The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has promised this Tuesday to promote a new Law on Universities as well as a new financing model for them.
This has been transferred to the Auditorium of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) during the inauguration of the rector, Joaquín Goyache, in what was his first act as regional president after his inauguration and the configuration of his Government.
“We are living in exciting times that present us with numerous challenges,” said the Madrid leader, who stressed that a large part of the responses to these “have to come from the universities.” In her opinion, what is expected of them is “what has always been her raison d’être: love for knowledge and the search for excellence that can only be achieved in a climate of respect, effort and freedom”.
For the president, “the current strength of Madrid” is in the entrepreneurs, companies, professionals, artists, intellectuals, politicians and scientists, but “its future initiative will be that of the more than 300,000 students who today choose any of the 19 public universities and private of the Community of Madrid”.
“All this talent, along with that provided by the increasingly thriving Vocational Training, is destined to continue to amaze the world in a process that will coincide with digitization that should lead us to full employment,” he declared.
Regarding the commitments, and regarding the new financing model, he has emphasized that they do not start from scratch, since in recent months they have formed “a working group” with the rectors”. “We want to design a more homogeneous system , transparent and capable of generating and attracting the resources that the university needs. I am sure that it will come out ahead and it will be the best possible, because in Madrid we work in a different way and always hand in hand with the universities. We do it with rigor and dialogue thanks to the willingness of the rectors”, she pointed out.
On the other hand, the Madrid president wants to draw up a new regulation that guarantees “university excellence and plurality, academic rigor and freedom in the classrooms against the ideological contamination of the campuses”. She sees it necessary to “intensify collaboration between universities and companies and promote research, innovation, the dissemination of knowledge and the international dimension”.
Likewise, he has maintained that they will continue to defend “universities as spaces for coexistence in freedom.” “Let’s learn from the lessons of what we are seeing in other universities in other Spanish regions and in other countries. The deterioration of freedom, censorship, and politicization should have no place in Madrid universities. If Madrid is freedom, joy, miscegenation and coexistence, so must be its faculties, heirs to the great school of civilization that is the West”, he remarked.
In his speech, Ayuso also had words of affection for the new rector. “Dear Joaquín, congratulations. You have renewed your mandate at the head of the largest university in Spain and the second in Europe, after four extraordinarily difficult years,” he was told.
In his opinion, “an institution of these dimensions with more than 70,000 students, almost 7,000 teachers and 10,000 administration and service workers, needed a firm captain and as a boost in the midst of the challenge posed by the pandemic.” He considers that “the Complutense University has overcome many challenges since then and at the same time has managed to maintain the ambitious objectives that it had previously set.”
“That is what this great university community has recognized with its majority support for the rector: the solidity of his project, his integrity in the face of adversity, his capacity for work and his willingness to collaborate, work and his spirit of dialogue and above all all his clearly university profile endorsed by a solid academic trajectory separated from militancy and partisanship”.
In this sense, he has considered it very valuable that those who are in charge of the universities be professors “in the face of the Organic Law of the University System and the Science Law that lowers that level of demand and suppresses the requirement.”
