Until the 1970s there were different engineering schools in Catalonia, such as mining, industrial, telecommunications or architecture, which in 1972 were integrated into the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, with Gabriel Ferraté as rector. The nine balls in 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, Rector Ferraté himself founded the Open University of Catalonia, 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 put his prestige at risk with the absurd idea of doing training only online. He persevered, a visionary, and, despite the technical and legal difficulties of the internet in the late nineties, he pushed 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 past 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 replied that it had become clear to him that the university did not want to change and that it was unbearably conservative. It reminded me of what Xavier Prats-Munné, then director general of education at the European Commission, said in 2013: "Reforming the university is like reforming cemeteries, you can't count on those 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 towards the world of work , where people go to get certified in order to access the labor market. Now the three main functions of the university are training, research and knowledge transfer, and all of them are in crisis, trapped by rules and regulations imposed by an outdated administration and more than questionable governance systems. Perhaps this is why the institution has closed in on itself, making long lists of all the problems that surround it, as it grows older, unable to renew itself, more and more precarious and removed from reflection and social debate. It is surprising that it is precisely in the so-called "knowledge society" when the university is not being able to adapt.
When there are too many applicants for a job position, the most common selection filter is that of a university degree. A bad student who may have even cheated in an exam passes this first filter simply because he has a 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 degrees than for knowledge, and it is perfectly possible to get the degree by passing exams or turning in exercises without having demonstrated understanding or critical ability. The public sector continues to use the degree as an access filter, but the private sector already increasingly values experience, attitude, skills and relational abilities.
Current challenges exceed the limits of any discipline and we need profiles capable not only of collaborating with other areas of knowledge, but also of understanding them. And they must also 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 miscegenation. 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 they are still focused on knowledge, not on skills and abilities. Having a degree has nothing to do with being a good professional, or a good citizen, or being able to act efficiently in the world we are building.
As Jorge Wagensberg used to say, if you're watching something and you see that it doesn't change or move...touch it, see if it reacts, because maybe it's dead. Let's touch college, even if it bothers me.
