El Colegio de México, A.C. (commonly known as Colmex, English: The College of Mexico) is a Mexican institute of higher education, specializing in teaching and research in social sciences and humanities.

The college was founded in 1940 by the Mexican Federal Government, the Bank of Mexico (Banco de México), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the Fondo de Cultura Económica. In the late 1930s, following the end of the Spanish Civil War, Mexican president Lázaro Cardenas created the House of Spain in Mexico (1938–1940) to host Spanish intellectuals in exile in Mexico; Mexico was the only country that in 1939 welcomed Spanish refugees. Under the direction of intellectual Alfonso Reyes, the House of Spain became a higher education center, and was renamed El Colegio de México in 1940. The College now operates under a 1961 charter that allows the institution to provide college-level teaching in the fields of humanistic knowledge and social and political sciences. In 1976, the university's campus was moved from the Colonia Roma (a historic neighborhood just west of the city's center) to its current location in the southern portion of the capital; the main building of the campus was designed by the Mexican architect Teodoro González de León. The college contains seven separate academic centers collectively offering three undergraduate degrees, seven master's degrees and eight doctoral degrees.

El Colegio de México received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 2001. Colmex's library (Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas), one of the largest academic libraries in Mexico, contains one of the most important Latin American collections in the fields of the social sciences and humanities.

History

Colmex arose from an organization of Spanish civil war exiles called "Casa de España en México" (House of Spain in Mexico). In March 1939, Lázaro Cárdenas named Alfonso Reyes to the presidency of the "Casa de España en México". Reyes would be president of the "Colegio" until his death. Historian Daniel Cosío Villegas played an important role in its institutionalization and the Colegio's library bears his name.

Academics

Students

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|+ Demographics of El Colegio de México

! !! Undergraduate !! Graduate !! Ph.D.

|-

! Men

| 57% || 49% || 44%

|-

! Women

| 43% || 51% || 56%

|-

! International Students

| 4% || 12% || 30%

|}

Colmex's student population includes 74 undergraduate and 369 graduate students representing diverse geographic and linguistic backgrounds. Of the entire student population, 83.5% are from Mexico, while 16.05% are from outside the country (including the United States, France, Italy and China). International students hail from about 24 different countries, with Colombians comprising about one third of all international students in the entering class of 2011.

Undergraduate and graduate admission to Colmex is very selective. Despite strong increases in university enrollment across Mexico, El Colegio de México has upheld a student-faculty ratio of 2.5:1. There are nearly 181 tenured or tenure-track professors and 50 adjunct and visiting professors teaching at the college. The remainder of all students are enrolled in Colmex's smaller schools, including the Centre of Asian and African Studies, founded by Flora Botton; the Gender Studies Program, founded by Lourdes Arizpe, Botton, and Elena Urrutia; and the Daniel Cosío Villegas Library, which is also one of the richest libraries in North America, with sources in many languages.

Since 1991, El Colegio de México is the host institution of LEAD-Mexico (Leadership for Environment and Development), a program established by The Rockefeller Foundation to bring together and train mid-career leaders from all parts of the world in improving their leadership skills around the issues of sustainable development . Led primarily by renowned Colmex professor Boris Graizbord, Lead Mexico responds to calls for acting as consultant, advisor, and policy evaluator at federal and local level.

In 2021 a Centre for Gender Studies was inaugurated.

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|+ style="font-size: 100%" | Centers of El Colegio de México[https://web.archive.org/web/20120919200036/http://colmex.mx/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=54&Itemid=62]

|- style="vertical-align:top; font-size:90%;"

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  • Centre for Historical Studies
  • Centre for Linguistic and Literary Studies
  • Centre for Studies of Asia and Africa
  • Centre for Economic Studies

|

  • Centre for Demographic, Urban and Environmental Studies
  • Centre for International Studies
  • Centre for Sociological Studies
  • Centre for Gender Studies
  • Daniel Cosío Villegas Library

|}

Exchange and cooperation arrangements (2021)

Canada

  • Glendon College
  • Queen's University
  • Université du Québec à Montréal
  • University of British Columbia
  • Université de Montréal

United States

  • Yale University
  • Tulane University
  • American University
  • Johns Hopkins University
  • State University of New York
  • University of Chicago
  • The University of Texas at San Antonio

Korea

  • Dongguk University
  • Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
  • Seoul National University
  • Busan University of Foreign Studies

India

  • University of Delhi
  • Jadavpur University
  • Jawaharlal Nehru University

Israel

  • Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Japan

  • Ritsumeikan University
  • Hitotsubashi University
  • Tsukuba University
  • Keio University
  • Waseda University
  • Institute of Developing Economies
  • Kyoto University of Foreign Studies
  • Tokio University

Germany

  • Humboldt University of Berlin
  • LMU Munich
  • University of Cologne
  • Heidelberg University
  • University of Hamburg
  • Leipzig University
  • Free University of Berlin
  • University of Bamberg
  • Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
  • Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Social Law

Netherlands

  • Leiden University

United Kingdom

  • University College London

Switzerland

  • Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

Daniel Cosío Villegas Library

The Daniel Cosío Villegas Library is a public academic library situated in the center of El Colegio de México's campus, contains around 700,000 volumes, and comprises 30% of the total building real estate. The library is composed of eighteen academic librarians, three IT professionals, and eighty clerical staff and paraprofessionals.

Among the best-known faculty of El Colegio de México are Lorenzo Meyer, Mauricio Merino, Antonio Alatorre; political leaders Jesús Silva Herzog Flores, Carlos Tello Macías, Manuel Camacho Solís, Natividad González Parás, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Bernardo Sepúlveda, José Ramón Cossío; scholars Sergio Aguayo, Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, Carlos Marichal, Clara Lida, Carlos Urzúa, Soledad Loaeza, Jacqueline Peschard, Brígida García Guzmán, Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, David Lorenzen, Jorge Alberto Lozoya, Gabriela Cano Ortega, Ruy Mauro Marini, José Luis Lezama, Orlandina de Oliveira, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Luis F. Aguilar Villanueva, Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Francisco Gil Villegas, Margit Frenk, Francisco Segovia, Saurabh Dube, Joseph Hodara, Gustavo Garza, Robert Pastor, Martha Schteingart; and diplomats such as Mauricio de María y Campos and Fernando de Mateo.

Alumni

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Among the people who have attended El Colegio de México are Mexican political leaders Marcelo Ebrard, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, former Head of Government of Mexico City; economist Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez cabinet member under the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration; economist Graciela Márquez Colín former Secretary of Economy, under the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration; economist Jaime Serra Puche, cabinet member under the Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo administrations; Jesús Seade Andrés Manuel López Obrador's representative in the renegotiation of NAFTA; Sócrates Rizzo, former Governor of Nuevo León, Marco Antonio Mena Rodríguez Governor of Tlaxcala and Enrique Alfaro Ramírez Governor of Jalisco.

Diplomats: Patricia Espinosa, executive director of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, former Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Arturo Sarukhán, former Mexican ambassador to the United States, Enrique Berruga, former Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations; Claude Heller, ambassador of Mexico to the UN, Adolfo Aguilar Zínser, former ambassador of Mexico to the UN Security Council, senator Rosario Green, Secretary of Foreign Affairs during the Zedillo administration, Bruno Figueroa Fischer Ambassador or Mexico to the Republic of Korea.

Intellectuals and academics: historians Enrique Krauze, Andrés Reséndez; and Javier Garciadiego member of El Colegio Nacional (Mexico) and director of Academia Mexicana de la Historia; sociologist Julio Boltvinik and Pablo González Casanova rector at Autonomous National University of Mexico; writers such as Pablo Soler Frost, Silvio Zavala, Héctor Aguilar Camín, and Margarita Peña; Secretary of State of the Mexican State of Nuevo León and former Senior Vice President of Cemex Javier Trevino; economists Gustavo Garza Villarreal; political scientists Soledad Loaeza and Francisco Gil Villegas; political analyst and writer Denise Dresser; current president of Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland, Janet Dudley-Eshbach; and narratologist Lauro Zavala.

References

Publications

  • El Colegio de México