The Government is preparing a reform that will change the organization of Spanish universities from top to bottom in order to “avoid excessive compartmentalization” and move towards a more “multidisciplinary” higher education where professors and researchers will have to open the focus of their gaze and collaborate more with those of other disciplines. The Ministry of Joan Subirats has drawn up two draft royal decrees, to which EL MUNDO has had access, whose measures will mean reducing the number of university departments before December 31, 2024. In addition, the traditional areas of knowledge will be eliminated to be replaced by more general and less specialized fields.
On the one hand, there is the draft royal decree that regulates the Organization of University Departments, which aims to make the departments larger than the ones that exist now. That is why it has established a minimum of “between 35 and 50 full-time members of the teaching staff and doctoral researcher” so that they can remain open. The specific figure will be decided by each campus in its statutes and an exception of “15 members” is established in the case of departments that bring together all the teaching staff from the same field of knowledge.
The current norm, Royal Decree 2360/1984 on University Departments, which will be repealed, establishes a minimum of 12 tenured professors and professors for the constitution of a department, although it also allows a minimum of five. Each campus sets the minimum number of members based on the size of the university.
The change proposed by Subirats implies, therefore, that the departments are made up of more members. All those who do not meet the new requirements must “adapt within the maximum period of December 31, 2024”. That means having to merge with others, with all that it entails in terms of staff mobility and reduction of management positions.
These measures, which seek savings and greater efficiency in management, are always controversial and cause concern among teachers and researchers, and also among administration and service personnel. In 2016, the then rector of the Complutense University of Madrid, Carlos Andradas, tried to merge departments to optimize the operation of the campus, since there were many duplicities, and he found direct opposition from the deans and professors, who declared a war that happened to him. invoice, because three years later he lost the elections against the current rector, Joaquín Goyache, who promised to leave everything as it was.
The Ministry’s draft proclaims that “the compartmentalization of knowledge has been overcome” and calls to “avoid excessive compartmentalization of departmental structures.” And it says that “departments should promote cooperation, multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, as well as integrated administrative management, and have the necessary means to adequately and effectively carry out the functions assigned to them”.
There is a second royal decree project that also causes a lot of “concern” in universities, since it “replaces the concept of area of ??knowledge by that of field of knowledge for the purposes of describing teaching posts in the list of jobs “.
The departments are the teaching and research units in charge of coordinating the teachings and are made up of an area or set of areas of knowledge. For example, the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health and Microbiology is made up of the area of ??Preventive Medicine and Public Health and the area of ??Microbiology.
What the Government proposes is that “all jobs assigned to university teaching bodies and labor teachers should be assigned” to more general and less specialized fields. Continuing with the same example, the scope would be Medicine.
The areas of knowledge no longer appear in the new Organic Law of the University System (Losu). And in this draft they are only mentioned to say that “the concept area of ??knowledge is still valid” only for accreditations for access to university teaching bodies.
The objective is that the fields of knowledge “are sufficiently broad to allow and favor the mobility of the teaching staff, as well as to facilitate their professional career and the necessary interdisciplinarity and collaboration between specialties”.
University sources explain what these changes will imply: “The decree is positive in the sense that it ends the taifa kingdoms, because the area directors disappear, who now hold power in a system that, in the end, ends up fostering clientelism The new model democratizes the university. But it is negative because specialization is eliminated and any professor may be forced to teach classes in other areas of knowledge, even if he does not master them. In addition, there are going to be tremendous fights because there can only be one department manager.”
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