Spain's first Chair Communication celebrates its 50th anniversary

Fifty years ago, the bulletin State bulletin of April 6, 1976, published a Ministerial Order dated March 8 of that same year appointing Alfonso Nieto Tamargo (1932–2012) as Full Professor business at the School of Science the Complutense University of Madrid. Thus was born the first Chair in communication in Spain. Behind that historic milestone stood a mentor: someone who left his mark not through what he accumulated, but through what he inspired in those around him. 

core topic contribution core topic programs of study in Spain

To understand what that appointment meant, we must remember where we came from. At the end of the Civil War, Franco’s government established the Official School of Journalism, which reported to the National Press and Propaganda Office. It was a tool control and focused more on power than on knowledge. Breaking away from that mindset was neither easy nor quick.

Alfonso Nieto was one of the most active advocates for the introduction of programs of study at Spanish universities. In 1969, he was appointed director the Institute of Journalism at the University of Navarra. It was the first university center dedicated to the training teaching journalism and communication. programs of study were not programs of study —they did not exist at Spanish universities at the time—but at the University of Navarra, the Institute of Journalism operated from its inception in 1958 as just another university department. Its first director, Antonio Fontán, was Full Professor , and from the outset the faculty included academic professors such as Ángel Benito, José Luis Martínez Albertos, and Alfonso Nieto himself, as well as journalism professionals. In 1968, the University of Navarra hosted Spain’s first congress communicationcongress , that of the International Association for average Communication Research (IAMCR), and in that same year, research papers research communication and media began to be published by the University of publishing house .

Nieto set out to fight for the Spanish university system to recognize programs of study as one of its programs of study disciplines. His appointment as director Navarra Institute of Journalism coincided with the Spanish Parliament’s drafting of a General Education Act, Education was passed in 1970. This Education reform Education Spain provided the opportunity for Alfonso Nieto, Luis María Anson, and others to explain the need to grant programs of study and media programs of study university status and to remove them from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Information. They spoke with various parties, and finally, on the very day the bill was voted on in Parliament, one of the deputies introduced an oral amendment to incorporate these programs of study Spanish university system. A 1971 decree established the Schools Information Sciences and dissolved the Official School of Journalism.

This marked the beginning of a new era in Education and research communication in Spain, with the establishment of the Schools Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the transformation of the Institute of Journalism at the University of Navarra into a faculty, with Alfonso Nieto serving as Dean.

A few years later, Alfonso Nieto moved to Madrid after passing civil service examination and securing civil service examination place Professor business —his specialization program School of Science specialization program—at the School of Science the Complutense University of Madrid. And in 1976, he became Spain’s first Full Professor communication upon being appointed to the Chair business at the School of Science at the Complutense University.

He later returned to the University of Navarra, where he served as President from 1979 to 1991, where he trained numerous students and carried out fruitful academic work in the fields of business and management .

The Chair Intelligence in the Service of Society

Alfonso Nieto was no Full Professor , and not just because he was the first in Spain’s programs of study . His Chair grounded in the vitality that intelligence brings to work . Nieto cultivated a genuine passion for advancing knowledge and knowledge, and for inspiring everyone around him—disciples, students, administrators, and media professionals, among others—with the idea that better understanding the world was a noble way to serve society.

Professor Nieto worked tirelessly to understand the history and present state of the world of communication in order to improve it and to glimpse what the future might hold. With boundless curiosity, the universal outlook of his academic spirit, and extraordinary intuition and intelligence, he made significant contributions to the field of programs of study . He was a pioneer in analyzing the unique characteristics of media companies, which had to reconcile their specific economic nature (serving readers and advertisers) with their publishing house ethos publishing house social function; he accurately analyzed the central role that the media entrepreneur— manager responsible for fulfilling the mission statement —played (and plays) in that market; He anticipated, sometimes decades in advance, phenomena such as the arrival in our country of technologies like FM radio, or the emergence of the free press as an information option that dated back to the very beginnings of the press. 

With the gradual adoption of new information technologies, and especially following the advent of the Internet, Professor Nieto realized that the world of information and communication was shifting from a product-oriented mindset to a service-oriented one —he wrote his book *Commercial Information Services* when the Internet was still just a promise—from an exchange approach exchange a approach (“relationships between intelligences,” as he liked to say), from valuing the tangible to valuing the intangible, and from working with multiple measures of value to revolving around a single currency of exchange: people’s time. 

He did all this from a position that he himself helped create, and which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

No doubt Professor Nieto would be reflecting today on the many challenges that Artificial Intelligence poses to the world of communication, and on how the essence of human intelligence—which he spoke of so often—will be affected by the reign of “thinking machines.” Fortunately, surely one or more of his disciples—among the many that the Full Professor left all over the world—is already devoting many hours to this topic, driven by the passion for researcher instilled in them all.

Manuel Martín Algarra and Ángel Arrese