Qualla: National University of Córdoba

National University of Córdoba: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Cordobes, CC BY-SA 3.0. On June 21, 1918, students at the oldest university in Argentina published a letter addressed not to a rector or a minister but to "the free men of South America." They had occupied their own university. The document, drafted by a young lawyer named Deodoro Roca, accused the institution of senility and called for it to be remade. It worked - and then it spread, from Córdoba to Lima to Mexico City. The university where this happened had stood for three centuries by then, founded by Jesuit priests in 1613, and it carried a nickname that the rebellion only deepened: La Docta, "the learned."

Image: User:Cordobes | CC BY-SA 3.0

National University of Córdoba: The Jesuits' Highest Calling

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alakasam, CC BY-SA 3.0. It began as a school for the Society of Jesus. In 1610 the Jesuits founded their Collegium Maximum in Córdoba, an institution of unusual intellectual ambition for the colonial frontier, advanced under the Bishop of Tucumán, Juan Fernando de Trejo y Sanabria. The right to grant de...

Image: Alakasam | CC BY-SA 3.0

National University of Córdoba: From Pulpit to Laboratory

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alakasam., Public domain. The university changed slowly, then all at once. Law studies arrived at the end of the eighteenth century, breaking theology's monopoly, and a royal decree renamed the institution the Royal University of Saint Charles and Our Lady of Monserrat, with the scholar-priest Gregorio Fu...

Image: Alakasam. | Public domain

National University of Córdoba: The Manifesto to the Free Men of the South

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alakasam., CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1918 the old structures had calcified. Professors held their chairs for life, the curriculum had ossified, and Darwin's ideas were still effectively unwelcome. Students struck and occupied the university. Their Manifiesto Liminar, published that June, attacked tenure as "a ref...

Image: Alakasam. | CC BY-SA 3.0

National University of Córdoba: La Docta Today

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alakasam., CC BY-SA 3.0. The university is now the second largest in Argentina after Buenos Aires, and its imprint runs through the country's public life. Several presidents of Argentina studied here, as did the ecologist Sandra Díaz, the physicist Gabriela González, and the novelist Camila Sosa Villada,...

Image: Alakasam. | CC BY-SA 3.0