31 January 2022;
[37] And, it must be added, the son of Enrique Alfaro Anguiano, rector of the University of Guadalajara (1983-1989) immediately prior to Padilla López.
[38] Acosta Silva, “Jalisco”.
[39] This description is based on the speeches given by López Obrador in his regular morning press conferences since 2018. These can be consulted here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-wEE8VmWaJ3BoPk-jxOrjOp711iP_Oqg
[40] “Anteproyecto de Ley General en Materia de Humanidades, Ciencias, Tecnologías e Innovación,” CONACYT-Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, https://consulta.conacyt.mx/?page_id=1255, page consulted 31 January 2022.
[41] “Problemas Nacionales Estratégicos”, CONACYT-Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, https://conacyt.mx/pronaces/, page consulted 31 January 2022.
[42] “A Top University in Mexico Becomes a Battleground Over Academic Freedom,” Los Angeles Times, 15 December 2021, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-12-15/la-fg-mexico-cide-strike; “Stand Off After New Leader Imposed on Mexican Economics Institute”, Times Higher Education, 14 December 2021, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/standoff-after-new-leader-imposed-mexican-economics-institute. Pages consulted 31 January 2022.
[43] For example, Raúl García Barrios, “Con las barbas en remojo”, La Jornada, 27 November 2021, https://www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2021/11/27/politica/con-las-barbas-en-remojo/; and Lucía Mantilla, “A los estudiantes del CIDE”, La Jornada, 6 January 2022, https://www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2022/01/06/politica/a-los-estudiantes-del-cide/ . Pages consulted 31 January 2022. García Barrios is the ex-husband of the Director of CONACYT, María Elena Álvarez Buylla; Mantilla worked at CONACYT until recently as the head of the Dirección Adjunta de Desarrollo Científico and is currently an academic at the University of Guadalajara. See, “La directora general del Conacyt presenta al presidente López Obrador el Anteproyecto de Ley General de HCTI,” 20 December 2020, CONACYT-Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, https://conacyt.mx/la-directora-general-del-conacyt-presenta-al-presidente-lopez-obrador-el-anteproyecto-de-ley-general-de-hcti/
El problema que enfrenta Johnson es el siguiente: de acuerdo con el 
Toda historia es contemporánea 
