Response to Quo vadis university? New challenges facing Spanish universities (Réplica a ¿Quo vadis universidad? Nuevos desafíos de las universidades españolas)

Abstract

The stated intention of the article Quo vadis university? is to outline the four challenges that the author believes universities are facing today: ‘excessive’ numbers of students, the exponential growth in information, the influence of business management and the bureaucratization of university work. As a professor and member of the governing team of a medium-sized public university, my vision differs from that of the author of that article in several respects. In my opinion, the first challenge facing universities is not the ‘excessive’ numbers of students but quite the opposite: the depopulation of their classrooms. According to the latest report from the Conference of Spanish University Rectors (The University in Figures, 2020), universities are losing bachelor’s students as a result of the decline in the young population: in the past decade, the Spanish population between the ages of 18 and 27 has declined by 21.7%, and during this same period, there was a 6.7% decrease in enrolment in bachelor’s degrees. Furthermore, this decline is more pronounced in certain degrees. I do agree that ‘the teaching staff has to attend to increasingly diverse populations’; however, this is not ‘excessive’ numbers but diversity. Nonetheless, the university is gaining two opportunities to grow and better adapt to the society it serves via this drop in bachelor’s students and rise in student diversity. The first is lifelong learning: universities are already creating new degrees (postgraduates, in-house degrees, etc.) which allow older students to continue to train, either to increase their overall knowledge or to fine-tune and improve their professional competences. Likewise, a positive approach to diversity is allowing our universities to become multicultural environments that more closely resemble the societies in which they operate and to attend to students such as those with disabilities, who until recently hardly aspired to study at university. The impact of the digital technologies in the production of, access to and use of information has indeed affected the ways we teach and learn and has entailed opportunities for both teaching staff and students: we professors no longer merely transmit