University modernization and student protest in Colombia: the case of Universidad Industrial de Santander

Abstract

This article is intended as a summary to an academic career that has been interested in historiographical reflection on the relationship between culture, studied from the history of university in Colombia and Santander, and experiences of social and political mobilization carried out by university students. The central thesis that lead this work argues that the relationship between politics and culture has had the university setting as a social space in which converged modernizing educational projects and revolutionary utopias screened in traditions of sectarian political culture. The work period is determined by the emergence, peak and the onset of decline of the Industrial University of Santander (UIS) student union, better known as AUDESA. The UIS became the most important institution that Santander created in the twentieth century, the result of strenuous efforts of regional elites, who paradoxically helped form from the College of Santander a counterelite that set its course in the socialist revolution.

Keywords: university modernization, student movement, Universidad Industrial de Santander, cultural revolution