At the Annual General Meeting of the CINDA university network, held on 20 October 2011 at the University of Panama, the UPC took over the chairmanship of the organisation.

For the first time, a European rector is the head of this institution, which was founded in November 1971 by a small group of universities in Colombia, Chile and Peru. CINDA currently comprises 41 institutions, including both full and associated members based in Latin America and Europe.

Among its aims is to analyse the challenges facing higher education systems and their constituent institutions, higher education policies and their impact on institutions, and in particular, different arrangements for university funding. Other objectives are academic cooperation through collaboration, the exchange of information and resources, and transfer of knowledge, in a manner that takes into account national and institutional contexts.

To achieve desired outcomes, CINDA works in a way that respects each member's autonomy and procedures, coordinates activities, and seeks to ensure that objectives are achieved. This involves establishing formal links between participants and generating stable, transparent, reliable mechanisms that create a working atmosphere based on trust, collaboration and a sense of partnership—the key to the organisation's success.

The network also promotes specific academic cooperation actions related to university teaching, curricular innovations, student mobility, academic performance, dropouts from higher education, quality assurance, the social demand for higher education, the link between universities and the productive sector, university administration and finance, strategic management of universities, knowledge transfer, and exploitation of research results.

As the rector of the UPC, I am honoured to have received the unanimous vote of CINDA's members, and have taken on this responsibility for the next two years. I look forward to tackling the challenge of increasing the presence and involvement of European universities in the network, and raising the profile of the reports and studies on higher education in Latin America that the platform periodically produces.