As Spain struggles under the weight of unsustainable borrowing costs and an unemployment rate touching 25 percent, its higher education sector has not escaped the turmoil.
Academic salaries have been cut several times and the country’s science budget slashed by nearly 25 percent. The government has also set up a committee to consider reforming Spain’s universities, only one of which — Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona — appears in the top 200 of the latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
But while the committee is expected to focus on structural issues such as funding and autonomy, many critics claim the real drag on Spanish university quality is the culture of politicisation and cronyism which has also been blamed for bringing the country’s cajas (regional savings banks) to their knees. Critics claim the power structures in many universities are dominated by nepotistic networks which tolerate and even promote all manner of non-meritocratic and unethical practices among members, while coming down hard on those who dare speak out against them.
According to Spanish educationist Jose Penalva, 98 percent of Spanish university positions are won by internal candidates selected by their academic colleagues. The free flow of personnel between local politics and senior university management means these professors, in turn, are often in hock to political interests, he claims. “This means that only the more intellectually and politically servile get posts, and if you criticise the system, you are accused by the Spanish academic community of not having ‘trust in institutional democracy’. So the good researchers and lecturers have to leave Spain,” says Penalva.
Penalva personally experienced the consequences of breaking the “code of silence” when in 2010 he published a book titled Corrupción en la Universidad (Corruption in the University). He was driven to write it by the campaign of “threats, insults and envy” to which he claims to have been subjected by the University of Murcia, after he went to court in 2007 to obtain a chair in education that he says had been earmarked for a less-qualified academic who was a friend of Murcia’s rector, José Antonio Cobacho Gómez.
Penalva was sacked for alleged absenteeism shortly after the book was published. He is challenging the dismissal in court, but expects the case to drag on for some time. A Murcia spokesman denies that the disciplinary action had anything to do with the book. Since publishing Corruption in the University, Penalva has been contacted by a large number of Spanish academics who also claim to have suffered after falling foul of their local power networks.
Among the stories (which he hopes to collate into another book) is that of Jorge Lirola Delgado, professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Almeria. He says he was suspended last November for four years and three months after reporting the university rector, Pedro Roque Garcia Molina, to the local chief prosecutor, Antonio Perez Gallegos, for alleged criminal offences. According to Lirola, the rector then acted as “judge and jury” and found that he had acted with “serious disregard for superiors” and caused “serious injury to the dignity of the staff or administration” of Almeria.
Stories also abound of alleged financial misconduct by senior officials in Spanish universities. One example, reported by Spanish newspapers in February, concerns the former rector of the Complutense University of Madrid, Carlos Berzosa Alonso-Martínez. He was accused by his local authority of “grave irregularities” over the construction of houses and the passing of “impossible invoices”, such as one for 57 car journeys to Athens by a researcher and another for Euros 1,700 (Rs.1.2 lakh) in wine for a science programme.
But perhaps most serious for the quality and reputation of Spanish universities is the alleged toleration of research misconduct committed by members of the alleged power networks. Allegations of other irregularities within the faculty abound, many of which were raised at a forum in Madrid earlier this year organised by a fledgling network of academics titled the Platform Against Corruption at Spanish Universities. “The whole system is rotten. But the vast majority of lecturers, professors and students — probably because of fear of reprisals — look the other way,” says a University of Vigo professor.
Penalva adds that this is also true of his experience, and expresses scepticism that the university reform committee will get to grips with such deep-seated cultural issues. “My feeling is the committee will use fashionable words such as ‘excellence’, ‘productivity’ and ‘internationalisation’, and ask for more autonomy and more money,” he says. “But in the current structure, that means more power to the current professors, so it will have no effect on nepotism.”
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)