The rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) lives inside a bubble in the unique University City in the Pedregal area of Mexico City. At the helm for 33 months, Leonardo Lomelí is out of sync with the times. He assumes himself unreachable, detached from real-time accountability, while tens of thousands of young students suffer from his hesitations.
UNAM is, José Emilio Pacheco would say, elusive. If governing Mexico City is, according to politicians of the past, a miracle, for the so-called highest house of studies in Mexico, the term “collection of mysteries” can be applied. Its internal life is turbulent, although often only the rumor is heard from that condition, that it is better not to test the impulses that could break its harmony.
It is enough to remember that until recently everyone pretended not to notice student tensions at the limit: from 2025 and for months UNAM had dozens of faculties occupied in protests that were not loud but harmful to learning, the university’s mission. Gradually, they were freed. A major crisis that could be averted.
Therein lies Lomelí’s main mistake in the bomb that exploded this week over the cancellation of tens of thousands of exams after it became evident that the results of the undergraduate admission test are statistically atypical, that there is not a batch of geniuses digitally storming UNAM, but that the technology paid for to prevent the “black hand” allowed wholesale fraud.
In an institution where “elephants in the room” graze at will without anyone daring to question why an auditorium has been occupied since the PRI era, and even less raise their voice to ask if it is time to review the academic performance of automatic admission (that taboo which, although it changes its name, is that), Lomelí — a mortal sin — put a UNAM problem on prime time. And a gigantic one.
To begin to not understand how this could have happened, one must look at Lomelí’s CV: can anyone explain how someone who was UNAM’s secretary general for eight years and has been rector since November 2023 came out with this Sunday seven? It is not understandable. There will undoubtedly be an explanation, but it is unusual that the number two controller, who became rector, scored this huge own goal.
Is this executive a case that proves it is not a good idea for a number two to rise to the pinnacle? Lomelí’s proven experience — as a bureaucrat, and in that the admission exam is as routine as disastrous this time — works against him in public opinion. If he were a newcomer to the Puma elite, he would have no excuse, but perhaps some would forgive him. What is his excuse?
Lomelí has taken too long to face the disaster of the 2026 admission process. And the measures he has begun to take cause astonishment.
The exam was administered in several sessions between May 23 and June 10. In the midst of this, UNAM itself reported in a bulletin a thousand irregular cases. Today the question whose answer the rector keeps silent about — and the commission that yesterday recommended applying a control exam to thousands also does not respond — is what decisions the highest university authority made between June 10 and July 17, the date when the results were published and very soon observers detected excellence scores so inflated that the admission process could only have been plundered.
Authorization from the person holding the secretary general position, that is, the rector’s right hand, is required to publish the admission exam results. Did Lomelí decide to publish results knowing that the admission process had been successfully compromised, that thousands bypassed the presumed twenty locks of the platform contracted by UNAM? Or did he not know about the cheaters?
In any case, those results were revealed without the rector calling the public’s attention and clearly warning of the threat of the hopes of thousands of students to enter UNAM sinking. Did he perhaps think no one would notice the huge hole in the bow? Did he want to create a wave of indignation and manage it in his favor to shield himself as a victim rather than as a leader?
His strategy is failing and he seems unaware that, even before the commission he installed spoke this Friday morning — once vacations are over — because in Puma bureaucracy anything can happen, but no one gives up a labor conquest even if it means the peace of young students is at stake — he owes other explanations.
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The apology issued yesterday by the rector — “to the applicants who, having been accepted cleanly, will be called to take the control exam” — will be of little use without a report of the errors, the exposure of the chain of responsibilities, and the recovery of the money wasted on a platform that cost UNAM a hundred million pesos. The heads of a university must also teach students how to face responsibilities for negligence and their costs.
It seems nostalgically affected to recall just today that three decades ago, when the internet burst in to become indispensable, UNAM was a leader in that socialization. Yes, another elephant in the room that, thanks to Lomelí, now must be talked about is where that technological vanguard that the university once had went, at least in the last ten years during which he has been an authority.
Today UNAM is not even in the top five in Latin America regarding information technology universities. It ranks ninth*, behind TEC de Monterrey and universities from Colombia, Brazil, and Chile. Will Rector Lomelí set up a commission to explain what he has done in ten years to regain the vanguard, especially on the edge of that global paradigm shift that is artificial intelligence?
But before asking about the future, the rectorate must satisfactorily clarify how it was decided to pay more than five million dollars to rent a platform for the admission exam that miserably failed. Did the engineering community, which has multiple institutes within UNAM, know that it was being displaced in favor of private entities and approve that? Lomelí’s future looks complicated.
On July 3, UNAM filed a complaint with the Mexico City prosecutor’s office for the cheating detected in the exam. But it took weeks to set up the commission that yesterday recommended that the highest scores, and those in line with averages accepted in recent years, retake a test. In the scandal and the solution, which is yet to be scheduled, Lomelí did not have the baton.
Like when days ago students went to the rectorate demanding to be heard. The rector is unreachable even if he fails, was the message given to the complainants. Settling in an office for a long time atrophies political sensitivity. UNAM demonstrated this: it issued a bulletin to support the rector, not the victims of his actions. Long live the PRI spirit of UNAM! Cachún, cachún…
A crisis at UNAM is bad news for Mexico. The flagship institution — since we are going to speak the secular language liked by those who boast it as their alma mater and non plus ultra of national public education, which remains to be seen — of education provided by the Mexican State ran aground due to its errors in an exam that was a formality, but whose costs may multiply.
And the above is not dispelled by the information that emerged Friday afternoon that Lomelí had decided the departure of Patricia Dávila from the secretary general position, a measure that caused surprise in the university community. Such a drastic decision without timely explanation also does not help to think it is fair, proportionate, or even necessary.
Dávila, the first woman secretary general of UNAM and who at one time was also an applicant in the process in which Lomelí became rector, has a reputation as a good academic and demanding boss; she undoubtedly has responsibility for what happened in the failed admission exam, but her departure without socializing the facts and proving guilt, rather than mitigating, could escalate the crisis.
Booty is another word that applies to UNAM.
There are groups, in Morena but not only there, licking their chops at the smell of Lomelí’s lack of leadership. In a matter of days, the path must be fixed so that those who legitimately have the right occupy desks obtained with scores free of cheating. That, the urgent and crucial, will not save the rector from facing the consequences of the fiasco. Cleaning suspicions and demonstrating control capacity is also urgent and crucial to quell the appetites of opportunists who want to capture UNAM, its academic life, and fragile tranquility.
A report from Lomelí in his own name — and a series of appearances in the media where his answers to questions are as convincing as the corrective measures he imposes are well accepted — is, university-wise, inexcusable. The opposite is to insist on sheltering in a bubble that sooner or later will burst.
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