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On the morning of April 23, the rectorate building of the University of Lleida must have looked more or less the same as on the morning of the previous day, the previous week, and the previous months and years. What was once the cultural regime's headquarters in the capital of Ponent has become an assembly hall of offices. The city has significantly increased its university centers and, of course, the number of enrollments for both local and international students. It seems that this fact should have led to an increase in creative activity – or at least spontaneity – around the arts, thought, and criticism. But it has not been so. The evolution has been in the opposite direction. The UdL centers have become classrooms for future professionals concerned about the future of their wallets. However, Lleida is not the exception. The ambition of Catalan universities is manifested in their respective websites or informative pamphlets – subversive in my opinion –: Choose your future, choose UAB (UAB). Choose your path (UB). Create your future (URV). An opportunity for the future (UdG). A value as a public service (UdL). These messages are also reproduced in other homologous centers in Europe and the rest of the world: Be 1 of the best (University of Helsinki, Finland). We think ahead and shape the future (Roskilde University, Denmark). Feel good about your future (BITS, Germany). Find your future inside (Abertay University, Scotland). Your future, your choice (University of Florida, USA). Where your future begins (IQRA University, Pakistan). Master your future (University of Utrecht, Netherlands). Choose your future, we will accompany you (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, France). Meet your future (Università Degli Studi de Padova, Italy). Looking to the future (Università Politecnica Delle Marche, Italy). Your future Plan (University of Gloucestershire, England). Focus on your future (Durham University, England). Transform your future (University of Sheffield, England). Invest in your properly future (Investment Education Programme of Cambridge University, England). Building your future (Oxford University, England)… and so on.
I observe the university quite concerned about the future. That, a priori, should be positive if it weren't for the fact that, in general terms, this obsession seeks the prestige of the brand itself, of the faculty, and of the researchers. Saving the exception of a small percentage, the university provides society, through its graduates, a credit of knowledge that has not yet proven to be useful. Degrees linked to art and humanities are increasingly less regarded. Those linked to communication end up subjected to the control of large corporations. And the scientific and technological field largely thrives on promoting consumption and pharmaceuticals, and fueling the conquest of space and war.
On April 20, the Agency for the Quality of the University System of Catalonia published the report on the labor market integration of master's graduates from the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 academic years. The main conclusions are that the number of master's degrees has gone from 1 for every 3 graduates to 1 for every 2. Each year, 34,000 bachelor's degree holders, 15,000 master's degree holders, and 2,500 doctoral degree holders graduate in Catalonia alone. A real absurdity. The report also boasts that 9 out of 10 master's graduates are working. And it concludes that the degree is, therefore, a key element in labor market integration. In short, one goes to university as one could go to a trade school, a fact – that of training in a trade school – which seems to me as laudable as doing so at university. But perhaps, instead of obsessing over labor market integration, it would be advisable for the university to be a stage of excellence for those who demonstrate the courage, disposition, and talent to defend a sustainable and conscious future. Because what is not laudable is that society is in the hands of an engineer or an architect simply for possessing a university degree supposedly superior to that of a painter, sculptor, poet, musician, photographer, choreographer, actor... however self-taught the latter may be. It seems terrible to me that the university has dedicated itself to producing workers as one makes patches. And in fact, if the first step of our future remains in the hands of the university as we understand it today, it seems to me that we have a serious problem. The university acts as a company where the people who enroll are both clients and workers. These people are the source of resources, along with public and private ones, that allow an excessive teaching and administrative structure to be sustained. At the same time, these people are subjected to a performance as extraordinary as it is fruitless for their own and collective well-being. The university is an implicated party in the current that subjugates men and women to stress, worries, tensions, dependence on work, capital, ambition, and power. People who seek fulfillment through properties, material wealth, bank accounts, prestige, and leadership status. This is the path to internal and external conflicts, the opposite path to happiness.