News about scientific advances and discoveries with the participation of centers, institutes and universities of the Catalan research system and universities often appear. This summer news of this type has proliferated almost every day. The Catalan knowledge system configures a universe with a great capacity to attract competitive resources in Catalonia, Spain and Europe; and it has first-rate recognition and benefits, as well as accrediting the role of universities in the benchmark rankings.
I write this post not out of complacency. Quite the contrary; I try to situate my arguments in a field where the momentary compatibility is pointed out, between excellence and insufficient resources in order to put the emphasis on a transcendent fact: the Catalan research system and universities with the economic resources and adequate equipment It would be even more the spearhead of an economic and social model of a vanguard country where investment in science and knowledge would definitely go from being considered an expense to being explicitly valued as an investment. And where the transfer and innovation would mean the integral culmination of the model.
The watchwords of the Conselleria de Recerca i Universitats are the ones that title this article. The arrangement as an essential condition for the smooth functioning of the system and the reform in order to overcome the impacts and inertia of the economic crisis and the pandemic. I allow myself a digression: the arrangement has domestic connotations and is intended to clean up the system and the reform has historical connotations since at least the 15th century when it became a program to recover the mercantile economy of late-medieval Catalonia.
A sample of arrangement is the recent update of the members of the Social Councils of the universities, some of which had expired in 2017! It is, if you like, only a symbolic fact, but it becomes a necessary condition, although not sufficient, to order the permanent challenge of the relationship of the Universities with their social environment.
The reform, on the other hand, goes through definitively reversing the effects of the cuts. Adjusting the budgets for research and universities to the objective needs of the system is to allow the recovery of a level of investment that ensures a material environment for the equipment appropriate to current circumstances and with the challenge of new buildings on the horizon. This is what we have started to do with this year's budgets and what we have to continue and expand in successive years.
Once the minimum arrangement and the adequate economic reform have been made, the time will have come to thoroughly rethink the system; the role of universities, the adequacy of supply and demand, the proliferation of degrees, the linguistic adaptation to the reality of Catalonia, or the redefinition and adaptation of the University to the model of learning throughout life. Finally, the merger of some research centers, the great options for the future of new hospital and research locations, the change in scale of large infrastructures, and the specific research options with an impact on the country as a whole, will finish defining a integrated and integrating research and teaching model that is the horizon for which we work.
The map of all the centers and future projects configures a circular ring, an irradiation system in concentric circles and in transversal collaborations that outlines a future full of challenges and opportunities. Well, resources must be adapted to ensure the virtuous circle that is being defined: that of a country that bases its progress and well-being on the knowledge it generates and shares. You only have to execute the provisions of the National Pact for the Knowledge Society and the Llei de la Ciència de Catalunya, whose deployment has already begun and which is the hinge that becomes the touchstone of the entire system and its efficiency. and benefits.
