The resumption of university studies in the city of Lleida: the study of Arts and its Faculty 1971-2021

Abstract

In the 1971-1972 academic year, university studies of Philosophy and the Arts were resumed in the city of Lleida. These first steps in the recovery of arts studies marked the starting point of a historical sequence that took place, with progress and setbacks, until the institutional consolidation of university arts studies, of the Faculty and of the renewed University of Lleida (UdL) in 1991, when the Parliament of Catalonia passed an act for its creation. This article provides a comprehensive reconstruction of the resumption of university Arts studies in Lleida at the end of the Franco dictatorship, with the transformation of an elitist university into one for the masses, its consolidation during the nineteen-eighties within the broad process of democratization forming part of the University of Barcelona, first as a territorial division and subsequently as the Faculty of Arts itself, and the academic and institutional development in the nineties as one of the centres constituting the new UdL. The academic and institutional dimension of the last fifty years of the Faculty of Arts is analysed together with its social, cultural and political impact on the social dynamics of the capital of Segrià and the region of western Catalonia.