100 Years of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Interview with Mary Frances Rodríguez Van Gort

UNAM Internacional: Can you describe for our readers everything the GraduateFaculty of Philosophy and Letters (FFyL) is doing to celebrate its 100th anniversary? The activities that have taken place, the ones goin on, and the ones yet to come?
Mary Frances Rodríguez: We are truly excited because we started in January with a colloquium for each discipline. There are sixteen disciplines. We started organizing a colloquium for each one. It is the joint creation of all of us, not only of my team, but also of teachers and students, and we have been improving the process as we went along. We started with the colloquia at the beginning of February. The first one was on Library Sciences, and it was very nice. Then we thought, why not invite other schools? Colloquia had already been held on Intercultural Development and Management, Geography, History, all of this was enriched with presentations and interventions by students, teachers, and professors, by the whole community.

So we arrived in August, when the Rector attended one of the official commemorative events, because it was one August 22 when President Alvaro Obregón signed the decree of creation, not only of the FFyL… In 1910, as a result of the Revolution, the National School of Higher Studies was created. As we know, the university has been around for five centuries; at some point it was Royal and Pontifical, then the National University, then the National School of Higher Education, etcetera. Our most immediate precedent is the 1910 National School for Higher Studies, and in 1924, Obregón’s decree, signed on August 22, created the FFyL, the Faculty of Sciences, the Graduate College, and the National Preparatory School.

There are other dates that could be used to mark the commemoration, but August 22 was the date chosen by the Rector to celebrate the origin of the faculty in the university neighborhood of the Historic Center of Mexico City, the Palace of Autonomy. This ceremony was held there, and a commemorative plaque was unveiled.

But I asked my fellow historians, what is the real date? We have had this question since last year, because there are many significant dates. On August 22 the presidential decree is issued, but it is on September 23 when it is announced and until October 12 it is published in the Official Gazette, and so we go. In fact, in January of the following year, the faculty was closed, all these instances are canceled by presidential decree because there is no budget to support them.

So, what happened inside FFyL is very important because the professors at that time said “There is no budget? It doesn’t matter. We will continue.” And that act of generosity and vision allowed the FFyL to continue its functions. We could celebrate the centennial in 2024 or 2025; the Faculty of Sciences, for example, took seven more years to start. Thus, we celebrated on August 22 with this commemorative act; on September 23—commemorating the day on which the decree was issued—we inaugurated the History Colloquium, and we held an international inter- and trans-disciplinary colloquium, “The Space of Humanities”, in which important experts of each discipline participated in a dialogue with the community.

There is a decree dated January 13, 1925, by which the doors of the faculty were formally reopened, although the activities continued thanks to the teachers’ decision. Another important fact is that in March 1954 the move from Mascarones building to University City (CU) began. The FFyL was the first faculty to be installed on the new campus. For me, FFyL is like the main gateway to CU. Now we have several Metrobus stations, the Copilco and Universidad subway stations, so we can enter from many sides, but originally this was the entrance to CU, flanked by the Library and the Rectory Tower; it is an emblematic faculty.

And we continue with the disciplinary colloquia. We have just inaugurated the Geography Colloquium, with the participation of guests from other schools such as History, Latin American Studies, and Library Sciences. Everything has emerged from collective work and academic dialogue. We thought of organizing everything around three major current global issues: migration, education, and environmental crisis, which have been the axes on which we have worked all the colloquia, our International Transdisciplinary Week, etc.

The main purpose is to enhance interdisciplinary work. Everything we do in the FFyL—in this faculty a lot of research is done and a lot of publications are produced—is usually isolated, so we have to try to do something to integrate.

And we have had activities in the three historical sites of the faculty: the Palace of Autonomy, the Mascarones building, here (in the FFyL main building at CU), and in the Great Hall of the annex, where we are about to inaugurate a new building.

UI: What can you tell us about students’ enrollment, especially within the Philosophy program? There is talk around the world of a significant decline in the interest of new students to enroll in Philosophy. How is this experienced at the FFyL, is there still interest in studying Philosophy as an undergraduate degree?
FR: Yes, there is still interest in studying the undergraduate Philosophy program. I think one of the reasons is that, when we were kids, our parents used to tell us: “Start studying so that you can work in something where you can earn decently.” Then came everything related to the labor market, which began to do without certain professionals, to replace people with machines, with less qualified people, and so on. Globalization has hit both social sciences and humanities very hard, while the exact sciences and engineering programs stand out. So, yes, there was a decline. But recently, given the new risk contexts we are facing, humanities have been reassessed.

I myself focus in the risks subject and the challenges I like to study are the volcanic ones because they warn you: “Look, the temperature has already increased,” and they take two more years to warn you, they have a quite limited area of influence. Of course, there are super explosions, super eruptions, but in general they have a very limited impact in a small area, normally no further than a diameter of more than thirty kilometers. Other kinds of risks are very complicated and now we are talking about global risks, risks that could destroy humanity. Among these is, of course, climate change. Volcanoes do not play a role, except if we are talking about a mega eruption. But climate change is global, the environmental crisis is going to generate a rise in the sea level, and this is going to have a huge influence on migration, because many large cities are going to be affected. Or bad government, bad governance, is another of these global risks. One more is Artificial Intelligence (AI), whose management is considered by experts as something serious from the technological point of view.

I feel that in the face of these risks, humanities and social sciences have been revalued. Geographers are a little more practical because we produce maps, but in general what is produced is the analysis of the situation, that is what we contribute from humanities. For example, regarding AI, the May 2024 issue of the Revista de la Universidad dealt with AI; they had already programmed the topic when I asked Guadalupe Nettel to dedicate an issue to the centennial. She then invited us to participate in the issue on AI: “Do you have something to say about AI?” she asked. And I told her we have a lot to say about AI and well, there are the articles (see https://www.revistauniversidad.mx/releases/81f2621c-2ae2-416d-b1ed-f6a559e351f7/inteligencia-artificial).

Regarding governance, we have a diploma course that has been very successful, in collaboration with other faculties and promoted by the University Program on Government (PUGOB), with the participation of the faculties of Accounting, Political Sciences, Economics, FFyL, Law, and the Faculty of Higher Studies Acatlán. The theme is governance in complex societies and concerns philosophers. So, enrollment in Philosophy has been maintained. We have had a decrease in Modern Literature and we believe that there has been a lack of communication, so we are going to make a more agile and explanatory “Orientatón” (vocational orientation marathon) because many of those interested consider that they have to master a foreign language to enter the program and that is not the case. It is important that people know all the ways to enter one of these programs; in Modern Languages we have English, French, Italian, Hispanic, German, and of course, also Classical Languages.

UI: Has new narrative media, such as TikTok and other networks’ reels impacted literature programs? Would there be a relationship between less interest in traditional storytelling and more interest in the new multimedia?
MFR: Yes, new communication ways have had a huge impact, not only in Literature programs (Literature students still seem to have that taste, that love for reading and writing), but in programs where writing is not so necessary: they want to generate everything with AI. They no longer want to read anything; it is very difficult to approach this context. They are going to have a strong impact on education. That is why our third transversal axis is education, together with the environmental crisis and migration. Here at FFyL we have the largest and best known Pedagogy community in Latin America. We have that career on three levels, so what are we going to do with Pedagogy? It also has to adapt to the new times without understanding this adaptation in a bad sense, not to go after what is happening, but to see how we take advantage of it.

UI: How have the FFyL integrated gender issues and studies in its programs, research, and publications? What is its impact within the students’ education and the academic community?
MFR:  This is a very nice question. In 2019, when the fourth wave of feminism was in effervescence, it is at the FFyL where the initiative to modify the university statute was born and Articles 95, 98, and 99 were reformed. The first thing that happened was that gender violence would be considered a serious offense, something that did not exist before in the university. This was approved by the University Council in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Since then, a very strong work on gender issues has been done. The first impact was not only inside FFyL, but it extended to the whole university, it was very interesting. UNAM’s Gender Equality Head Office was also created during that month. The proposal that reached the University Council emerged from FFyL in late 2019.

Internal Commissions for Gender Equality (CInIG) also expanded then throughout the university. Obviously, here we have our own CInIG, but something else that happened in FFyL is that women professors and students decided to organize themselves to create something they called the Tripartite Autonomous Commission (CTA) in which also women workers participate, so the CTA is constituted by women that are teachers, students, and workers. It is an autonomous group, but it has the full support of the faculty since I was the General Secretary and of course, it still is now during my period as Director. CTA opinions are carefully considered because its members are aware of gender issues within the faculty.

Another thing is that the FFyL was the first to include a subject of “Gender, violence, and community ethics”, where gender issues are addressed along with other violence related issues; here we address eradication of violence of all kinds, looking to strengthen the community fabric through community ethics. The subject is mandatory subject for all students, both in presential programs and in the Open University System. The faculty has 16 disciplines that feed 24 career programs, given that they are also replicated in the Open University System. In all the 24 programs, the “Gender, violence, and community ethics”  subject is mandatory; students need to pass it in order to enroll in the fifth semester, and it has the purpose of strengthening the community in an ethical and non-violent way, with full respect for human rights. There are now 20 groups each semester and we believe that the subject’s fundamental impact can be seen in how the processes of dialogue and listening have been changing. I was going to say “processes of inconformity”, but more than that, it is about dialogue and listening. We have tried to ensure that this dialogue includes the use of the official protocols to make denunciations. This year we have 60 teachers, mostly women, who have participated and taught the subject.

As for the impact on students, so far, figures are more than 6,000 students who have taken the subject—exactly 6,157 since 2021, when it began to be taught, to 2024. We believe it had an important impact. I feel it can be clearly seen, for example, in the fact that there are fewer conflicts within this concern that were frequently experienced just after the COVID-19 pandemic, when we returned to the classrooms, when we all became depressed because of the confinement, and we all felt the threat of that scythe ready at any moment to fall over us or our family. We had a lot of conflicts before and that stopped happening. Likewise, graffiti was very aggressive and now the paints in the walls make more sense, they have been returning to what the graffiti were before COVID-19 pandemic.

As for the attention of formal denunciations, during the period in which I have been director, we have dealt with a little more than one hundred complaints, which are very important because they give visibility to the complainants, and lower tolerance to this type of violence is being established. I believe that students, and even professors, have understood that the protocol for filing a complaint with the University Rights Ombudsman’s Office must be followed. And even though it needs to be improved, it is useful. Because otherwise, even if we publicly cancel people severely, nobody punishes them, literally nobody, there is no discipline process, there is no sanction. But if they carry out a formal procedure—which may be complicated for the victims—at the end there is a professor or a student suspended, sanctioned, or exhorted.

UI: You can still see complaints against a harassing person on faculty’s walls. Are these non-protocol complaints acted upon?
MFR: It is the wall called tendedero or “clothesline”. It started that way because they literally hung out the papers on a string. Now it is a wall which has been losing validity because we have been attending to the complaints. We are one of the few faculties that have a delegation of the Ombudsman’s office on site, in the faculty building, where a lawyer, three psychologists, and a manager collaborate. Not all the faculties have this, one more of the things that are done at the FFyL. I asked the CTA to follow up on what was going on and it turned out that most of the professors denounced by those anonymous media are no longer in the faculty. Some professors were sanctioned because in addition to putting them on the wall, someone did denounce them, and they were reprimanded. We, as heads of the entities, have to be in agreement with the Ombudsman’s office, because it is this instance that carries out the protocol, in collaboration with the General Counsel’s office. We do the follow-up.

We also have a legal office with a lawyer and two assistants, and since I arrived I have asked the lawyers to support all cases. Sometimes this requires a criminal complaint and then we have to accompany them—this is not a legal obligation—but we try to go with them to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and tell them how to go on.

We also have the “Psychological Spore” program, created by the Faculty of Psychology with experts in emotional attention. The protocol goes to the Ombudsman’s office, but we help from the faculty with the Legal Office and with the Spore program to provide support to victims and complainants.

In addition, we have a propaedeutic course, created from one of the suggestions of organized women who asked for a mandatory course in the first semester. We put it in the fourth semester, which means that students have two years to take it. There we include information on disabilities, because people with disabilities also have the right to education and to a life free of violence. They may suffer some kind of violence, the first of them being poor access to the facilities, which are not adequate enough for them. We incorporated this topic in the propaedeutic program and now we are about to make the evaluation of the gender subject, that was programmed to be done two years after starting its application and now it has been almost three and a half years.

UI: You are a geographer; Geography has recently taken a transversal importance in many areas of knowledge and is taught at the FFyL.
MFR: Some time ago, if you went home and said you wanted to study Geography, they would tell you: “You are going to starve to death.” Now it is a fundamental career to understand how everything works in all ecosystems, in cities, in different environments, in the economy. This is interesting because it can also affect the university population and how young people perceive differently what they can study and the vast opportunities they have to develop. In my time, the question was “What are you going to study? But why?” A teacher in the first semester used to tell us: “Go save money to buy a hot-dog cart so you can support yourselves.” I saw in a magazine an article about the five best paid careers today and there was Geography. 

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