In the United States, I said it out loud. Christopher Rufo, one of the architects of Trump’s offensive against colleges, explained this brazen strategy: using financial pressure to trap girls in “existential terror” until the only viable option capitulates. In the Community of Madrid, nothing is certain, but the figures speak for themselves: the richest region in Spain has the least well-funded public university. What is proclaimed there is accomplished here in silence. No one advises us to explain what educational model the Community needs, what role it reserves for research, how the university intends to contribute to the prosperity of the region. We are not talking about diagnoses or strategies because that would force us to recognize that the objective is not to improve the public university, but to reduce it to make it irreconcilable.
Yale professor Meghan O’Rourke described it accurately: “We are not just seeing an attack on academia or a series of tax reforms. This is a frontal attack on the conditions that make free thought possible.” Anyone who believes that Madrid is just bad management or presupuestaria cicatería has understood nothing. Because Madrid is not a local anomaly: it is the silent version of an offensive that crosses Western democracies, where the attack on universities is accompanied by a broader project of institutional weakening. The white man is not just higher education, but all the structures that allow a democracy to function without depending on the whims of a leader: institutions that generate public trust, that establish boundaries, that ensure collective credibility. Public health, means of communication, science, education. They are all in sight. Not because they have fallen – which is what they sometimes talk about – but because they work: they offer an alternative truth to political power and, therefore, disturb you.
The technique has a name: inversion. When Isabel Díaz Ayuso accuses the public university of being “colonized by the left”, when she describes it as a “nest of criminals and vandalism”, she is not describing anything: she disorganizes the language to the point of saying the opposite of what she is naming. What produces knowledge becomes comparable to “indoctrinating”. Anyone who defends university autonomy becomes “elitist”. Anyone who conducts a rigorous investigation is accused of having a hidden “agenda.” This is the grammar of the possible: reversing the categories of victim and aggressor until those who are asphyxiated seem to liberate, and those who resist appear as a threat. And there is something more: silence. Silence about the university we want, the research we imagine, the citizens we aspire to train. This is a deliberate silence because proposing something would require debate, exposing the letters. Here there is only a patient wear and tear of what exists, like someone leaving a house without maintenance until one day it declares itself uninhabitable. This is not an educational project: it is a demolition presented as democratic hygiene.
But it would be naive to think that there is nothing behind the silence. Lo ha. This is a parallel ecosystem of legitimacy that is growing while the public university is dying. Authorized pseudo-universities with negative reports from the ministry, politicians without academic careers placed as vice-rectors, titles without official validity which serve to inflate CVs and create an appearance of solvency. The case of the Francisco Marroquín University is not an anomaly: it is a model. We saw it recently with Noelia Núñez, the PP deputy who fell when it was discovered that her titles were false. Núñez appeared as “professor” on the website of the Universidad Francisco Marroquín, a Guatemalan institution considered the “temple of neoliberalism in Latin America” that opened its campus in Madrid in 2017. It was authorized by the Community even though the Consejo de Universities was warned that it did not meet minimum requirements. No matter: it was approved when Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, a politician without an academic career, served as vice-rector. Esperanza Aguirre and Lucía Figar passed their classes. Their titles do not have official validity in Spain or the EU, but they are useful for what they are useful for: decorating CVs, presenting solvency for what they pay.
They denounce the alleged ideologization of the public university that has been constructed, as well as its own circuit of ideological legitimation. It is not that there is a lack of an alternative project: it is that it is not formulated because, by formulating it, we would clearly understand what it consists of. Its logic is simple: replace institutions that produce validated knowledge with others that produce useful references to power. The public university is uncomfortable because its truth has no reason: it does not respond to the Government, nor to the market, nor to the leader of the moment; meets proprietary evaluation and contrast methods. This autonomy is difficult to tame. Pseudo-universities are, however, malleable: they certify finance, ensure solvency to those who need it, create an appearance of merit without going through the filters of science or the human sciences. In short, they produce the truth that suits them.
Public health, justice, journalism, state agencies, public broadcasting services have something in common: their authority does not come from power, which is why the truth they produce does not belong to the nation, because the moment it belongs to the government, the market or the party, it would like to be true and would become propaganda, advertising, doctrine. A doctor does not heal because he is beaten, he heals because he applies a method. A scientist does not discover anything because he says so, but because others can verify it. This is the difference with the charismatic leader who demands faith: these institutions do not say “cream”, they say “compruébalo”. And that is why they are not practical for power. We cannot buy them without destroying them: a judge who pronounces sentences according to measure no longer needs to be a judge, a periodical which publishes what suits it no longer needs to be a journalist, a university which certifies employees no longer needs to be a university. All of these institutions are under siege, to varying degrees and in different locations. But when they fall apart, what falls apart is the place where the words still mean the same thing to everyone. It is the grammar of coexistence, the one that allows us to disagree without breaking up.
Sociologist Harry Collins phrased it with an image worth remembering: the process of believing something in the flow of stars to others, bell to the stars. Knowledge does not arise from neutral observations; it is forged in prior agreement on trustworthy sources. Why showing a photo of space to a flat earther is of no use: what is the question, it is not the image, it is the authority which supports it. It is exactly this authority that is being demolished today.
Why should this matter to someone who distrusts academia or believes that universities are ideologized? Meghan O’Rourke sums it up clearly: the serious, thoughtful work of the university protects things that no government or business can guarantee alone. Academic freedom is not a corporate privilege: it is a space where ideas can be deployed without giving in to the market or political power. And the humanities – born after the horror of two world wars – exist to remember something uncomfortable: that a society can be both technologically advanced and morally barbaric. O’Rourke sums it up in a sentence not to be overlooked: “In an era marked by transformative technologies, a climate crisis and unprecedented global instability, we must at least demand more of universities.” More rigor, more openness, more capacity to disturb. The opposite is to open the floodgates and look the other way as the water rises, allowing space for criticism to stretch to the sole voice of the person in charge.
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