That the play of forces leans towards the direction of the leadership in any institution is something apparently natural, within certain limits. In the case of the public Spanish university, the principle of autonomy may conflict with those of transparency and accountability, fundamental in a public institution. This happens when the laws fail to put up barriers that stop manipulation, that is, when the formal conditions allow the candidates for rector to build clientele networks that will allow them, de facto, to control the governing bodies. This explains the current onerous case of the University of Salamanca (USAL), where its rector has been accused by different media, national and international, of bad practices.
When the Spanish Research Ethics Committee urges the USAL to investigate the case, what was expected happens, that the commission created for this purpose does not meet the minimum requirements of impartiality, so its conclusions are exculpatory. It is true that in transparent societies, freedom of expression and its technological vehicles promote a kind of informal social control that makes many infractions become evident, such as when they take a photo of us for running more than necessary on the road. But then, how is it possible that, in the face of published evidence, a good part of the members of this university community ignore or deny it?
When someone asks me that question, I remind them that there are people who deny the Holocaust and Covid-19. There are also some, and not a few, who believe that the deadly virus was planned by certain governments. Why should we be surprised then, that in the most widely read media in Salamanca, its director begins an article saying that “one day we will know what the animosity of the Government of Pedro Sánchez and its media excrescences against the rector of the University of Salamanca responds to?” ”, despite retractions of articles from international journals and accusatory reports from independent researchers?
Some say that this case is worthy of attention because it reveals the defects of the research system that governs our lives as academics, based on competition for accumulation of citations. Being true, I think it reflects deeper problems. It refers to a global crisis of the ethics of responsibility, caused by multiple factors and that takes the form of radicalized polarization between alliances of different social subsystems.
In this affairthe collusion of actors from the political, media, business and academic world, both at the local and regional levels, has been clearly revealed. As an example, apart from the quote above, the attitude of the Junta de Castilla y León, to which powers in matters of education belong, serves as an example. I wonder if the same would happen in Catalonia, to give an example. Would the responsible authorities maintain such a clamorous silence there that it makes complicity itself blush? Is it still true that “wide is Castilla”, especially carpetovetónica?
It seems that our blessed Unamuno said that this university – I suppose it can be applied to all – was the temple of wisdom, with the rector, who at that time was himself, its high priest. A century later we have a rector who does not seem to be wise, because he does not rectify. On the contrary, he seems to act as those persecuted by justice did in the Middle Ages by taking refuge in temples, taking refuge in the sacred. Then we have a part of the teaching staff whose faces and conversations I do not see showing a hint of concern about the subject. Others, and not precisely because they are attentive to their places, confess fear, causing their teachers imprisoned by Franco to turn in their graves.
Then there are the students, whose silence has the same effect in the cemeteries—or on the couches, if they are alive—among those of their classmates who gambled in May 1968. Finally, there remains a small group, which I don’t know if it increases. or decreases, from colleagues who feel indignant and powerless, caught in the trap of university autonomy, begging the spirit of Unamuno to give us the strength to believe in his words: “My religion is to seek the truth in life and life in the truth, even knowing that I will not find them as long as I live.”
Fernando Gil Villa He is a professor of Sociology at the University of Salamanca and coordinator of the USAL Strategic Plan 2018-23.
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