The current president of the Community of Madrid is a continuator of this way of seeing things, and today her cabinet is at the head of the offensive against public universities. But I don’t know who is surprised
During the mobilizations of the sixties and seventies in Spain, at that time of struggle for the recovery of democracy, one of the most popular slogans was the one that said ““We children of workers want to study”. An important manifesto from that time was the one written by Manuel Sacristán in 1966, titled ‘For a democratic university’. Reading it today, almost sixty years later, has an impressively topical tone.
This document, which had a lot of influence in the fight against the dictatorship, highlighted that higher education “must stop being a privilege reserved for the economically upper classes and on which a second privilege is also based: that of reserving to its members, only sector of the population that normally obtains academic degrees, important functions of social management”, to immediately demand “a great increase in the number of places in higher education and the destruction of class barriers, already manifested in secondary education, that function today as irrational selection criteria for the youth”.
The political and social struggles of that generation made it possible to lay the foundations for a university education with a broader and less elitist social base. Thanks to this, access to the university was democratized – it became popular – to the point that, indeed, the children of workers were finally able to go to university. In fact, many of the people of my generation would not have been able to access university if it had not been public in nature. My father and mother, for example, could not have afforded to send their two children to a private university. Perhaps, as is currently happening in the Anglo-Saxon world, they would have had to go into brutal debt or, more likely, resign themselves to the fact that that university space was occupied only by the wealthiest families. Fortunately for my generation, in Spain things turned out differently.
The problem, the promoters of the Bologna Plan – a program that reformulated university education at the beginning of the century – would emphasize many years later, is that the European economies, and especially the Spanish one, did not need so many university students. In that diagnosis they were not wrong, since the economic system – and the Spanish productive model in particular – what demanded were low-skilled and poorly paid jobs in sectors such as tourism and construction. The university system, they told us, generated a surplus of people versed in philosophy, sociology, history, and a long etcetera, headed above all by the branches of humanities. Something had to be done.
If you think about it, the productive system is only interested in the production of economic value, for which the intellectual training of the worker can even be a drawback. This is something that the first liberals always kept in mind, although it makes us blush to remember it. For example, one of the founders of the American nation, Thomas Jefferson, allowed slaves on his plantation in Virginia to learn to read printed papers, but he flatly refused to allow them to learn to write – which would have given them the ability to write. falsify documents to free oneself from the yoke to which the democratic revolutionary I had them under control.
Today’s societies are more complex and require qualified labor in many sectors, and also with skills that are constantly updated, which is why few modern liberals would renounce the existence of advanced training centers. But what they do prefer is that the formation of the working class and the formation of the elites occur through different channels and, furthermore, be a business and not a resource monopolized by the community – the State. In fact, what the Bologna Plan promoted was the deepening of hierarchical categories within university education itself. On the one hand, there would be a group of students who would only finish the degree in a few years. On the other hand, there would be another group of students who would also access the postgraduate course, spending some more time and, above all, a considerably greater financial investment. Here classism resurfaced, of course.
The current president of the Community of Madrid, Díaz Ayuso, continues this way of seeing things, and today her cabinet is at the head of the offensive against public universities. But I don’t know who is surprised. Those conquests of the sixties and seventies were historically contingent, that is, they could always be reversed if the correlation of forces changed. And that is precisely what is happening, since the three great pillars of the Social State (education, health and pensions) are continually threatened by political actors who represent the blind drive to maximize private benefit. These pillars are candy for a business network that can also provide these services, probably of lower quality today, but, above all, at the cost of excluding the less favored sectors of society. Sons and daughters of the working class would once again be left out.
One of the most serious problems facing public universities is the precariousness of their teaching staff, especially those under 45 years of age, who work for salaries that in large cities do not even cover rent and food. This is a consequence not only of an organizational system that could be greatly improved but, above all, of the lack of budget. But it is not an accident, but a concerted strategy so that the best that the university has, its quality embodied in the teaching staff and the facilities, is devalued or, in the case of professionals, goes somewhere else. Who is going to blame a 40-year-old university professor with a doctorate for leaving his 1,500-euro-a-month job if he is offered something better outside?
This is the strategy: devalue the public service and inflate the private one so that, over time, the many private universities that emerge like mushrooms can, or at least some of them, be competitive and attractive for their quality. And then the transfer of resources will be complete and the students will also be segregated by social class. Those who can afford it will go to the private one, and the rest to the public one. What David Harvey called “accumulation by dispossession” will have been completed, that is, the progressive and stark privatization of public resources. That, and no other, is Ayuso’s objective. Although, to say the least, it has never been a secret.
#Ayusos #accident
