new rector of the UAI after the surprise resignation of Harald Beyer

It was not going to be easy for the Adolfo Ibáñez University (UAI) to start the academic year without one of its highest authorities. The resignation of rector Harald Beyer was surprising, although everything indicates that he resigned after a series of episodes that eroded his relationship with the president of the university, Pedro Ibáñez, and with a Board of Directors where business orientation prevails.

Beyer’s resignation was made public in mid-January and today that same board of directors agreed to the election of Francisco Covarrubias Porzio as the new rector of the house of higher education, a position he will assume starting April 1.

The name of Covarrubias, former dean of the university’s Faculty of Liberal Arts, former director of the Financial Diary and panelist on political programs such as “Zero Tolerance” CNN Chilewhom President Gabriel Boric called a “minor columnist,” was circulating as a possible candidate shortly after Beyer’s departure, as the newsletter reported. +Policy of El Mostradore:

• One of Covarrubias’ strengths is that he has been at the UAI for 14 years and is close to Pedro Ibáñez, because he leads his star project: the Faculty of Liberal Arts.
• Covarrubias’ profile is more similar to that of the former rector Andrés Benítez, who spent 18 years in that position at the UAI and stood out for his ability to attract students from the best schools in the country to a university that was just entering the big leagues of private higher education.

“I am excited to be able to continue with the project that has allowed the Adolfo Ibáñez University to be placed in such a prominent place at the national and Latin American level. Its avant-garde, rigorous and pluralistic educational proposal has been the result of the work of a university community that I have been proud to be a part of for many years and, by the way, of the outgoing rector Harald Beyer,” commented the now rector Covarrubias through a release.

The academic also maintained that the challenges in general for higher education are “enormous” and stated that “as UAI, we must be able to continue facing them in a distinctive way.”

Covarrubias is a commercial engineer from the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC), a master’s degree in Political Science from the Catholic University and a Master of Arts in Economics from the University of Navarra (Spain). He is 49 years old, married and the father of three children.

• The appointed rector arrived in 2010 to occupy the position of Dean of Undergraduate Studies, where he served until 2015.
• As of 2015, he became Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts.
• He has also worked as a professor of History of Economic Thought.
• He has been a professor of the History of Economic Thought course at the UAI for 14 years, a course that he previously taught for 12 years at the PUC Institute of Economics.

“Minor columnist” and formalized for archaeological damage

On December 28, in the middle of his speech for the inauguration of the works on the Vespucio Oriente 2 Highway (AVO 2), President Gabriel Boric called Francisco José Covarrubias, then dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, a “minor columnist.” of the UAI.

Without mentioning the name of the analyst, the President pointed to the column in The Mercury which the commercial engineer titled “Horribilis Day”, published on December 15, in which he questioned that the Head of State criticized the morning news programs for not transmitting the “good news” of the Government.

Covarrubias criticized that, in the midst of scandals such as the Democracia Viva case and the arrest of Luis Castillo, President Boric was “inaugurating the remodeling of a plaza in Renca (a seesaw, a couple of benches and a few petunias).”

“The other day a minor columnist despised the importance of having recovered a square in the commune of Renca, where there was previously a narco-mauseum,” President Boric stated in said speech.

But this was not the only controversy carried out by the columnist. In 2019, Francisco Covarrubias and three other people were charged with damage to the archaeological monument of the Giant of Tarapacá in Iquique. The events occurred in May, when they ascended the emblematic protected monument. Covarrubias alleged that it was an error and lack of signage. However, the prosecutor in the case reported that they were surprised by municipal officials and security cameras. Due to the facts, it remained with national roots.