We have to think that it is not enough to analyze and criticize the “barbarities” of the extreme right and the “privileges” that the right defends, but we must also look at the management that social democracy has done over the last 36 years, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Margaret Thatcher already said it: the heritage of which I am most proud is Tony Blair. Because social democracy has bought and assumed the mental and ideological framework of the right and the extreme right, especially on security and immigration issues. But, in general, it has assumed its neoliberal model and what it has done is manage capitalism, euphemistically called “with a human face”, “third way” or whatever you want to call it.
From the hand of social democracy, throughout these 36 years and even before, have also come the privatization of large public companies, the policies of austerity and cuts in social and public services, the increase in military spending, etc. That is to say, today the population hardly notices the differences between the economic policies of social democracy and those of the neoliberal right and extreme right. That is why so many people end up opting for political apathy and, in any case, to vote for those who at least promise that “ours first”, in this Darwinian fight of all against all, in which capitalism has pitted those from below against those from below.
In this sense we see how the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, by which Royal Decree 640/2021 on the creation, recognition and authorization of universities and university centers is modified, is a social democratic measure that does not alleviate the succulent business of private beach bars that have been promoted, especially by conservative governments, but also social democrats, throughout the state territory. It is a performance which keeps the structure as it is.
This royal decree only puts a patch, which can burst at the seams
Although, just in case, we see how conservative governments, which seem to govern more for the companies they benefit, have accelerated the creation of private universities-beach bars, such as the Government of the Balearic Islands (PP) that has skipped everything and with an “express formula”, in six months, has granted administrative, urban and political privileges to approve the creation of the San Pablo CEU “university” of the Catholic Association of Propagandists (including a reclassification planning of land in nine days, when the public university has no spaces). This conglomerate has “chiringuitos-businesses” in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville. Generating competition with public universities in university courses in which there was no more demand or need for graduates. So the only desire is profit. The private profit of the shareholders of these companies. Or, in the case of religious beach bars-universities, the desire for ideological indoctrination that is the breeding ground of the extreme right, since they are directed by the most fundamentalist Catholic hierarchy in all of Europe.
This royal decree only puts a patch, which can burst at the seams. All it requires is that a series of requirements be met that serve to protect a university model that, supposedly, is committed to teaching and research, so that, according to this standard, all universities maintain high quality standards in teaching, research and economic solvency. But the problem is earlier.
It is not possible to conceive Higher Education as a business. Whether as an ideological business (universities created by religious or ideological institutions) or as an economic business (universities created by companies or venture capital funds). It is a human right. Its organization, therefore, cannot be designed from a commercial conception and obtaining economic or ideological benefit. Another thing is that science, research, discoveries and the resulting products can produce economic or ideological benefits to society.
Universities are institutions that must fulfill three fundamental missions, teaching, research and service to society:
- The higher education of citizens, preserving the knowledge acquired throughout history, producing new knowledge and transmitting it to as many people as possible along with the controversies that have surrounded or surround them;
- Research and generation of knowledge with universal references, preparing students in research methodologies and in the critical analysis of the challenges and social effects of the questions, practices and results of the scientific field, in the exercise of thought freed from any dogma, that seeks the common good, and in the preparation for the development of an expert and responsible professional activity;
- Service to society through the broadest cultural, social and economic impact of its activity that allows it to feed societies’ reflection on themselves and especially on their model of development and construction of a better, more just and democratic society.
These objectives can only be achieved by maintaining and promoting a non-market social model of a public university, of public ownership and management. Unfortunately, we find ourselves with neoliberal proposals with a marked anti-democratic tone that in recent years advocate reducing higher education to a simple commodity and the university to a knowledge industry, where higher education would only have a place as a business niche for private companies and corporations that seek profit (whether economic or ideological), university teaching that fits with the demands of human capital coming from the private sector and research that can be immediately commercialized in order to generate benefits for private industry.
There is no political will to face the big problem: it cannot become a private business where knowledge is trained, researched and transferred based on commercial criteria, that is, the essential model of capitalism. And this is what we are doing with the growing momentum of private business universities, which have become a highly profitable business niche in which more and more companies and vulture funds are landing to obtain benefits. But, above all, they are modifying the purpose and essential meaning of Higher Education. And, what is worse, normalizing the appropriation of knowledge and wisdom at the service of capital and capitalism itself, which commodifies everything it touches.
In short, continuing to admit the existence of private universities (even with a cosmetic facelift, with these new requirements) means assuming that capitalism, profit, usury, commercial relations and the extraction of profits can govern science, knowledge and the training of higher education. Something that openly contradicts the basic meaning of Higher Education as an essential right.
