University's mission has been informed by a liberation theology motivated by a preferential option for the poor. Father Ignacio Ellacura, Rector of the UCA from 1979 until his death in 1989, was a renowned theologian and public intellectual; he wrote numerous articles on liberation theology and on the role of the university in the life of the country. In "The University, Human Rights and The Poor Majority," he states: The university will have to set as its ultimate overall objective the attainment by the poor majority both of living standards sufficient for meeting their basic needs in a decent manner and of the highest degree of participation in the decisions that affect their own fate and that of society as a whole. 5 As Hugh Lacey points out, practicing this option for the poor is not only a moral imperative, but opens a path to a deeper, more accurate understanding of social reality: A fundamental theme of liberation theology is that contact with the sufferings of the poor, and with the communal struggle to overcome those sufferings, provide the key to understanding social reality -- a contact that is immediate, involved, expressive of compassion and solidarity, and critically articulated. 6 Ellacura was well aware that the UCA's mission required praxis in the form of a university response to the human rights violations going on in the country at the time and that this, in itself, posed a risk of persecution. In 1982, as the counter-insurgency intensified, Ellacura wrote: [The university's]