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Papers for everything. The culture of "everything in writing" has been imposed on the University, although in virtual format. And everything is a lot. The day to day of a teacher has become a heavy career of bureaucratic procedures , a real white-collar thief who takes a precious time that should be devoted to teaching and research. But the one is a necessary condition for the other. And so the burden of introducing, even for the smallest things, a host of data, forms and documents in a constellation of applications and computer programs, each with its own requirements, formats, passwords and, in occasions, malfunctions: systems hang, files are missing or cannot be accessed.

Enter the data of the teaching project, with its list of competencies for student information and operations to be repeated for each theoretical group; the exam schedules, detailed practice programs, justification of the expenses in research projects, in which sometimes the invoice is not enough and the purpose of the purchases has to be explained in writing . Payment orders with their corresponding copies, settlement of diets with their forms and models, supporting reports; forms for conducting stays in foreign centers, service commissions, study license applications, filling out surveys on the operation of university services, updating articles and participation in congresses, certificates of lectures and seminars, introduction of CV data in different formats, whether for the Aneca (National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation), for the application of six-year periods, regional complements, habilitation, English models, letters and more letters ... All this and much more makes up the exhausting adds and continues in the day to day of the university.

MORE BUROCRACY, LESS TEACHING

With the work of teaching, research and management, the feeling has spread that teachers have never worked so much and students so little . "More hours of bureaucracy mean less time to update the syllabus or to find new materials for students," says Francisco Cabezuelo, a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). This teacher tells how to give two or three hours of class during a week in a center in Italy he has had to face five months of paperwork in which, among other efforts, he has sent a letter of application to the university, he has received another one of invitation and signed a five-page contract that specifies the number of students, the content of the classes, the expected benefit of mobility. And, on the way back, a questionnaire of 50 questions about the experience.

Then there are the rubrics, that for each exam or student work you have to document the rules with clear instructions. Or the teaching guide of about six or seven pages with standards, revisions, all in advance and with guarantees for students . «A university invites me to a thesis court and each one has a different staff, the other Ministry ...», says Cabezuelo.

GUILTY BY DEFAULT

The bureaucracy has taken over university life, monopolizes the complaints and the time of professors (in addition to the Administration and Services Staff) who, although they accept the need for a certain control and transparency, question that this level of requirement. And to that fierce tendency to put the magnifying glass on their activity. «In Spain, by default, you are guilty and you have to prove that you are innocent. Here, you are innocent at first, but as you are guilty they will penalize you well, ” says Marcos Martínez, a Spanish professor at Stanford University (USA), one of the best in the world.

Precisely, top centers are characterized by minimizing bureaucracy, and not only for having more resources, but for a cultural and efficiency issue. "In Spain, to buy a pen there will be an official doing paperwork that costs 40 times more than the pen," says Martinez.

The obsession with control and transparency reduces flexibility and competitiveness to our universities, contrary to what happens in countries like the United States where, as Cabezuelo points out, “the departments even give money to teachers to organize meetings with students in their own houses ».

«We lose a lot of money for the bureaucracy to which we are subjected in the universities» , confirmed in a recent meeting the new rector of the UCM, Joaquín Goyache, who has proposed to put a stop to a bureaucratization «more and more asphyxiating» , a practice which, in his opinion, has reached "hardly tolerable limits in an institution that aims to evolve towards simplicity and efficiency of processes."

The bureaucratization of the increasingly suffocating universities

Joaquín Goyache, rector of the Complutense

Thus, he referred, among other things, to the new Contract Law, which introduces more requirements in the public tenders of universities in order to guarantee transparency, said correctly or, if preferred, to prevent any threat of corruption. or waste. And, nevertheless, it seems to have become a new obstacle for the development of the projects, by demanding laborious efforts for what were previously simple procedures.

ORDER AND CONTROL

But does so much bureaucracy make sense? "Universities could not function without bureaucracy from a positive point of view, that of organization and management, they need a certain order," says the Vice Chancellor of Communication of the University of Barcelona, ​​Francisco Esteban. The problems begin at the extremes, because "sometimes it gets out of hand and leaves no time for university work."

Moreover, Esteban considers that "the bureaucracy has helped transparency, but it has been involved in paperwork processes and waiting times that require excessive effort , although teachers also appreciate that there is a certain normalization of processes." And yes, as a teacher, Cabezuelo is in favor of a dose of bureaucracy: "Public universities have slower procedures because they play with money from around the world." The problem lies more in the excess of zeal, in the disparate and infinite models of procedures, in which each administration and university has its own systems and in which reaching agreements to unify these processes is complicated. Here, "agencies are the key, rather than universities," says the vice-chancellor.

"Accreditation and the time that must be devoted to requesting it is one of the main bureaucratic obstacles of our scientific system," says Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM) researcher Javier Fernández de Bobadilla, who recalls that "applying for a position in abroad is much simpler and has more guarantees ». In his opinion, " the scales that are required in the accreditation do not guarantee to be a good professor or holder, they reduce the ability to attract foreign talent, it is cumbersome and slow and therefore weights our access system . " And the truth is that, in his opinion, this model of scales is not even contributing effectively to solve the problem of inbreeding.

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