Until the seventies in Catalonia there were different engineering schools, such as mining, industrial, telecommunications or architecture, which in 1972 were integrated into the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, with Gabriel Ferraté as rector. The nine balls of the UPC logo are a nod to those nine schools that, not without difficulties, managed to come together in a shared project. Twenty-two years later, in 1994, the same rector Ferraté founded the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the first virtual university in the world, but this time without so much academic consensus. In fact, the rectors at that time recommended that he not risk his prestige with the absurd idea of doing training only online. He persevered, a visionary, and, despite the technical and legal difficulties of the Internet at the end of the nineties, he continued forward and today the UOC has more than 80,000 students around the world.
Ferraté dedicated his life to thinking and rethinking the university, he loved it, but at the same time he was free and rebellious enough to question it. This September I was able to share a good conversation with him and when I asked him what he had learned after so many years at the institution, he answered that it had become clear to him that the university did not want to change and was unbearably conservative. He reminded me of what Xavier Prats-Munné, then Director General of Education of the European Commission, said in 2013: “Reforming the university is like reforming cemeteries: you cannot count on those on the inside.”
The first European university was that of Bologna, in 1088, and after more than a thousand years of change and evolution, the current model has been reached, marked by the industrial revolution, which has left us a university very oriented to the world of work, where People are going to get certified to be able to access a job.
Now the three main functions of the university are training, research and knowledge transfer, and all of them are in crisis, trapped by norms and rules imposed by an obsolete Administration and more than questionable government systems. Perhaps that is why the institution has closed in on itself, making long lists of all the problems that surround it, while it ages, unable to renew itself, increasingly precarious and distant from reflection and social debate. It is surprising that it is precisely in the so-called “knowledge society” that the university is not being able to adapt.
When there are too many applicants for a job position, the most common selection filter is a university degree. A bad student who may have even cheated on an exam passes this first filter simply by having the degree, while a professional with fifteen years of experience but no degree is left out of the process. This has filled the classrooms with people more eager for titles than for knowledge, and it is perfectly possible to obtain the title by passing exams or submitting exercises without having demonstrated understanding or critical ability. The public sector continues to use the title as an access filter, but the private sector increasingly values experience, attitude, skills and relational capabilities.
The current challenges exceed the limits of any discipline and we need profiles capable of not only collaborating with other areas of knowledge, but also understanding them. And they also have to be able to collaborate with other cultures, other ways of doing things and other ways of understanding the world, so we need both technical and cultural mixing. Cross our European borders and relate to other continents, and also cross our cognitive borders and relate to the rest of the disciplines.
We will have to find a way to accredit this broad concept of mobility, geographical and intellectual, but at the moment the degrees still do not talk about this and continue to focus on knowledge, not on skills and abilities. Having a degree has nothing to do with being a good professional, nor a good citizen, nor being able to act efficiently in the world we are building.
As Jorge Wagensberg said, if you are observing something and you see that it does not change or move... touch it, see if it reacts, because perhaps it is dead. Let's touch the university, even if it bothers.
