{"id":4430,"date":"2026-04-18T09:54:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T09:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=4430"},"modified":"2026-04-18T09:55:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T09:55:06","slug":"the-endogamic-nature-of-the-spanish-university-thoughts-and-experiences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2026\/04\/18\/the-endogamic-nature-of-the-spanish-university-thoughts-and-experiences\/","title":{"rendered":"THE ENDOGAMIC NATURE OF THE SPANISH UNIVERSITY: THOUGHTS AND EXPERIENCES"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today\u2019s post is partly inspired by Ana Bravo-Moreno and Francisco Javier Og\u00e1yar-Mar\u00edn edited collection Los males de la academia: Abuso de poder, endogamia, acoso, corrupci\u00f3n y otras violencias<\/em> (Peter Lang, 2026), which can be downloaded for free here<\/a>. This is a necessary book to animate a conversation carried so far discreetly away from public attention, but, at the same time, possibly not the book we need. The authors offer either autoethnographic accounts, in which they present themselves as typical cases of the situation they describe, or reports on a selection of victims in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and, oddly, Indonesia (this choice lacks any cultural or geographical coherence, unless the point is to prove that the rotting university culture is the same anywhere, even randomly). I expected a systematic report, with a clearer typology of the types of abuse and the corresponding analysis, with statistics and figures, but this is not what the editors had in mind. I found very appropriate, at any rate, the Mexican notion of \u2018academic violence\u2019, which serves very well to cover the whole field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I\u2019m a victim of academic violence, but I\u2019m not ready yet to give a full account, and I\u2019ll focus instead of the endogamic nature of the Spanish university, which so much offends Bravo-Moreno. Her chapter is a lengthy account of her difficulties to enter a Spanish university department after a long stay abroad first training for a PhD and next working as a teacher-researcher. It seems that I have never written about endogamy here and this has an explanation: in Spain, 68.8% of all tenured teachers work in the same university where they obtained their PhD, and often their MA and BA. I\u2019m one of them. I\u2019ve been at UAB for forty years now. I transferred from UB in 1987-88 as a second-year student, after a gap year in England as an au pair, was first employed in 1991, earned my doctoral degree in 1996, and tenure in 2002. I am not comfortable with this situation, but I refuse to feel guilty because I\u2019m certainly not at all a product of corrupt endogamy. So, let me explain a few matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Mobility is taken for granted in the university, internationally, but this is an ideal that clashes with the actual situation of the persons involved in academic careers and that is much easier to implement up to the age of 25. The Erasmus programme, launched in 1987, has made it easier for BA and MA students to integrate mobility in their CVs at an early stage. I\u2019ve mentioned here a few times that I spent a year, 1986-87, as an au-pair in England and that is how many (female) students used to access a cheap kind of mobility before Erasmus. Upper or middle-class families, of course, sent and still send their children to spend a year abroad already in secondary school, or to take a BA, or MA. Yes, academic mobility is a good idea, particularly if it begins during the BA years. Some scholarships like La Caixa\u2019s and others offer funding for MA degrees and other options. I spent a year in Scotland (1994-95) as a visiting doctoral student, with a La Caixa grant, for which I am extremely grateful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          That year abroad was also a requirement to continue my contract at UAB as a full-time associate teacher, and this is where complications begin. I totally agree that a university teacher aspiring to tenure should spend at least one year away from their home university, either abroad or in a national university, but this is a requirement that makes strong demands on personal life. At this point, say between 25-30, young researchers may find themselves in stable relationships they don\u2019t want to risk or already planning a family, the normal things people do at that age. Ambitious persons may consider the risk worth taking and go away for a time, or transfer to another university, seeking a long temporary contract or even tenure. Good for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          In practice, things are complicated. Couples break up, or young researchers abandon academia opting to take care of children. Yes, all this affects women mainly, for, clearly, university mobility comes from a time when academics were mainly men and they could uproot their families to go elsewhere if a new job materialized. Add to this that in Spain we have strong attachments to family and friends, and even though we have been migrants for centuries seeking better jobs and lives, and many young researchers left Spain after the 2008, this is not seen as something desirable for personal progress. Mobility interests many researchers, of course, but, as it is obvious, many others accept it only because they have no other option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I tried to leave UAB three times along my earlier career, for a mixture of personal and academic reasons, with endogamy acting very much against my interests. You\u2019ll see the case is typical, so here\u2019s my autoethnographic account. My husband is from Madrid and when we met we considered the possibility that I moved there, so I signed up for a tenured position as soon as I became a doctor (this could be done then). A friend gave me the gentle warning that the position was for an in-house candidate who had been waiting for years and had a strong CV. I should not turn up for the public presentation, he told me, so I didn\u2019t. A couple of years later I met said in-house candidate and she greeted me rather aggressively with the salutation \u2018So, you\u2019re the person who signed up for my tenured position, right?\u2019 Just imagine. Next, I applied for another position in another Barcelona university, following the indications of my UAB Department, for, I was told, they would not guarantee tenure for me. This time I did show up, knowing the house candidate had a much weaker CV but would anyway win the position. I\u2019m still reeling from the abuse I suffered to secure the position for him. A few years later, when I was very unhappy at UAB, I tried to leave again, even if that cost me passing yet another public state examination but the university I contacted told me that their jobs were for their own people. So, three tries to get away from the endogamic game, three fails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Bravo-Moreno narrates how frustrating it is for someone returning from abroad to be received with so much suspicion and wariness when she applies for jobs. Well, I certainly wasn\u2019t welcome when I tried to work in other Departments, but I also was less than welcoming to a returning academic aspiring to occupy the tenured position I had waiting for. I had been working at this point for about nine years at UAB, I think, when a prot\u00e9g\u00e9e of the professor returned from abroad. I was already competing with another in-house candidate for tenure as my Department made a point, exceptionally in Spain, of not playing by any endogamic rules. Yet, it turned out that the endogamic rules were played to facilitate the return of this person. You can imagine the atmosphere but I won\u2019t go into more details. I did win tenure, but I can only describe the experience as deeply traumatic. I have no idea, then, what it’s like to easily win a tenured position that your endogamic Department has always destined for you. Often, I envy the peers who were that lucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The situation is awfully unfair for everyone. You might be fully qualified and competitive but be rejected in favour of far weaker candidates (I have just narrated that). You might be doing a great job in a Department but lose tenure to someone who, while better qualified, perhaps had personal circumstances that facilitated a long stay abroad or the acquisition of diverse merits. Some Departments protect their local candidates fiercely; others have strange loyalties to persons who left and demand to return. But the core of the question is never discussed: there are not enough positions. Ideally, nobody with a doctoral degree, post-doctoral experience and a solid CV should be left out. The Spanish university, however, is poor and employs as few teacher-researchers as possible, forcing many to simply abandon academia. Resources are spent in training doctors than then end up seeking jobs away from Spain, which, for me, is a total waste. One thing is wanting to work abroad, another very different having to do so because there are no jobs locally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Endogamy, I\u2019m trying to argue, is not as simple as its critics suggest and not as corrupt. Many factors concur, from personal to socio-cultural circumstances. What for me is truly baffling is not so much the mutual attachment of researchers seeking tenure and their universities, but the almost total impossibility of moving once you have tenure. You can transfer to another university temporarily on secondment (in what is called a service commitment) but the only way to work elsewhere is by passing again a state examination, which is only called when a tenured position comes up (and these are mostly only called if there is already a qualified candidate). A friend of mine needed to transfer from Lleida to Tarragona for family reasons, and even though Tarragona did have a position with no in-house candidate, he had to pass a second state examination for the same category he already had. There was a far more complicated case in Oviedo, leading to a lengthy legal dispute, of which there are quite a handful. I don\u2019t know how this works for other civil servants like judges, but my guess is that there is more mobility and in far easier terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          So, my view is that we are so endogamic for two main reasons: the lack of jobs makes it extremely difficult to secure a tenured position and you might get stuck for all your working life elsewhere if you apply for tenure in another university. So people patiently wait for their own universities to offer positions and universities tend to reward loyalty for that long wait. I would insist that in Spain we\u2019re used to the idea of having to move if you have no other option, but we\u2019ve been always far less willing to move chasing a job, putting it before family or love. In general, we\u2019re a low mobility nation and the endogamy of our university partly reflects this reluctance to leave home. I must also say that our endogamy has a silver lining: you can find very good teacher-researchers in all Spanish universities. We don\u2019t have a system that attracts the best academics to just a small ring of top institutions, and I prefer that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          So, yes, I\u2019m a product of endogamy because I\u2019ve been rejected by other endogamic universities, but not because I was protected in any way by my own university. I know of many who enjoyed that protection, some of whom did not deserve it, but I also know of many others who are great teacher-researchers. I think it benefits any Department to employ a mixture of their own doctors, who know the house well, and of newcomers, who might refresh the atmosphere, and I find full endogamy as ridiculous as the automatic rejection of your own doctors. What we all need are more jobs, it\u2019s as simple as that, and far more freedom once you\u2019re tenured to work elsewhere, with no need for further hassle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s post is partly inspired by Ana Bravo-Moreno and Francisco Javier Og\u00e1yar-Mar\u00edn edited collection Los males de la academia: Abuso de poder, endogamia, acoso, corrupci\u00f3n y otras violencias (Peter Lang, 2026), which can be downloaded for free here. This is a necessary book to animate a conversation carried so far discreetly away from public attention, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,27,34,1052],"tags":[1465,1467,446,1466],"class_list":["post-4430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-research","category-teaching-tools-and-rules","category-university","tag-endogamy","tag-mobility","tag-spanish-university","tag-tenured-positions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4431,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4430\/revisions\/4431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}