This article describes the first student fights in favor of the university autonomy in Colombia.We evidence that the search of a legitimate space in the structure of the university government has been for the Colombian student a historical aim.The actions developed in the seventies were important, since they put in shock to university system.Nevertheless, it was the generation of university students of the first half of the 20th century who put the aims of the fight, when proposed that the cogobierno would favor the scope of the university autonomy.We argued, then, that for the students of that generation the fight for the cogobierno was indispensable to generate substantial changes in a university system that was characterized by his academic and institutional authoritarianism.