Esteban López-Escobar, Full Professor emeritus of the School of Communication, passes away

Esteban López-Escobar, Full Professor of Public Opinion and Professor Emeritus of the School of Communication has passed away in Pamplona. He was 83 years old. López Escobar (Valencia, 1941) joined the faculty of the School of Communication in 1972, at the invitation of the then Dean Alfonso Nieto. He succeeded Ángel Benito as professor of General Information Theory. He was also the first director of the School 's Public Communication department and teaching in the Latin American Graduate Program (PGLA).

He developed his professor and research work in Communication Theory and Public Opinion. He was a pioneer in integrating the main areas of research that make up the department of Public Communication, such as: Deontology, Political Institutions, International Relations, Political Communication, International Communication and Information Law.

During his academic career he was president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), the main academic association for the study of public opinion as a discipline. He also stood out, among others, for his study of the diary setting theory together with one of the fathers of the theory, Maxwell McCombs. He was also a great scholar of Marshall McLuhan.

López Escobar began his programs of study in Law at the University of Oviedo and, in 1958, he attended the first summer course of the then Estudio General de Navarra. Directed by Antonio Fontán, the summer course was the precedent of the Instituto de Periodismo (current School of Communication). He received his doctorate in Budgetary Law from the University of Seville in 1971. He also obtained a diploma in Comparative Law from the University of Strasbourg, a diploma program in Journalism and a licentiate degree in Communication.

He was one of the founders of the magazine Gaceta Universitaria and director of the magazine Nuestro Tiempo(1974-1979), and was part of the committee publishing house of the journal Communication & Society. After his retirement, in 2012, he joined the Doctoral Committee of the UNIR, where he was also a professor. In December 2013 he was appointed Professor Emeritus of the School of Communication.

In 2020, after having supervised 17 doctoral thesis , he defended his second doctoral thesis "Charles Horton Cooley: an approach. instructions for a communicative theory of the social", supervised by Manuel Martín Algarra and Maxwell McCombs. Until then he had been a doctor in Law and this second thesis was the end of his research and professor career.

Charo Sádaba, dean of the School of Communication, remembers the professor as follows: "With Esteban López-Escobar an important part of our history is leaving us. In addition to an enormous sorrow, we feel the responsibility of receiving his legacy, which we are committed to treasure and continue to cultivate. Esteban always taught us to look very high and very far. To be bold in our goals, particularly in those of research, when in Spain there were hardly any wickets for communication as a science. And he did so by setting an example, participating in dozens of research projects, directing numerous doctoral thesis and publishing in the most relevant journals in his field, Public Opinion. He also assumed leadership in these tasks and was president of the World Association for Public Opinion in 2005 and 2006, among many other positions he held in international institutions in various fields". 

Charo Sádaba also highlights in Professor López Escobar's career "his many friends that he generously shared with colleagues and doctoral students, which contributed to one of his most distinctive features: his image as a man of the world, a contemporary intellectual".  

"His way of being and doing, full of gestures and anecdotes, had as a consequence that his students were certain that what Professor López-Escobar was talking about was very important. And this was, I would dare to say, one of his most important contributions: to impress upon dozens of graduating classes of students that the theory of communication and public opinion were complex issues that required study and effort to be understood. Esteban López Escobar has been an exceptional researcher, professor, teacher, colleague and friend. He has been, above all, a protagonist in these more than sixty-five years of the School's history, and he leaves us an immense and rich bequest ," concluded the dean.