Tolerance, plurality and democracy are defended with beatings

With the complicity even of those who, now, warn and criticize it.

I don’t know what is worse, the embarrassing spectacle of seeing daily how our country’s own universities are destroying the system, moving the social elevator from the university to politics, militancy and activism, leaving university degrees as a hygienic card, or their alignment with this ruthless attack on freedom of opinion and pluralism.

Also making clear which currents or ideas have space on university campuses and which, on the other hand, do not.

Yesterday in Navarra.

A few days ago, in Granada.

I had to inform my own dean that, when he unexpectedly told us by email that there were serious problems maintaining normality at the center, greater clarity would have been desirable.

Because the affected professors, especially those of us who are not correspondents for the university gazette in the hallways all day, deserved more details. What was happening, what activity was potentially altering the development of our classes, what exactly was the threatwhat had been authorized by the civil Government and what, it seems, had not been authorized.

It would have been appropriate to clarify it, and in writing.

It was the second time I found myself in these circumstances in recent years. The first, that ‘olonada’, was an absolute embarrassment. Not so much because of what I witnessed, but because of the orchestrated censorship device and having to almost clandestinely access my workplace to teach a class that later could not be taught because the students were not able to enter the Faculty.

Those who boycotted, on the other hand, did.

I won’t experience the same thing this time, I told him. I announced the suspension of class to the students and attributed it to the inability of those responsible for the center to ensure that the teaching activity could develop normally as a result of external threats that I did not know what they were or why.

Pure lament or kicking. A complaint in relief format. But what a shame. What we have reached. How regrettable this degeneration, since we are also a law school..

I asked myself then, in case it occurred to me to do so, what would happen if I personally invited to one of my classes, within the framework of complementary activities, someone clearly identified by the Government, for being related to the Government. or for the narcoterrorist world.

Should we also activate a security device and consult with the civil government, in case the new guardians of democracy and plurality come to attack us or stone us?

I left my previous professional life to rejoin the University, what things, the same year that a group of young Venezuelans, passing through Spain, tried to tell us what was happening in their country. An attempt was made to censor that activity in an infamous manner, with accusations of all kinds, even from institutional accounts.

They were “representatives of fascism and the oppressive oligarchy,” they said. Some boys who just wanted to talk, and we don’t even know if they will still be alive.

Authoritarianism has already been assumed and naturalized. But with a letter of legality and in the name of democracy, of course.

“Avoid violence,” they say.

As if preventing freedom of opinion and neutralizing pluralism were not, in effect, violence.

I know that this text will be read by many more colleagues than students, but at this point in my life I care little or nothing about the large group of gregarious people, the galaxy of courtiers, careerists, lukewarm and equidistant.

So, if you read me, young university student, run away.

Free yourself from scam and servitude.

*** Juan José Gutiérrez Alonso is a professor of Administrative Law at the University of Granada.