More than 1,000 professors ask that the new Law on Universities guarantee ideological neutrality on the campuses of Catalonia

• Universities The Law on Universities will allow the cloisters of the Catalan campuses to adopt ideological positions such as those of 1-O

• Universities Universities must "ensure inclusion" in the Erasmus program of Basque, Catalan and Galician

More than

professors and university professors from all over Spain have written a letter to the senators and deputies of the Cortes Generales to ask them to eliminate the controversial article

of the project of the Organic Law of the University System (Losu) that will allow the cloisters of the universities to position themselves politically, as the Catalan campuses did after the sentence of the illegal referendum of 1-O.

The Losu was approved on December 22 in

and is now going to begin its processing phase in the

.

At the last moment, PSOE and Unidas Podemos agreed to negotiate an amendment with ERC, Junts and Bildu which included, as a new "fundamental function" of the faculty, that of "analyzing and debating issues of special importance", as announced THE WORLD.

This change had gone unnoticed until the ERC deputy

revealed that it was going to allow the campuses to "position themselves" in matters of "deep political news", recalling that the University of Barcelona or the Polytechnic University of Catalonia have been denounced and condemned. by the courts for this reason and implying that this type of sentence will no longer occur after the new article of the Losu.

Not surprisingly, both the

and the

have recently condemned the University of Barcelona, ​​the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and the Pompeu Fabra University for violating the principle of neutrality that public administrations must comply with. .

The letter, promoted by

, the group of teachers who filed these complaints, asks that article 45.2 be deleted.

g "since it should not be the function of the faculty to analyze and debate, much less take a position, on issues of a non-academic nature".

The letter, forwarded by

, also demands that "a clear reference to the ideological neutrality of the academic bodies of government and representation be incorporated into the text of the Losu, which is nothing more than the application to the university of the most generic principle of neutrality of public administrations".

"Stop deviations of power"

"Clearly embodying the principle of ideological neutrality in the Losu would mean putting a stop (beyond the obvious protection that the Constitution grants us) to the deviations of power that have already occurred and that could occur again on our campuses, to the detriment of of university autonomy, of the rights it protects and of the correct fulfillment of the educational and research mission that is proper to the university", states the letter, which has also been sent to the Minister of Universities,

.

And he adds: "Our universities will be more pluralistic and more critical, and will contribute better to the formation of public opinion, if they refrain from institutionally ruling on 'issues of special importance' and instead remain as spaces of freedom where all 'themes' can be addressed and all opinions can be expressed, submitted only to the court of reason and not to that of authority".

Among the signatories are intellectuals such as

,

,

,

,

or

, former magistrates of the Constitutional Court such as

or

, jurists such as

or

, historians such as

or sociologists like

,

or

.

Isabel Fernández Alonso

, professor of Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and one of the promoters of the letter, explains that the professors of Universitaris per la Convivència have been "for more than four years fighting against the political instrumentalization of Catalan universities and claiming that It is not a question of standardizing thought on campus, that the ideological freedom and freedom of expression of teachers, students and administration and service personnel be respected".

"It seems inconceivable to us that an amendment to the Universities Law is now introduced to try to create confusion in the face of resolutions that are based on fundamental rights and constitutional principles. That we do not want to be debated, they say. Well, if we want to! All our support for a real debate, where different perspectives have a place. What we are not going to allow is that an administration appropriates the thought of its members, which is something very different, "he adds.

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