Beginning a new mandate through 2030, Susana Mira Leal called for the University of the Azores to look beyond the limitations traditionally associated with distance and insularity. As the institution and Azorean Autonomy both mark their 50th anniversaries, the Rector described the University as essential to the Region’s future and argued that its place in the world should matter more than its position on the map.
For half a century, the University of the Azores has lived with a geographical paradox. It was created in an archipelago distant from the principal continental centers of higher education, yet its very existence challenged the idea that knowledge must always flow outward from those centers. On September 9, as Susana Mira Leal publicly began her second term as Rector, that tension between geography and possibility became one of the defining themes of a ceremony looking simultaneously backward at fifty years of achievement and forward toward the University the Azores will require in the decades ahead.
Mira Leal was elected by the University’s General Council on May 28 and formally took office on July 20 at the Rectorate Palace. The public investiture of the rectoral team for 2026–2030 took place in the Aula Magna on the Ponta Delgada campus before a large audience that included Representative of the Republic for the Autonomous Region of the Azores Susana Goulart Costa and President of the Legislative Assembly Luís Garcia. The leadership team remains unchanged from Mira Leal’s first mandate and includes Suzana Caldeira, Francisco Martins, Adolfo Fialho, Artur Gil, Ricardo Teixeira, João Gonçalves, Amélia Fonseca and Luís Furtado as vice-rectors and pro-rectors.
The coincidence of anniversaries provided the Rector with a larger historical frame. Both the University of the Azores and constitutional Autonomy are celebrating fifty years, achievements she described as “distinct, but profoundly connected.” Their histories developed alongside one another: one expanding the political capacity of the islands to govern themselves, the other strengthening their capacity to produce knowledge, educate generations and participate intellectually in the wider world. A university in an autonomous archipelago is therefore more than an educational institution. It can become one of the places where autonomy acquires knowledge, scientific capacity and the human resources necessary to imagine its future.
Mira Leal challenged an old vocabulary through which the Azores have frequently understood themselves. “For too long, we have looked at the Azores, and even at the University of the Azores, through distance, through their peripheral and outermost location,” she said, “perhaps more concerned with the place we occupy on the map than with the place we can occupy in the world.” It is a significant distinction. Geography cannot be changed, but the meaning assigned to geography can. An island can be peripheral in kilometers while becoming central through marine science, climate research, Atlantic studies, biodiversity, culture, technology and international cooperation.
For Mira Leal, beginning another term is consequently more than the continuation of an administration. She described it as “the renewal of a commitment to an institution that is decisive for the future of this Region.” She thanked the General Council and academic community for renewed confidence while insisting that confidence carries obligations. “Confidence is not a point of arrival; it is a permanent demand,” she said. “It obliges us to want more, to do better and to be accountable for what we do.” Governing a university, she added, requires vision and the ability to implement it, institutional responsibility, courage in decision-making and serenity when confronting criticism.
Students themselves were given an important place in the ceremony’s vision of the future. João Soares, president of the University of the Azores Academic Association, welcomed the existence of a vice-rector with specific responsibility for student affairs, seeing it as a means of creating greater proximity and participation between students and the Rectorate. He emphasized mental health and well-being but also the material conditions that determine whether students can actually remain in higher education. New university residences across the institution’s three campuses, he argued, represent considerably more than new buildings: they create conditions for students to study, remain in the islands and complete their academic journeys. Housing, in this sense, becomes part of educational equality.
General Council President Marco Pessoa Lopes placed the new mandate within an even longer horizon. He pledged the Council’s participation in defining the University’s strategic development and called for dialogue among its governing bodies, while emphasizing the importance of strengthening the University of the Azores as an institutional presence. His hope for the next fifty years is for a modern and adaptable university with greater scientific production, stronger capacity to attract and retain talent, deeper integration with Azorean society and an active role in demographic renewal, cultural dissemination, educational advancement and the international projection of the archipelago.
Those ambitions reach directly into one of the defining questions facing the Azores: whether islands marked historically by emigration can increasingly become places where knowledge stays, returns and arrives. A university cannot reverse demographic decline by itself, nor can it solve housing pressures or economic inequality. But it can educate people who might otherwise leave permanently, attract researchers from elsewhere, connect local knowledge to international networks and create reasons for young people to imagine a professional future within the archipelago.
The investiture ceremony, accompanied by music from the clarinet quintet of the Azores Military Band and musician Luís Martins, therefore carried symbolism beyond the beginning of another four-year mandate. Fifty years after its creation, the University is old enough to possess institutional memory but young enough to redefine its ambitions.
And perhaps Susana Mira Leal’s most consequential phrase was also the simplest: the Azores must become less preoccupied with where they stand on the map and more ambitious about the place they can occupy in the world. For an island university entering its second half-century, that may be more than an aspiration. It may be the definition of the work ahead.
Based on a story by journalist Vasco Blayer for Diário dos Açores-Paulo Viveiros, director. Photos from DA.