Rector of INTEC participates in the meeting of the Board of Directors of CINDA
SANTO DOMINGO. The rector of Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC), Julio Sánchez Maríñez, participated in the fifty-sixth meeting of the Interuniversity Development Center (CINDA), which brought together rectors and academic leaders in the Malaga University, Spain, to address current challenges y future in the higher education.
The central theme of the 56th. Board of Directors of Rectors was “Ethics, Citizenship and Social Responsibility”, with a conference by the Spanish philosopher Adela Cortina, emeritus professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the University of Valencia and director of the Étnor Foundation.
CINDA It is a collaboration network made up of 37 higher education institutions in Latin America. It began its activities in 1971 with the purpose of promoting links between universities and generating, systematizing and disseminating knowledge, which allows it to contribute to the development of higher education policies and university management.
During her conference, Dr. Adela Cortina urged universities to reflect on purpose and ethics in their actions, promoting training for justice and compassion as central elements of their educational projects. “The university has to be free, it has to be autonomous, it has to be inclusive. How our societies should be. (...) And finally, they have to educate citizens, with all these elements, in justice and compassion,” she emphasized.
The Ibero-American Secretary General, Andrés Allamand, participated in the meeting, highlighting the “uninterrupted work” of CINDA in the last 50 years and valued the “high impact” that its contributions have had in relevant matters such as the internationalization of higher education, the curricular innovation, quality assurance, management and inclusion.
At the programmatic level, the approval of the new strategic guidelines for the period 2023-2028 was agreed. These include internationalization, digital transformation, and ethics, citizenship, social responsibility and connection with the environment, as complementary axes to the traditional areas of university policy and management, quality and equity of higher education. It was also agreed to expand the radius of influence of the network in the Ibero-American area.
In that order, the incorporation of two new institutions into the network was unanimously approved: the Pedro Henríquez Ureña National University (UNPHU) of the Dominican Republic and the Catholic University of Northern Chile.
The next Board of Rectors will be organized by the CINDA universities of the Dominican Republic in 2024.