Message from the Rector

The university teaching project of COFAC has its origins in the late 80s when ISMAG was established. The Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias was recognized only in 1998 as a higher education institution of public interest by Decree-Law No. 92/88.

We are therefore the youngest university in the country and we are proud to be the largest non-State university, in number of students, teaching programmes and teachers holding PhD degrees.

The ULHT was established under a right enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic and because of that, not only does not renounce it, as uncompromisingly will defend its execution and will reject by all means at its disposal any form of discrimination, regardless of the origin.

Article 43

Freedom to learn and teach

1. Freedom to learn and teach is guaranteed.

2. The State cannot plan education and culture in accordance with any philosophical, aesthetic, ideological or religious guidelines.

3. Public teaching shall not be confessional.

4. The right to create private and cooperative schools is guaranteed.

From the legal and social point of view, we are a public university (of public interest) alongside state universities. What distinguishes us from these universities is the fact that we are a self-financed university, something that is also supported by the Constitution of the Republic.

We were certainly the Portuguese university that has striven the most for the implementation of the Bologna Reform because we believed that it was urgent and vital for the country that higher education was the subject of change in obsolete paradigms and working models, and therefore needed to be replaced by other values, more in line with the needs of the country's development.

That is why we were at the forefront of the adjustment of the Portuguese universities to that Reform in terms of curricular, spatial and functional organization. In this framework, we have adopted the Dublin descriptors for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd cycles.

We fully recognize ourselves as part of the European Higher Education Space, as well as part of the Lusophone Higher Education Space. Therefore we have reflected on the Statutes of the university the Lusophone dimension of our project, as an inevitable manifestation of social responsibility since it is defined that the University has as objectives "teaching, research and rendering of services in the various fields of culture, science and technologies, in an interdisciplinary perspective and especially in order to contribute to the development of all countries and Portuguese-speaking peoples.

The ULHT is the only private university in the metropolitan area of Lisbon (3 million inhabitants and 25% of the Portuguese population), which has ensured a sustained growth of students and teachers holding a PhD degree in recent years, accounting for about 50% of the non-state educational university offer in the Metropolitan area of Lisbon.

In the national context, the ULHT ranks eighth in number of students and teachers holding a PhD degree amongst the 25 State and private universities.