The rector of the University of Salamanca (USAL), Ricardo Rivero, announced this Thursday by surprise his resignation as head of the educational institution. The now former rector had been in office for six years and, although there is no formal term limitation, he did not plan to run for re-election when his term expired in just under two years. Sources close to Rivero attribute the measure to “purely personal reasons” and rule out that it is due to any health problem beyond the “exhaustion” inherent to the position and all the daily complications that it entails. These informants indicate that it is expected that he will continue teaching Law as a professor of Administration. This same Wednesday he participated in the tribute ceremonies to Miguel de Unamuno as an Honoris Causa doctor of the USAL. And a few days before, he had to come forward as rector of the accusations launched by the president of Vox, Santiago Abascal, who called the University of Salamanca a “censorship machine” at an event in the United States. The vice-rector María José Rodríguez Conde will take over command until elections are held.
Ricardo Rivero has announced his resignation a few minutes after presenting the portrait of María Dolores Gómez Molleda to place it in the Rectorate. The senior academic official had only announced his resignation to the president of the Junta de Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, and the mayor of Salamanca, Carlos García Carbayo, both from the PP and charros. The Administrative Law specialist has appreciated the support since he accepted this position in 2017 and has attributed his position to the need to renew the faculty and approve new statutes, a process that he has declined to lead because the end of his mandate would come during the drafting of these internal rules. His temporary replacement, María José Rodríguez Conde, until now vice-rector, will be in charge of coordinating the stage prior to the internal elections.
Sources from the professor's environment exclusively limit his step aside to “personal reasons” and highlight the “exhaustion” attached to his representation and coordination functions, carried out during the six years that the 55-year-old professor, also a professor, had been commanding the USAL. . “There are many acts and events,” add these informants, who cite the traditional “tacit” agreement at this University that rectors never spend more than eight years in office, the equivalent of two terms, and that Rivero was not considering staying longer either. in charge of the rectorate. The former rector had to manage the impact of the pandemic on a university as large and with a multinational student body as Salamanca. In addition, he also experienced “very competitive elections for the rectorate that he won by a large majority.”
Rivero had participated this Wednesday in the posthumous appointment as Doctor Honoris Causa of the philosopher, writer and former rector of the USAL Miguel de Unamuno, a tribute carried out a century after the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera ordered his exile for his criticism of the regime. The resigned rector gave a very vindictive speech to praise both Unamuno and the “values” represented by his figure and inherent to the academic field of the prestigious University of Salamanca. Rivero considered Unamuno as “perpetual rector with the highest academic distinction” and praised Don Miguel's “incontrovertible anti-extremism against those who denied tolerance or freedom of thought and love for Spain above impostures, which includes Bilbao and Salamanca, Catalonia and Castile and also America.”
Rivero's words had a markedly vindictive character, praising Unamuno's “lucidity, frugality, justice, integrity and coherence” and remembering the University that he commanded as a “space for free intellectual debate and harmony between people who think differently.” with allusions to the “illusory desires to rewrite history and give different and interested versions of the past.”
Paradoxically, the previous Monday this institution attacked the “interested ignorance” of the Vox leader, Santiago Abascal, when he called the USAL a “censorship, coercion, indoctrination and Semitism machine” during a few days of extreme right in the United States. The rectorate sent a statement defending “the first Spanish University, the oldest and most constant in the vindication of academic values: dedication to knowledge, creation and transmission of knowledge and service to society.” According to the text, “whoever insults our University through a lack of information, in the end, shows little appreciation for the international image of Spain.”
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