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With the strength of our institutional commitment, we begin to bid farewell to 20...

With the strength of our institutional commitment, we begin to bid farewell to 2025, Thank you for joining us along the way!

29 April, 2026

How many times have we sung or repeated a sentence, a motto, or a song without even knowing what it means, or without taking the time to reflect on it carefully? My invitation today is for us to think and imagine how our motto and our anthem are not just words, or perhaps they are words, but words that we can and have embraced with their full power as a promise or a commitment.

So, let us begin by examining what the word “to promise” means. “To promise” comes from the Latin promittere, which is composed of the prefix pro- (meaning “before” or “forward”) and the verb mittere (meaning “to send” or “to let go”). Therefore, etymologically, to promise means “to send or say something before doing it,” committing oneself to something that will happen in the future. And look how interesting this is: the word “promise” is linked to the word “commitment,” which comes from the Latin compromissum, meaning a “total promise” or a “joint agreement.” It derives from cum (“together,” “completely”) and promissus (“promise”), referring to “an obligation undertaken or a word given that the parties commit to fulfilling.” And what if we assume that Posteris Lvmen Moritvrvs Edat (He who is to die should leave his light for posterity) and the lyrics of our anthem are our promise and our commitment, or that our university work and our promise of commitment to an excellent and supportive university have been linked to the power of words that we repeat daily.

The first lines of our anthem state:

“Soul of knowledge, your children today come to adorn your altar with crowns.”

I believe there are many occasions on which we adorn the altar of our institution with crowns: on this date, for example, during graduation ceremonies and in many other academic rituals rich in symbolism, where we pay tribute to a great public institution to which we owe everything.

I prefer the idea that we honor our institution in our daily lives, upholding its name in all our personal and professional actions, carrying out our work with commitment and transparency; I like the idea that we do so from every place from which we contribute to its mission and its educational purpose. Professors do this by continually enhancing their qualifications to carry out teaching, research, administrative, and outreach activities. Our committed administrative staff do this as well, those who understand that their work supports the entire university endeavor that transforms lives. And students do it too, who through their education, excellence, commitment, and social sensitivity make us feel, through their life stories, that all our efforts are worthwhile.

Our Alma Mater is present, and we must seek it, in the books we read, in those we read only halfway, in those we read and write for it, in the images that dwell within us because of it, and in the creative solutions we pursue to encounter it, to do something for it (from civil works to musical scores), and to connect who we are with the territory and with the lives we touch. We pay tribute to the University, but today it also pays tribute and recognizes the members of our community who contribute to its greatness through a lifetime of work or through their outstanding actions.

“As an offering, the gentle hope with which you cradle arduous thought”

This is a task that calls us to keep working despite how gray the days may be and how dark the nights may become, to never give up hope, and to understand that every formative, research, cultural process, and indeed everything we do, is a commitment to life, a seed of peace, and a way of resisting those who insist on keeping us within the absurd and senseless cycle of violence.

Today, Cauca needs its University more than ever; this bicentennial Alma Mater, the intellectual community that inhabits it, but also its sensitivity and its collective intelligence. It requires each of its institutional actors, their talent, their creativity, and that loving commitment that calls us to resist war. Because we are not, nor can we be, another actor of violence: we are the persistence and the stubbornness of those who dare to live in peace, of those who believe that conflicts and differences can be resolved without resorting to any form of aggression. We are an institution that is the heritage of those who build social fabric, of those who love despite everything, of those who place education at the service of others and make it an act of resistance. Today, the people of Cauca need us; more than ever, they need the light that this University represents for their territory.

“You bestow unconquered nobility, and before the outcast you bend the king; only one canon governs your rites, bare truth is your law.”

In a world of false truths and polarization, let this be a call for truth to set us free (an Enlightenment aspiration), which today I reframe as a promise and a commitment to continue making our institution a space to approach those provisional truths that allow us to advance in the sciences. This commitment has been, for us, action with conviction, a commitment that has become evident through strengthening and supporting our research groups (currently 94 ranked groups and 265 recognized researchers), as well as research groups for students; and through the development of calls that create space for other ways of researching and creating.

It is a conviction that has led us to action, strengthening our continuing education initiatives and embracing, with openness, dialogue among forms of knowledge, practices, and those other truths that allow us to recognize one another, coexist, and live together; truths embedded in contexts of multiple realities, in singularity and difference, in that invitation to broaden the spectrum of what is possible, always grounded in respect for the other with whom we challenge ourselves to coexist.

“Grant us now the life-giving norm that redeems human suffering, and gathers at the table of the world the slave of yesterday and the lord.”

Perhaps this final verse is also a permanent promise of solidarity, from the perspective of a special sensitivity toward the territory, as a call to create opportunities, to provide solutions, to support, and to redeem human suffering from our institution, with the great responsibility of caring for the lives we touch.

And indeed, we have cared for the lives we touch. We have done so through the Immediate Transition to Higher Education Program (PTIES) in Argelia, Guachené, Guapi, Inzá, López de Micay, Páez, Piamonte, Rosas, San Sebastián, Santander de Quilichao, Sucre, and Timbiquí.

We have also touched lives through research groups in mathematics, oral communication, reading, and writing in Arboleda–Mercaderes, Cajibío, El Bordo, Tambo, Guachené, Guambia, Inzá, La Vega, Mercaderes, Páez, Patía–El Bordo, Popayán, Piendamó, Pescador, Rosas, San Sebastián, Santander de Quilichao, Sotará, and Suárez. We have impacted lives through educational support initiatives in 40 programs for mathematics teachers. Solidarity, as a commitment to our educational mission, is reflected in our work in Santander de Quilichao, improving access, infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks, while working intensively on our new campus in Guapi and joining efforts to train teachers through agreements with teacher training schools in Guapi, Belalcázar, Almaguer, La Vega, and Popayán.

More than 2,500 people have benefited; today, some of them are part of our community. They are not statistics, they are lives: Karina, Victoria, Kevin, Karen, Aura, Luis Miguel, José Ángel, Breimar, Orlith, Liseth, among many others. They are their dreams, hopes, and aspirations that challenge us not to fall short of their expectations, nor those of their families, municipalities, and territories. Because we are certain that these seeds we have sown in the gray days of autumn (those currently faced by Cauca and its people) will become the flowers and fruits of spring.

Today, as we celebrate 198 years of history, I want to give thanks for something essential, what the Little Prince says is invisible to the eye: this promise, this commitment, this conviction have never been, nor will they ever be, a solitary path; they require the complicity of each one of you. They require your hands that sustain, your decisions that guide, your rigor that builds, your ethics that care, and your hearts that accompany.

Today we pay tribute to those who, through their lives and work, have made the University possible, those of the past, those of the present, and those yet to come. And in doing so, we adorn with crowns this house that has seen us grow: a vibrant and colorful home that has transformed us and will continue transforming lives; a home that is—and will continue to be—heritage of all.