University of Madeira

It was a joint dispatch of 1983 of the Secretary of State for Higher Education and the Regional Secretariat for Education, then under the tutelage of Dr. Eduardo Brasao de Castro, who created "a commission to study the feasibility of creation and operation of a university in the Region Autonomous Region of Madeira and / or other institutional alternatives ". In 1985, this commission presented a "Study on the Feasibility of the University of Madeira" opposing to the Napoleonic University model another one presumably more adapted to the reality of Madeira. Three years later, through Decree-Law no. 319-A / 88, of September 13, 1988, was born the University of Madeira, being part of the first Installing Commission the President's Vowel Prof. Doctor Raúl de Albuquerque Sardinha, the Vowels Prof. Doctor Fernando Santos Henriques and Prof. Doctor José Luís Morais Ferreira Mendes and the Administrator Dr. Ana Isabel of Portugal Almada Cardoso. In its "Strategy and Programming" document, this commission manifested the desire to establish a new "scientific-cultural project" in the face of the "exhaustion of the conventional university model". Presenting a timetable with a view to the full integration of the courses of Letters and Sciences that, since 1978, had functioned in the centers of university extension, this document considered however that the University of Madeira, at least as far as the courses of Letters, And given the diversity of variants, could not assume the finalization of the courses, having their students to move to the mainland.