SOU community invited to Guanajuato lectures
Three SOU alumni from Guanajuato will present free, public lectures on Thursday, April 11, as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the sister-university relationship between SOU and the Universidad de Guanajuato.
Members of the SOU community are encouraged to attend the lectures and to welcome the visiting delegation from Guanajuato.
“If you see any visitors from Guanajuato on our campus next week, be sure to tell them bienvenidos – welcome to SOU,” said Provost Susan Walsh, who is organizing the 50th anniversary celebration.
Thursday’s lectures will be in the SOU Art Building’s Meese Auditorium at 9, 10 and 11 a.m. The first speaker will be Martin P. Pantoja Aguilar, an educator at the University of Guanajuato, who will address “Public Financing in Mexican Universities: A Matter of Academic Quality?” Georgina del Pozo, an administrator and former Amistad program coordinator at the University of Guanajuato, will speak next, discussing “Guanajuato City: History, Culture, Living, Education and Amistad.” Susana Montalvo, who has managed several small business projects in Mexico and the U.S., will wrap up the series with her talk, “Small and Medium Business in Mexico and the USA: Common and Divergent Paths.”
The lecture series is part of a multi-day celebration of the relationships between SOU and University of Guanajuato, and the cities of Ashland and Guanajuato, that began in 1969. The partnerships will be formally renewed during a breakfast observance on Monday, and an invitation-only reception and concert for the Guanajuato delegation will be held at SOU’s Music Recital Hall on Tuesday evening.
More than 1,000 students, faculty members and others have participated in exchanges since the Sister City agreement between Ashland and Guanajuato began in 1969.
The cooperative link between the two communities is unique, even though both Guanajuato and its university are much larger than Ashland and SOU. Several Guanajuato families have participated in exchange programs with SOU for three generations, and more than 80 marriages tying people from the two cities have resulted.