As the bicentennial of the Colegio de Santa Librada comes to an end, next January 29, I dedicate these reflections to my former students and current Libraduno students.
Likewise, I dedicate them to my colleagues for the years of teaching that we jointly exercised in their classrooms.
This moment in Libraduna’s history, more than rebuilding a building, will be established with the foundation of its academic reality, social mission, administrative leadership, its guiding principles and the institutional collective well-being.
The first republican educational institutions forged new generations, the seed of Colombian democracy, operating in old monasteries where a few friars lived in prayer and which were expropriated as goods from dead hands.
The history of Santa Librada, which began in the old convent of San Agustín, on 13th Street, shows that it contributed to the formation of the republic because non-submissive youth with libertarian ideals were educated in its cloister.
Various contemporaries who became professionals four decades ago at the Santiago de Cali University, with affection every time we pass by and look at the old mansion on Seventh Street, we yearn for the rector Álvaro Pío Valencia, the vice rector Estanislao Zuleta and their teachers who were true scholars of the chair.
Santiago de Cali was then the epicenter of the debate that institutionalized the first university co-government in our country, while the high school graduates from Santa Librada were the protagonists on February 26, 1971, marching to save Colombian public education.
The student councils at that time were not regulated by law, but we saw that true student leaders were forged in Santa Librada, reflecting the exercise of the free chair during administrations of rectors based on institutional democracy.
In my four decades of teaching, I was fortunate to serve the last years of teaching practice in Santa Librada.
Ramón Ignacio Atehortúa Cruz was rector and I can testify that he fostered a democratic environment, also because as a historian he knew that his main commitment, as a continuation of his illustrious predecessors, was to guarantee free teaching, institutional democracy and ideological pluralism.
A few days apart, we decided on our two retirements, he as rector and I as a literature professor.
I don’t know if that legacy is still alive in the cloister. As the Colegio de Santa Librada celebrates its bicentenary and longs for the fact that I once also distributed knowledge in its cloister, my greatest wish, more than just achieving the reconstruction of its building, is that the light of science never goes out, nor does it call it of democracy is replaced by autocracy.
May the legacy that allows presidents of the republic to be reviewed in their history as graduates continue: Eliseo Payán, Jorge Holguín, Manuel María Mallarino; illustrious writers, Eustaquio Palacios, Mario Carvajal, Enrique Buenaventura, Jota Mario Arbeláez; men of science, Evaristo García; artists, Antonio María Valencia; sports commentators, Mario Alfonso Escobar.
I aspire, as demonstrated in previous decades, that the vision proclaimed on January 29, 1823 by Mariano del Campo Larrahondo, its first rector, be vindicated as an emblematic thought: “The republic of enlightened and not ignorant young people, of virtuous and not fanatics, of young patriots and not selfish”.
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