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The Old & the Older. A group of frontón courts, strikingly similar in line and color to the ancient pyramids near by, seem even closer to Mexico's Indian past. Actually, the structures are made largely of concrete, and the local volcanic rock is used merely as a coating. A far more striking blending of Indian and international is Architect-Muralist Juan O'Gorman's magnificent windowless library (see opposite page). O'Gorman, son of an Irish father and Mexican mother, has decorated the four sides of his tower with vast and vivid mosaics pairing heraldic symbols of Mexico's Mediterranean and Middle American pasts, the feathered serpent of Quetzalcoatl and the cross of Cortés.
For engineering students, there are laboratories big enough to hold any kind of model machinery; for demonstration lectures, there is a whole building full of amphitheaters; for the humanities, there is a three-story, ruler-shaped structure 1,000 ft. long.
In such quarters, the ancient university is sure to change drastically. It already has. Once a cloister for seminarians, later a hotbed of middle-class anticlericals, the University of Mexico has become since the 1910 revolution a center of mass-produced higher education. Its doors are open to anyone with certain minimum secondary-school marks and $20 a year tuition money. More & more it resembles the big U.S. state universities at which so many of its faculty leaders have been trained. Overwhelmingly conservative nowadays, the students, men & women alike, seem mainly concerned with the practical business of preparing for their vocations as lawyer, doctor or engineer.
Toward the Ivory Tower? With its traditions of self-government and academic independence, the university is likely to hold its commanding position in the Latin American intellectual world. Some 5,000 non-Mexicans enroll each year in its 15 colleges. But it is a big question whether the university's prestige will persuade the distinguished Mexico City lawyers, physicians and businessmen who now comprise almost 90% of the faculty to continue as part-time professors at a nominal fee of about $10 a month, after the university moves eleven miles away from their courts, hospitals and board rooms. These men, whose respect for the prestige of being on the university faculty has enabled the institution to operate on a ridiculously small budget, have largely set its tone. They attract to themselves personal disciples, who sit at their feet much as students sat at the feet of great scholars in medieval universities.
This side of academic life may now tend to disappear. The university expects to establish a full-time faculty. The cost is bound to be heavy. Just to maintain the new campus will take more than the university's present $3,000,000 annual budget. To make a go of the University City, the administration will need almost three times the sum it receives now from the national treasury. In Mexico, as elsewhere, the cost of education is going up.
* The U.S.'s oldest: Harvard (1636).