On 16 November 1948, when Colombia had still not recovered from the disturbances following the murder of the presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan -perhaps the most important of Bogota´s history-, a group of enterprising and enthusiastic young men decided to offer new reasons for hope with the creation of an university. The leader of this initiative was Mario Laserna, a student of mathematics, physics and the humanities at Columbia University, who at the age of 24 convinced politicians and industrialists in Bogotá of the need to build an educational institution which would be in the vanguard of its day.

In addition to being the first non-confessional private university, the University kept itself away from the struggle between the political parties - the Liberals and the Conservatives - which at that time divided Colombian society. Then, there were two kinds of university in this country: the private religious foundations and the State institutions, whose campuses were always just another battlefield for party warfare.

The university set out to form a technical elite which would close the breach which, in the matter of knowledge of scientific advances, separated Colombia from the rest of the world. Important academics, who had fled from the war in Europe, arrived at the University and spent their lives in research and teaching. From the first, the University set-up exchange agreements, at that time unknown in Colombia, with the universities in the United States.

The fact that from the outset the University proposed to offer a humanistic and intellectual formation for well-rounded professionals implied a genuine revolution in curriculum.