The university was created in Yaounde, the political capital city of Cameroon, in 1961,
after the independence. For the young Federal State it therefore became necessarily urgent to put in
place a training institution that would cover the needs in local senior staffs, after the departure of
French and English colonial administrators. It was also to endow the young nation with an instrument
of quality training that would boost local economic and social development. At its opening, the
university had 213 students (Sup Infos, 2011, pp. 10-11) who were systematically absorbed by the
labor market; it will accommodate 37,215 students in 1992, on the same campus. But with the
economic crises, it witnessed a severe employment crisis. Due to the implementation of structural
adjustment programs driven by the Bretton Woods institutions, the economic crisis was coupled with
a political crisis: the Ngoa-Ekelle campus where the University of Yaounde was found rapidly
became a vast experimental field of socio-political demands for an integral multiparty system, a
general amnesty and liberal democracy in Cameroon. Faced with these crises, the State could not
remain indifferent. Thus, a ―university reform‖ will be launched in January 1993 by presidential
decree (Ministry of Higher Education, 1993, p. 9).