2.8: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) — Selecting a Rector

Hi. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast.

Around the world, there are lots of different names of the people who run universities: Presidents, principals, vice-chancellors, rectors, etc. And there are also various ways of deciding who should get those jobs. Broadly speaking, there are two ways this gets done. In the first, either governments or lay Boards select people, hopefully based on merit. In the second, chief executive officers are elected by some kind of direct or indirect method.

And then there is l'Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, or UNAM. With 350,000 students it the largest university in the Americas, and in terms of its place in the Mexican political and cultural scene, arguably one of the most important universities in the world. UNAM has its own unique system for choosing a rector: it’s not quite an election, but not quite a selection either. Sometime in the next week (that is, before November 17th), the university’s “junta” – which makes the final call on an election – will announce which of the ten candidates whose names have been put forward will be put in the top job for the next four years.

With me today is Marion Lloyd, a higher education researcher at UNAM. And she’s here today to give us a tour of UNAM’s electoral system, the behind-the-scenes power politics that accompanies this process and handicaps the current race which is coming to a head in the next week or so. What I found interesting about this interview when I re-listened to it was realizing that while proximately, the method of choosing a leader matters, in the bigger picture the discipline of power and the requirements of running a major research institute lead to choosing similar kinds of people as rectors in any event.

But enough from me, let’s hear from Marion.

Alex Usher (AU): Marion, Mexico has a very large higher education system and yet UNAM, either politically, socially, I'm not sure what the word is, has a very outsized place within that system. I think it's not just because it's the largest institution in the country. Can you tell us why UNAM is so important in the Mexican higher education system?

Marion Lloyd (ML): To understand UNAM, you have to understand that [this kind of university] a phenomenon throughout Latin America. This idea that you have one main central university that Imanol Ordorika, a colleague of mine, has termed the nation building university. So, it's a different model. It's this idea that you have this one massive university, government free, open access university that not only is educating and doing research, but also running the astrological observatory, and the volcano observatory, and museums. So, it plays a role way beyond a university. There's a ton of outreach programs. If the government needs help with some major problem, then they turn to the UNAM researchers to help solve it. So, the idea is that it has a social mission that goes beyond what we normally think of as the function of a university.

AU: What would be another example of that in Latin America? I'm guessing University of Universidad Buenos Aires. What would be the others?

ML: Yeah, Buenos Aires is actually the largest university in Latin America because they have completely open access. Anybody who graduates from high school is guaranteed a spot at the university if they want to go. Others would be, for example, the University of the Republic in Uruguay, the University of Chile, the San Marcos in Peru, which is one of the oldest in Latin America, along with the UNAM. So pretty much most of the countries in Latin America have at least one big public university that has an outsized role and in addition to producing most of the top government officials, presidents. figures in the country, at least until recently when there's been a privatization boom, they also are supposed to weigh in on the major issues facing the nation.

AU: Now, it's also a more democratic system, if I can put it that way, than say we'd be used to in Canada or the United States. There's a tradition of elected rectors right across the higher education system. How do rector elections work in Mexico and how is UNAM different, if at all?

ML: There's actually three ways in which rectors are elected. And actually, the minority or the universities that have elections, and these are kind of elections, not totally direct elections, because you have a percentage come from the students, a percentage from the faculty, a percentage from administrators, and that's actually a minority. It's less than a third of the universities. The public universities in Mexico have that system. A majority have an elected council, which has representation from all the parts of the university who then elect the rector. So, it's more similar to the U. S. election process for president, that you have the electoral college and each state chooses. The UNAM is in the minority in that it has a governing council. It's called the Junta de Gobierno and the Junta is made up, it's very akin to a papal election. You have these 15 notable members of the community who have to be very well respected, typically researchers, research-professors, kind of leaders in their individual fields, and these 15 get together and vote among themselves in secret for the rector. We make a joke that, the day that they announced the results, it's like there's a smoke plume coming out of the administrative building that says, “okay, we have a new rector, but it's not a very democratic process.”

AU: Who selects the Junta? Is it like a self-perpetuating oligarchy? How do I get to be a member of the Junta?

ML: Yeah, many of them are named by the rector. They have a 15-year term limit. If they finish those 15 years, then they have to step down and the rector gets to choose the new members. But, if they step down for some other reason, or die, or for whatever reason can't fulfill their 15 years then the Junta itself gets to elect the new members of the Junta. So, it's a very much self-perpetuating elite, academic elite system.

AU: What do they do when they're not electing the president? Do they just have a function every four years when there's an election? What else are they doing between votes?

ML: They also weigh in on the election and the choosing of the directors of all the institutes. So, the UNAM has all its schools, which are mostly teaching oriented, and then it has its research institutes. So, weigh in on the other really top administrative positions in the university.

AU: Now, I understand that just before this election process started, that the President, AMLO [Andrés Manuel López Obrador], had made noises about altering the UNAM voting system. If I understand it correctly, to make it more much more democratic, if I can put it this way. It sounded like it was one vote per community member, but the proposal didn't go anywhere. So, what was that about?

ML: AMLO very much has this idea that most populist leaders have; feels threatened by the academic elite and doesn't like being questioned. He's actually a graduate of the UNAM however, I think he's very much in favor of direct election. In fact, he wants the Supreme Court to be direct election which is become very controversial. So, partly because his party is so popular, he has this idea of if we can just get the people to elect all the top officials and every agency, then it'll be more democratic. I think the pushback against that is partly there's a law. The UNAM has been an autonomous university institution since 1945. And so, they can't just do that. Then that was strengthened in the recent higher education law, several years ago in which that the idea that, nobody can change the UNAMs governing laws without input from the UNAM itself. So, it was the president making lots of noise pushing back against an institution that's been very critical of him. And yet it hasn't gone anywhere because it can't go anywhere unless they change the constitution.

AU: Now, what happens when a new rector is elected? Is it an entirely new cabinet of leaders? What's the continuity between rectoral regimes? It sounds how can I put it… wrenching… if the entire senior executive just switches every four years and there's no continuity. How do they manage that?

ML: I guess if you think in terms of the fact that it is this kind of ruling elite, they tend to choose among themselves. Typically, the person who's chosen as rector is very close to the members of the board. It is a totally new cabinet, but he tends to choose people from the same group of people. So, there's actually quite a lot of continuity in terms of the same figures in the establishment, moving around among different positions. If somebody has been Secretary General, then they might go on to be the Head Lawyer for the UNAM or head of the humanities part or head of the science part. So, it's not that they just come in and clean house. The new positions tend to be the very high-ranking positions. It's not as if they go into every institute and every department and clear ranks all the way down to the lowest levels.
AU: Do people run in order to position themselves for being the head of the humanities? Is this a way of raising your profile on campus?

ML: Most of it is back door negotiations. This year has been a very different, interesting process with a very high-profile figure who is actually a former student protest leader in the 1980s named Imanol Ordorika, who has basically his candidacy for rector has been as if there were an election. In fact, last week, he organized a sort of symbolic election in which they only got less than 1 percent of the entire university to vote, but it was still considered extremely threatening to the administration. The idea was we have two questions. First, do you want the UNAM to be a more democratic institution? And of course, 95 percent of the people who voted said yes. And the other question is, who would you vote for? Imanol won 33 percent of the vote; I think partly because the people who voted for him were people who are sort of part of that process. He has been campaigning in every single department, institute, faculty, giving talks, presenting his plan for rector, which is not a typical thing. Basically, because the community has very little say, there's no point in doing that, but I think he's trying to set an example of what could be a different way of choosing the rector. However, yesterday he had his interview with the board. They actually made a first selection, there were 17 original candidates, and then they cut that back to 10, and he was one of the 10. And there was actually speculation, when would they cut Imanol out of the process? I think very few people think that he'll actually become rector because he's threatening to the status quo. Despite the fact that he's been a high-ranking university administrator, he's been head of institutional assessment for the past almost 20 years, but he hasn't been secretary general. He hasn't been in one of the very, very top positions. And he seemed to somebody who's questioning the kind of basic functioning of the university, which is obviously threatening to the status quo.

AU: Marion, you touched on something about the way that election is conducted. From the outside, when I see these things every four years, they're covered like an election, right? Like when you see in the Mexican press or in TV, they're covered like election. There are candidates, they are making presentations. It feels like there's a campaign, there's a horse race aspect to the coverage, if not the actual process itself. So apart from Imanol Ordorika what does a typical candidate do to press their case during these two or three months? What's their schedule look like? What are they doing?

ML: Again, I think it's very similar to what happens in the Vatican. There are a lot of kind of backdoor wheeling and dealing. The press coverage has to do with the speculation. The same thing with the choosing of a pope, unless you think it's divinely ordained. But, there's this kind of idea; do we want somebody who represents the global south? Do we want somebody who represents the old Catholic hard line? So, there's a lot of speculation about what type of person would be good for the institution in this particular moment. What the rectors or the candidates themselves do, they cobbled together this support from the community, particularly from higher ranking members of the community. For example, research faculty directors of institutes. The board holds these meetings, and you have to make an appointment and you go in and you have about 15 minutes to make your case of why you think your candidate should be elected. So, you put together groups of people and you go in and you lobby for your candidate. You can also send letters to the board. And they apparently had meetings with more than 20, 000 members of the community or something. So sometimes, 20 people will go in at once and several people will talk. But the idea is that they put together these alliances, and so the press is speculating who has a better alliance, who's more convincing, and also who's going to have a better relationship with the government, how important is that, who would be a better player to continue to help preserve the special status of the UNAM and keep it from being undermined by whoever's in, in the presidency.

AU: Like the Mexican presidency, I understand there's a one term limit, right? I can't run for re-election. Is that correct?

ML: No, you can run once. So, it's more like the U. S. presidential system. There are two four-year terms.

AU: To what extent do these elections reflect wider concerns in society? I know there are certainly parts of the world where democracy on campus is really local political parties who are organizing these kinds of things. I know in India that's quite an issue. That's more on the student side than the faculty side. But do people really only focus on issues inside UNAM or do they align themselves to political movements outside the university? Could a candidate get support by being particularly pro- or anti- AMLO, for instance?

ML: No, I think because of the enormous weight of the UNAM, and we have to realize we're talking about almost 400,000 students, there's more than 100,000 high school students 250,000-280,000 undergrads and graduate students. So, it's a massive institution. And I think it really is a metaphor for society itself. The UNAM has been at the forefront of major political movements in Mexico, the ‘68 student uprisings, where dozens if not hundreds of students were massacred by the army right before the Olympics. I think that the issues at stake in the UNAM, things like violence against women is a really big issue right now, and how the UNAM deals with that, and how a candidate is perceived as having proposals to deal with that are also huge societal issues. The relationship with the president in this particular moment is quite important in the same way that it was when there was the one-party system for 71 years prior to 2000, in the sense that the president has a ton of power and the current president, his party is expected to get re-elected next year. So, there's a lot of speculation. Do you want a rector who's going to stand up to the president? Or do you want a rector whose buddies with the president? There's a lot of debate on that, particularly because this current president, López Obrador, has really been attacking the UNAM nonstop for the past at least two and a half years. People are really divided about what the best strategy is, and there's a lot of fear that the federal government will try to weaken the UNAM and take it more into the fold. And there are other people who feel like it would behoove the UNAM to have somebody who was buddies with the president. It could therefore soften the campaign against the institution.

AU: Say in the last 20 or 30 years, have there been any really epic contests? Ones that have really defined the direction of a university and turned it in a new direction? Because I imagine the one that followed the big student strike in 1999, that would have been quite an interesting matchup.

ML: Absolutely. I think particularly in moments when there was a major student uprising. We had a strike in 1999-2000, that shut down the university for 10 months and was quite violent. And in the end, they ended up sending in the army. The president basically handpicked who would take over as rector. The idea was that the rector at the time was too weak and wasn't able to handle the situation. So basically, handpicked somebody who was very close to the ruling party at the time, who was a member of the community and a very respected academic, but was not chosen by the community. His name was Juan Ramon de la Fuente and he was an extremely strong figure, partly because he was close to the ruling party, and because he had been given this kind of mandate to save the UNAM from certain chaos. So, I think that was a very epic turn in the university. Another was actually right before the strike that Imanol led in 1986-87, there was a kind of coup d’état because in the early 1980s, Mexico was a major financial debt crisis, and the UNAM was a mega financial crisis. And so, a member of the community led, a coup against the previous rector who, in theory, could have been elected for another four-year term and put together basically a more neoliberal approach to the university. In fact, even proposed charging tuition, which currently the UNAM is essentially free and Imanol and a bunch of students got together and led this two-month strike that managed to overturn that proposal and keep the system. But I think some of those kind of more neoliberal proposals basically ended up being introduced, changed the character of the university starting in the 1980s.

AU: What about this year's candidates and campaign? What are the flashpoints? What are the issues? And who are the candidates who you think are the frontrunners right now?

ML: It's interesting because there's either going to be the old guard, for example, the current Secretary General, Lomelí is considered a major favorite. But, then there's a very kind of neoliberal engineer, Sergio Alcocer, who's been a candidate several times, who are very kind of strong figures who could take the UNAM forward in a kind of more, world class universities vision. And then there's the argument that we need a woman. There's never been a female rector of the UNAM. So, there are currently several candidates. I'm not sure that actual number, maybe four or five female candidates among these 10 that are in the running. However, I feel like none of them are a very obvious choice. The current head of the coordinator of the humanities, basically of half the UNAM's research, all the humanities, social sciences and arts is one of the candidates, but there's no clear favorite. And so, I think it has a lot to do with whether they're going to push for a woman or whether they're going to push for somebody who's going to be continuity in the UNAM or whether they're going to, they're going to push for somebody who's really going to up the public profile of the UNAM. I think one of the other concerns is that the UNAM has been slipping in the global university rankings for very complex reasons, which have to do with government funding for research and so on. But there's somewhat of a feeling of “oh gosh, we're being beaten by these powerhouse universities in Brazil and we're being beaten by China and we need to step up our game.” Then there are other people who feel like actually we have to focus on what's happening internally. For example, there's a huge issue about how poorly adjunct professors are treated, like there is in the United States. So that's another big issue. So, it depends on whether we want somebody who's more in the competitive line, or a female president, or somebody who's going to look more into these social issues.

AU: We’re having this discussion on the 31st of October and we are broadcasting on the 9th. We may already have a winner by the time this goes out, but I'm going to put you to it right now. If you had to pick a winner, who is it?

ML: Oh gosh, I think I would probably choose between Lomalí, the Secretary General, who's a neutral figure, or Sergio Alcocer, this kind of star engineer, really international figure, but honestly if I had to put my money on it right now, I put very little money.

AU: So, you're discounting the idea of this might be the time for a woman president?

ML: Probably the strongest candidate among the women is Patricia Dávila, who was head of one of UNAM's kind of satellite campuses. But if I'd have to say, if it's going to be a woman, it'll probably be her. But I think none of the female candidates really stand out to me as a really obvious choice. As sad as that may be.

AU: Marion. Thanks so much for joining us today.

ML: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and of course, all of you listeners for joining us. If you have any comments or suggestions for future podcasts, please get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be Paula Clasing Manquian from the Nucleo Milenio de Education Superior in Chile, and she'll be joining us to talk about Chile's policy of Gratuidad be done 10 years after the re-election of Michelle Bachelet. Bye for now.