The Spanish Congress will adopt today [9 March] the bill of the Organic Law of the University System (LOSU). The amendments passed in the Senate have not meant a substantial modification of the project approved in Congress previously, except to give universities more flexibility and time to set up recruitment adaptations and new figures. Therefore, the project to be approved is practically the same as that which has been taken out of the congress.

According to Steillas, it is not a law that meets the needs and aspirations of public university education in the Basque Country. It does not envisage or offer instruments to overcome the administrative division between communities and states. Nor is it a law that liberates universities from the current mercantilist and bureaucratizing dynamics, although in the preamble of the law one can read another discourse.

However, with all this, it has a series of interesting, appreciable and directly questioned aspects and characteristics by the University of the Basque Country and the Public University of Navarra, as well as by the Government of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country and the Foral Community of Navarra.

Thus, with the 2030 horizon, the law obliges to increase public funding of public universities to 1% of GDP. Currently, public funding for the UPV/EHU budget in the CAPV is barely 0.4% of GDP. This percentage has worsened in recent years, and the new University Plan 2023-2026, which will be approved soon, does not provide a good forecast from the point of view of public funding of the public university. In Nafarroa Garaia, for its part, the public contribution remains lower, at around 0.36% of GDP.

The Basque Government and the Government of Navarre cannot shirk this mandate, which will be the great challenge of public universities and our governments in the coming years.

On another level, the law also has positive aspects in terms of university structure, governance and teachers (it maintains structures of representation and command based on suffrage, opens the way to equalizing working professors and officials, no longer demands to be an official to be a rector, a claim for gender equality), but also obscure (the condition remains that the majority of the professors of the public universities are an official, and the structure of the Social Council is almost in favour.

As for the structure of the studies, the structure of grades and postgraduate degrees is not modified, but the importance of studies throughout life is emphasized, and microcredentials or microgrades are also referred to as novelty. How will these proposals be implemented? Increased dependence on companies or on the supply of social services? Here too we risk the market deciding what the law and public policies do not prescribe or encourage. Hence, among other things, the importance of improving the funding of public universities.

With regard to the stabilisation of the workforce, and especially of teachers, it undertakes to reduce temporary recruitment by up to 8%. This issue will not take into account adjunct professors or associated health professors. Stabilisation measures are aimed exclusively at associated teachers and enable them to be converted into permanent contracts. This measure will have a limited impact on the UPV/EHU, as there has been no excess with this image similar to that of other Spanish universities. However, nothing is said about the situation and precariousness of part-time interim teachers, and the largest precarious pool of our university is the one that risks perpetuating itself with the new category of substitute teachers established by law.

In this way, the fundamental structure of the staff is not modified, and although the accreditation of the attached professors is not now required, the stabilization of the staff and the progress in the academic career will continue to depend on the bureaucratic accreditation system, with all the competence and mutual anxiety that this generates in the teaching staff.

Patxi AzpilhghGoenaga and Nagore Iturrioz López, Steilas Union