Austral University of Chile

The idea of creating a university was presented to the national congress in the 1950s by the senator for Valdivia, Carlos Acharán Pérez de Arce, who later succeeded in consolidating the project.

In a meeting held on 16 February 1954 supporters of installing a university created a directory and proclaimed Eduardo Morales Miranda as president of it.

After have been founded by decree on 7 September 1954 the university was inaugurated on 12 March 1955 by president Carlos Ibáñez del Campo.

The first degree programmes to be taught at the university were fine arts, agronomy, forestry engineering and veterinary medicine, each of which had also its own faculty.

During the military regime's privatization of higher education in the 1980s UACh incorporated the successor regional see of Universidad Técnica del Estado, the Instituto Profesional de Valdivia.

Deputy Gabriel Ascencio (DC) accused Claudio Bunster, director of CECS, of using his personal influence among politicians and the Council of Innovation for Competitiveness (of which he is member of) to gain more resources.

The building, located on Teja island Campus housed considerable amounts of chemicals and scientific equipment which could not be saved.

Firefighting companies from the neighboring cities of Osorno, La Unión and Paillaco had to come to assist to control and extinguish the fire.

[4] On May 13 of 2008 the student federation of UACh decided to go on strike since they considered that a request list sent to the university administration was answered in too loose terms.

A third campus exists in Puerto Montt where business administration, speech and language pathology and aquaculture are studied.

[7][8] Some of the fields where UACh scientists have made contributions include: The university publishes several scientific journals three of them, Bosque, Archivos de Medicina Veterinaria and Estudios Filológicos are part of ISI's bibliographic database.

[17] In matters of literature, communication science and linguistics the university has published the journal Documentos Lingüísticos y Literarios (DLL) since 1977.

Documentos Lingüísticos y Literarios has two sections, one dedicated to articles and comments on literature, linguistics and communication science and another were original literary pieces are published.