Central University of Venezuela

The Central University of Venezuela (Spanish: Universidad Central de Venezuela; UCV) is a public university located in Caracas, Venezuela. Founded in 1721, it is the oldest university in Venezuela and one of the oldest in the Western Hemisphere.

The main university campus, Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, was designed by architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and it is considered a masterpiece of urban planning and was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000.

History

Origins

The origin of the university goes back to Friar Antonio González de Acuña (1620–1682), a Spanish Bishop born in present-day Peru who studied theology at the Universidad de San Marcos and founded in 1673 the Seminary Saint Rose of Lima in Caracas named after the first Catholic Saint born in the Americas. In the following years, Friar Diego de Baños y Sotomayor broadened the scope of the seminary by creating the School and Seminary of Saint Rose of Lima in 1696. Yet, in spite of the creation of the seminar, students who wished to obtain a university degree had to travel great distances to attend universities located in Santo Domingo, Bogotá or Mexico City. Given such harsh circumstances, the Rector of the Seminary, Francisco Martínez de Porras and the people of Caracas requested the royal court in Madrid the creation of a university in Venezuela (then part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada). As a result, on 22 December 1721 Philip V of Spain signed in Lerma a Royal Decree that transformed the School-Seminary into the Universidad Real y Pontificia de Caracas (Royal and Pontifical University of Caracas). The Royal Decree was concurred by Pope Innocent XIII with a Papal bull in 1722. The university offered degrees in philosophy, Theology, Canon law and Medicine. Until 1810, when the Seminary of Saint Bonaventura located in Mérida became the Universidad de Los Andes, the Universidad Real y Pontificia de Caracas was the only university existing in the country.

Republican years

Until the end of the 18th century, the official papal and royal censorship on books was largely ignored in Venezuela, a situation which allowed the smuggling of the works by Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Locke, Helvetius, Grotius in the ships belonging to the Guipuzcoana Company.

The Royal constitution was displaced by the Republican Statutes proclaimed by Simón Bolívar on 24 June 1827. The new statutes gave the institution a secular character and transferred the main authority to the Rector.

20th century

In December 1908, dictator Juan Vicente Gómez came into power with a coup d'état against the government of Cipriano Castro. Gómez stayed in power until his death in 1935 and during this time, having ambivalent feelings about the purpose of educating free minds when he could hire foreigners to exercise any technical requirements for the nation, decided to close the university from 1912 to 1922. When it reopened, the Rector Felipe Guevara Rojas had reorganized the traditional division of only a few schools, separating them into departments.

Organization and degrees

The university is organized into 11 schools (Facultades) which are subdivided into 40 departments (Escuelas).

All schools offer undergraduate degrees at the level of Licenciatura (5 years) and graduate degrees at the level of master's degree (2 years) and PhD (3–4 years) from the Graduate School. The Graduate School, founded in 1941, offers 222 different specializations, 109 Master's degrees and 40 PhDs.

• Architecture and Urban planning
• Agronomy
• Dentistry
• Engineering
• Humanities and Education
• Law and Government
• Medicine
• Social Sciences and Economy
• Pharmacy
• Sciences
• Veterinary

Research ranking

The Ranking Iberoamericano de Instituciones de Investigacion based on the Institute for Scientific Information ranked the Central University of Venezuela as the most productive research institution in the country and as the 20th most productive in Latin America.

Other top 25 positions were reached in the following areas:

• 8th in Law
• 10th in Social Sciences
• 12th in Psychology and Education
• 15th in Physiology and Pharmacology
• 16th in Philology and Philosophy
• 16th in Food technology
• 18th in Mathematics
• 18th in Medicine
• 21st in Plant and Animal Biology
• 21st in History and Art
• 22nd in Architecture and Civil Engineering
• 22nd Molecular Biology

The 2010 University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP), ranked the UCV as the best university in Venezuela and 805th university in the world.

The 2016 QS World University Rankings placed the UCV as 18th overall in their Latin American Universities Ranking.

Notable alumni

Among its faculty, alumni, and researchers include several Founding Fathers, 19 Venezuelan presidents, National Architecture Award winners, winners of National Prize for Science, Technology, and Innovation, members of the National Assembly, 2 Princess of Asturias Award winners, a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine laureate, a Cervantes Prize and a saint of the Catholic Church.

Humanists

Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816) General, political thinker; fought in the main three revolutionary wars of the 18th century, American, French and South American.

Andrés Bello (1781–1865) Poet, lawmaker, philosopher, educator and philologist.

Sylvia Constantinidis (1962) Pianist, composer, conductor, music educator, author, writer. (Original name: Maria Silvia Castillo Casanova Arismendi de Constantinidis).

Juan Germán Roscio (1763–1821) Lawyer, main redactor of the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence.

Andrés Eloy Blanco (1896–1955) Poet.

Miguel Otero Silva (1908–1985) Writer, journalist and co-founder of the newspaper El Nacional.

María Teresa Castillo (1908–2012) Journalist, activist, politician and founder of Caracas Athenaeum.

Alberto Barrera Tyszka (1960) Writer.

Diannet Blanco, human rights activist.

Scientists

• Marisol Aguilera (born 1971), researcher, professor
• Jacqueline Clarac de Briceño (1932–2023), anthropologist
• José Gregorio Hernández (1864–1919), physician
• José González-Lander (1933–2000), engineer, chief designer of the Caracas Metro
• Livia Gouverneur (1941–1961), murdered psychology student

Notable faculty

18th century

Lorenzo Campins y Ballester (1726–1785) Spanish born scientist, founder of the studies of medicine.

Fr. Baltasar de los Reyes Marrero (1752–1809) (also alumnus) began the teaching of modern science and philosophy based on the theories of Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Stahl, Lavoisier, Locke, Condillac, Leibniz and Wolff. In 1789 he was convicted by the Crown as an infidel for teaching doctrines forbidden by the King.

19th century

Juan Manuel Cagigal (1803–1856) mathematician.

Alejandro Chataing (1873–1928) (also alumnus) mathematician, architect.

Agustin Codazzi (1793–1859) Italian military, scientist and geographer

Domenico Milano (1810–1880) Italian agronomist engineer, started in 1843 the Faculty of Agronomy ("Escuela Normal de Agricultura").

Fermín Toro (1806–1865) politician and linguist.

Alejandro Ibarra (1813–1880) scientist.

José Gregorio Hernández (1864–1919) (also alumnus) physician, began the teaching of Microbiology in Venezuela.

Adolf Ernst (1832–1899) Prussian born scientist, started the teaching of natural history based on Charles Darwin and Lamarck.

Luis Razetti (1862–1932) (also alumnus) physician, began the teaching of modern surgery in Venezuela and wrote an influential code of ethics for the practice of medicine.

Humanities

Abraham Abreu (born 1939) pianist and harpsichordist.

Mario Briceño Iragorry (1897–1958) writer.

José Balza (born 1939) novelist, critic.

Rafael Cadenas (born 1930) poet.

Saber UCV

Saber UCV is the institutional repository of the university. It provides open-access to the intellectual output of the university and hosts several academic journals, usually licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND. It makes use of the Open Journal Systems.

Aerial photos

Aerial Photo from GoogleMaps

The UCV is located at 10.4884°N 66.8907°W / 10.4884; -66.8907

Эх сурвалж: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)