We the undersigned, all of us university professors and researchers, declare, in the first place, that we have decided to compose this document and make public the disgraceful spectacle of the institutional response to the students that are against the principles and the manner of implementation of the current university reform. It is not difficult to predict the result of the unequal struggle between, on the one hand, students who demand the delay of the reform´s launch until a real public discussion has made clear its general meaning and its precise content and, on the other hand, the powerful governmental-managerial-media complex responsible for the reform itself, as well as the design and execution of the current “information” campaign about the so-called plan Bologna.

Spanish society should know that the students of what is called the “anti-Bologna movement”, far from being anti-system fanatics or uninformed adolescents, are, at this moment, the only members of the university community that have the lucidity, the responsibility, the courage and the generosity sufficient to defend unyieldingly against the University´s substitution by quite a different thing altogether, to defend the very concept and the conditions of existence of a real system of higher education. They are the only ones interested, it seems, in the survival and support of an institution that conserves the “University” in anything more than its name, and that remains bound to the ideals of the Enlightenment by something other than propaganda. They are doing it in a country and in a world that shows itself incapable of understanding and respecting an activity like studying, in a country and a world that scorns the very idea of a disinterested search for the truth, that ignores, in general, everything that a long tradition has called theory, that appeals to the “interest of society” to undermine the humanist bases and the institutional achievements of the political concept of equality.
Spanish society should know that there are many of us professors and researchers who, perhaps not so generous, perhaps not so brave, and certainly far less effective than these students, nevertheless adhere fully to their ideals. It´s more than likely that they will be defeated in their effort to preserve the treasure of scientific independence and academic freedom which the word “University” still connotes, that the racket and the publicity-reports designed to deactivate this effort will distort the most profound of the demands of these young people: that the place and the promise of a possibility of a serious life, ruled by the love of knowledge and of reality, must not disappear from their country.

This promise brought us to the University when we were students: we recognized in it the place that preserved the freedom of the truth as its most fundamental essence, the end of school and tutors, the opportunity also for us to live together, as adults, with wise men that had no other interest than the investigation of the things of the world, in and of themselves, for the love of knowledge.

That is why, if the students are defeated in their defense of the public University we would want to be considered as defeated along with them. And for this same reason, we join their call to the university community, and we ask for the support for the strike and demonstration on the 12th of March in defense of the public University.