The university of Córdoba del Tucumán — degrees on the far edge of the Indies
A cattle-and-mule town founded in 1573 in Comechingón country carried, within fifty years, higher studies open to poor clerics and laymen without inheritance and a house authorised to confer degrees. Alcedo's 1786 dictionary records two colegios "con título de Universidad"; Concolorcorvo in 1773 finds Franciscans running it and issuing degrees to the three provinces of Tucumán. Both pages are read from the scans, and the sources' own frame is printed with them.
Why this wins its question: English coverage of this institution is a Wikipedia infobox with a 1613 date and a claim about being the oldest university in Argentina, sourced to itself. This object replaces both with pages actually opened: the 1786 Madrid dictionary naming the Comechingón site Kiskisacate, correcting a Jesuit's founding date, and recording "2 Colegios con título de Universidad" in a city that paid for them by fattening mules for Peru; and the 1773 traveller finding the degree-granting house in Franciscan hands after the expulsion, still issuing borlas to three provinces. It quotes a curriculum meant for "clérigos pobres y seglares sin herencia", and it does the two things the infobox cannot: it holds the oldest-in- South-America superlative at confidence 0.5 and names why, and it prints the triumphalist sentence its own 1773 source puts one paragraph earlier.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Alcedo's Diccionario geográfico-histórico de las Indias Occidentales, Madrid 1786, tomo I, page 658, gives the city and corrects a predecessor over its date: capital of the province and government of Tucumán, "fundada por el Gobernador de ella Gerónimo Cabrera el año de 1573, y no por Juan Nuñez de Prado el de 1549, como dice equivocado el Ex-Jesuita Coleti", in the territory of the Comechingón Indians "y parage llamado por estos Kiskisacate á orilla del rio Pucará", from which it was later moved to the southern side. The indigenous place name is printed in the article that records the Spanish foundation, and the founder's date is argued rather than copied.
The same article, in its inventory of the city, states the institution in six words: three convents of religious of San Francisco, Santo Domingo and la Merced, a Bethlehemite hospital under the invocation of San Roque, two monasteries of nuns of Santa Teresa and Santa Clara, "y 2 Colegios con título de Universidad"; head of a bishopric erected in 1570, with the best buildings in the whole province although the city is small and nearly square. Alcedo gives no founding date for the colleges and names no instrument, and this object does not supply one from him.
Alcedo prints, in the same breath, the economy the schools sat on: the city is "muy rica por el gran comercio que hace de mulas que compra en la Provincia de Buenos-Ayres, y engorda en sus potreros para venderlas en las demas y abastecer todo el Perú". A university on the far southern edge of the Indies was paid for by fattening mules for the Andean silver economy. Whose labour ran the potreros and the droves the article does not say, and nothing read here does.
Who the teaching was for, from a Córdoba compendium of 1900 whose chapter VIII is headed "Educación—Los franciscanos—Los jesuítas—El obispo Trejo y sus fundaciones—Concesión de grados—El convictorio de San Javier—La Universidad". Its page 65 records that the Franciscans founded the first school "bajo un árbol al principio y luego en un rancho incómodo", and that from 1612, under P. Alonso Vique, that house held higher studies: quoting a source it does not name, "escuela primaria de niños, latín y retórica, filosofía con matemáticas y física, teolojía y cánones para frailes, clérigos pobres y seglares sin herencia". Poor clerics and laymen with no inheritance are named as intended students. Confidence is held down because the quotation is unattributed in the only source that carries it.
The foundation dates, from the same page 66, and from nothing stronger. The bishop of Tucumán, Fr. Fernando de Trejo y Sanabria, began by founding a seminary at Santiago in 1609 under the invocation of Santa Catalina; "En 1613 fundó aquí el colegio de San Francisco Javier y el año siguiente ya fué Colegio Máximo"; and that house "sirvió de plantel para la fundación de la Universidad de Córdoba … pues se fundó en 1622". Confidence is 0.7: this is a civic compendium with no apparatus, which names no archive and cites no instrument, and which carries plain date errors in the same paragraphs — a lieutenant governor appointed "en 14 de Febrero de 1513" where the sequence requires 1613.
One claim in that source is recorded here as the source's and not adopted. Olmos writes that the university of Córdoba, "después de la de Lima es la más antigua de Sud América". A local historian of Córdoba is the weakest possible authority for a superlative about Córdoba, no source read here weighs the other South American foundations of the same decade, and this corpus's own entry on the universities of Lima and Mexico shows how much earlier the 1550s foundations were. The claim is printed because omitting it would hide what the source says; the confidence is deliberately low and the object makes no priority finding of its own.
What it looked like in 1773, six years after the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish dominions, from a traveller's account printed that year. El Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes describes Córdoba on its pages 92 and 93: two colegios "adonde se enseñan facultades. El uno se dice REAL, cuyo Rector es Clerigo, y el otro es, de MONTSERRATE", whose "direccion está al cargo de Padres de San Francisco, con título de Universidad, que provee de Borlas à las tres Provincias del Tucumàn". The degree-granting house had passed to the Franciscans and was still conferring its borlas across the three provinces. The same passage adds that in few places in America of equal size are there so many fortunes, and that they would be larger "sino gastaran tanto en pleytos impertinentes".
The frame the 1773 book puts around its own description, printed here rather than trimmed. On the page that introduces Córdoba, the narrator praises the generosity of the Tucumán gentlemen who adorn the churches of the Indian pueblos of Potosí and Cuzco, and writes that such displays "dan materia á los Españoles para que le den gracias, y se congratulen de la feliz Conquista, que han hecho sus antepasados". That is the voice of the source, in the sentences immediately before the passage on the colleges. It is quoted because an object that took the university description from this book and quietly dropped this would be misrepresenting what kind of book it is.
What would raise this entry's tier, stated so the gap is visible. Neither source read here reproduces an instrument: no papal brief, no royal cédula, no matriculation or degree register. The 1786 dictionary attests only that two colleges held the title of university; the 1773 traveller attests that Franciscans were conferring degrees; the 1613 and 1622 dates rest entirely on a 1900 compendium registered at reliability 0.6. Nothing read here shows how many students there were, where they came from, or whether indigenous or mestizo candidates were admitted. The archives and the modern institutional scholarship that would answer all of that sit on hosts this container cannot reach.