In my last post I cited the doctoral dissertation by Leonardo Sánchez Ferrer, currently of the Universidad de Burgos, Políticas de reforma universitaria en España: 1983-1993 (1996). I downloaded it to take a quick look, and ended up devouring it, given its informative, reader-friendly tone. PhD dissertations are not a genre I tend to read unless I’m part of an examining board, which will give you an idea of how well researched and written Sánchez Ferrer’s work is. To my surprise, he submitted his dissertation the same year I submitted mine, and here’s the irony: if I had read his thesis then, I would have understood much better my own situation and the hardships I faced in the following years. At least, I have now a valuable instrument to make sense of circumstances I believed to be unique to my Departament, but that turn out to be part of a much larger national pattern.
Because I have turned 60 and been attached to UAB for 40 years (35 as a teacher), I find myself going through my academic biography with a certain intensity this summer. Last week I met, after many years, one of my best friends from my secondary-school days, and we both agreed that the education we received at the Instituto Menéndez Pelayo was simply outstanding. I was actually depressed for the first two years of my university education (at the Universitat de Barcelona), owing to the much lower standards and the incredibly crowded classrooms. My quite desperate transfer to UAB in 1986-7 was the right decision, as I found there younger staff, smaller groups, and a degree of personal attention I could only dream of at UB, but that I had already enjoyed at Menéndez.
What I didn’t know, but Sánchez Ferrer has taught me, is that the period when I was a secondary-school student and an undergrad student (1980-1991) corresponded to a very complicated process to try to update Spanish higher education for the new democratic, post-Franco era. I did know, but only superficially, without the necessary details.
Children and younger teens are not aware of how they are situated in history, and that includes the development of the legislation that shapes the institutions of education. You go to school and are taught a series of contents articulated by the legislation and political background of the time, which in my case was conditioned by the final years of Franco’s regime (I started primary school in 1970, when the Ley General de Educación was passed, after the turmoil of the 1968-9 protests). The difference between the school I attended, Rius i Taulet in Barcelona, and my secondary school was abysmal, as corresponds to the immense differences between Franco’s Spain and the democratic consolidation of the 1980s under Felipe González’s governments (1982-1996).
I didn’t really know who Franco was until he died in 1975 (I was then 9) and it might be said that I first became aware of my position as an individual caught in national history in the exciting following years, between the referendum for democracy (15 December 1976) and the first democratic elections (15 June 1977). I was a mere child, but it was practically impossible to ignore what was going on, though I realized as an adult that I had missed much of the violence of those times. History, however, caught up definitely with me (or I with it), with the attempted coup of 23 February 1981 and, most definitely, with the History lessons by my admired secondary-school teacher Joan Roig i Vicens.
I can’t remember exactly when, I must have been 16 or 17, but one day I realized thanks to Prof. Roig that History was not only about the past but about what was going on in the present. My personal choices were, therefore, conditioned by the historical reality, whether I wanted it or not. As a girl from a working-class family, this meant that I could enjoy educational opportunities unheard of for my mother, including attending university. She, in contrast, was always frustrated because her primary-school teachers offered to help her prepare for secondary education, and perhaps a profession like nursing or medicine, but my sexist grandfather decided that she should start working (at 14!) and help to pay for her younger brother’s education. Those were other times indeed.
After reading Sánchez Ferrer’s thesis, I am confirmed in my own view, formed in the years when I was head of Departament, that university professors always tend towards anarchy. I mean by this that, as all education ministers have eventually found out, one thing is passing legislation and quite another implementing it with the full acquiescence of the professors. This is the result of an intrinsic tension that can’t be solved. As teachers and researchers, we must show much personal initiative. Besides, except for classes and meetings, we can organize our time as we prefer. This means that most of us have fiercely independent personalities that are not easy to manage either individually or as a collective.
The system implemented in Spain in the early 19th century, in imitation of Napoleonic policies, tried to modernize the university by making all the centres (just 12) respond to the Ministry’s authority. At the same time, it relied on full professors (catedráticos) who were given immense amounts of power, and who made sure to infiltrate the political institutions to hinder any decision they didn’t like. This system, with its strong hierarchy, remained in place basically until the publication in 1969 by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of the Libro Blanco, on which the 1970 law was based. A major change introduced by this law was the reorganization of the cátedras into departments headed by full professors, which means that the same hierarchical structures were perpetuated, but in bigger institutions. Sánchez Ferrer basically claims that the Ley General de Educación failed because of the reluctance of the universities to implement it; in plain words, because of the resistance of the catedráticos to give up any of their privileges.
This situation of stagnation, complicated by the first massification of the Spanish university (when middle-class young persons, mostly women, broke the monopoly of the upper classes) and the irregular hiring of thousands of underqualified teachers, lasted until 1983 when the Ley de Reforma Universitaria was swiftly passed, thanks to the Socialist majority in the Parliament and the Senate, after the failure to pass the 1980 Ley de Autonomía Universitaria.
That was the year I started secondary school, which means that by the time I started the Licenciatura in Filología Inglesa, in 1984, I found a very different university, with far more consolidated departments, actual independence from external control (well, more or less), and a declared willingness to improve research though international contacts and collaboration. I owe to Minister José María Maravall, and his collaborators Joaquín Arango, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, and Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, the legal foundations that enabled me to convince my far from privileged family that a university education was feasible.
Sánchez Ferrer, however, has opened my eyes to the far less savoury consequences of how each university applied (or twisted) the new 1983 legislation to hire young staff. The law rescued the older title ‘ayudante de cátedra’ (a sort of ‘professor’s aid’) to create new full-time positions with a light teaching load, aimed at having younger staff write their PhD dissertation. In fact, I and many others were hired as ‘ayudantes’ to teach full-time. Sink or swim…
My first job title was Ayudante de Escuela Universitaria, even though I worked for a Facultad, a higher institution than a Escuela. I was asked to teach two annual subjects (one instrumental language, the other Literature) with no previous training of any kind and, as far as I recall, no supervision, except that I had to teach the same programme as the other teachers. I was an Ayudante in diverse categories for nine years, and then a full-time associate for two more. This might seem very convenient in comparison to the subsequent extinction of full-time temporary contracts, but the fact is that for eleven years I taught as many subjects as a tenured teacher for half the pay (and wrote my dissertation, in three years).
Sánchez Ferrer argues that the young staff who, like myself, worked under these conditions, could not offer quality teaching, being untrained as teachers and inexperienced as researchers. We were perhaps awful teachers, I don’t know, but we certainly compensated any deficiencies with enthusiasm and with many new ideas. These came from our collective effort not to replicate the often appalling methodologies we had suffered as students. Still, we were very much exploited, while stupidly believing that the university loved us for our academic distinction.
Sánchez Ferrer gives a particularly good account of how this exploitation created a moral debt with us, which resulted in the endogamic system lasting in Spain since the 1980s. I didn’t know that catedráticos often moved from one university to the other, with the result that Madrid and Barcelona attracted the best and nothing much happened in the smaller provincial universities. With the new law, mobility was reduced to make sure all universities had quality staff, while at the same time international mobility for research purposes was encouraged, if not made mandatory by the universities. Hence, my year in Scotland.
Sánchez Ferrer does not comment on this, but the lack of mobility also perpetuated the power of certain catedráticos, who could be despotic, over the Departments and drastically diminished the chances of escaping them. I said that university teachers tend towards anarchy, and the most anarchic ones were always the old-style catedráticos, who knew nothing could force them to change their ways. Besides, they were given priority to head Departments over tenured teachers in inferior categories (titulares). When I became head of Department, still a recent titular, I broke the implicit rule by which the catedráticas ruled in practice, telling each successive head what to do. And I paid quite a high price for it. Now it is generally understood that catedrático is a personal title connected mainly with the capacity to conduct research and lead teams, not to dictate how a Department must be run.
I’ll stop here or will end up writing a book instead of a post. My deepest thanks, once more, to Sánchez Ferrer for illuminating a central period in the history of the Spanish university, and for helping me to understand how I stand within it. I never intended this post to be only about me and my personal circumstances, but to send an invitation to other university teachers to consider how their careers are conditioned by political decisions leading to specific legislation.
Have a lovely summer break, if the heat allows it. I’ll meet you again in September!