Signed by Professors Doctor Gonçalves Ferreira, Doctor Maria de Lourdes Belchior, Eng. Delgado Domingos, Doctor Alfredo de Sousa, and Dr Silveira Botelho, state that: "The NOVA University Lisbon, still in its structuring and installation phase, seeks from the first step to be guided by educational and scientific objectives typical of a truly democratic society that we wish to build in the country".
This document, which belongs to the archives of the NOVA University of Lisbon, outlines the university's position on a day full of strong emotions - five days and five nights after the dawn we had waited for so long, that whole, initial and clean day, April 25, 1974, the day before May 1, Labour Day, declared a national holiday, was marked above all by the arrival in Lisbon of the exiles: Álvaro Cunhal, General Secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party, the musicians José Mário Branco and Luís Cília, and the future archaeologist Cláudio Torres returned on the same Air France flight.
Moreover, as the 30 April edition of Diário de Lisboa showed, with its headline about a country "on the road to democracy", support for the JSN had already begun to be expressed publicly by the most diverse representatives of Portuguese society - from the Portuguese Society of Authors to the one hundred and fifty scientists of the Gulbenkian Institute of Sciences, as well as the student body, who announced their "unequivocal support for the movement".
