Vito Quiles at the UAB: Is everyone happy?
The ritual has been repeated a couple of times each academic year for many years. It's been widely reported that an association has invited a far-right politician or a politician aligned with them to the Autonomous University of Barcelona, whether Rosa Díez, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, or the latest in this series, Vito Quiles. On the appointed day, far-left student associations have already organized to disrupt the event and prevent the alleged protest from taking place. conference. The Mossos d'Esquadra must intervene to prevent more violent clashes. (Some of the police, by the way, beat the students with barely concealed rage.) Afterwards, everyone goes home and that's it, a year ago today.
The two opposing factions get what they wanted. The far right considers tried There is no freedom of expression in Catalan universities, dominated by a sort of pro-independence communist dictatorship, especially at the Autonomous University of Catalonia. Vito Quiles didn't choose it by chance to hold the first session of his campaign.Combative Spain". What mattered least to him was the content of this conference. Now he has the images he wanted and, as a martyr of cancel culture, he will be able to go on a triumphant tour across half of Spain.
The far left considers tried that the Autonomous University campus is their territory. Their student leaders earn merits to become leaders of a particular political group, which demonstrate who, if they want, can mobilize their comrades while waiting for the happy day when they will make the revolution. Now they have the images they wanted: Quiles forced to say a few words secretly in a parking lot and turning around in a hurry (at least, it must be said that Cayetana Álvarez and Rosa Díez were more insistent).
Everyone's happy, then.
Everyone? No! If the journalists who so hastily followed the young people of the two opposing groups had taken the trouble to distance themselves a little from that commotion, they would have seen that, while all this was happening in the middle of the square, in most of the faculties life continued as usual, teachers of all personalities, thousands of students going about their work, oblivious to the liturgy that these little groups stage for us a couple of times a year. The university was, like every day, a space for study, reflection, experimentation, and discussion. Completely free.
Many of us are hurt not only by this clumsy use of a public institution to serve the interests of certain political parties, but also by the ill-timed, deliberately planned nature of this incident. Vito Quiles's pantomime and the overreaction of some students project the idea of a polarized and intolerant campus that only benefits certain substitutes for private universities, driven by profit or dubious ideological motives. Furthermore, we know that it will be manipulated by those media outlets that try to create political tension that doesn't correspond to current Catalan reality, either on the streets or on campus. It's logical that the far right wants to portray our public university in this way. But for student groups and some left-wing unions to play along with them in this way is shooting themselves in the foot.
The firm opposition of the vast majority of members of the university community to the far right is clear, but it can be expressed in other, more rational and non-violent ways. Through indifference and the continuation of normal tasks, for example, without resorting to botched provocations. Or through rallies in alternative locations, which will reveal to everyone the agitators' limited ability to rally. In fact, we all know that the television cameras were not there to cover the intended protest. conference Quiles (I insist: does anyone care what he had to say?), but the disturbances he intended to cause.
The best response to the far-right's attempts at destabilization is an imperturbable normality. May the university continue to be the place for the analysis of arguments, for reasoned debate, for the transmission of knowledge, for the dissemination of culture and, in our case, especially Catalan culture. And may it, as the statutes of the Autonomous University of Barcelona say, always act "inspired by the principles of freedom, democracy, justice, equality and solidarity." This is the best antidote to fascism.