University and science | Letters to the Editor | Opinion

There is an acute crisis in the Alma mater. Acquiring a university degree becomes a conventional way of having status in front of family and society.

The university crisis is due to the lack of science, because in Ecuador there is no academy, there is reproduction of pensum, of models, copied from other countries and poorly elaborated here (Senescyt experiment, Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation), so that the autonomy of this is hindered; since there is no claim to discover contributions that come from laws, theories, that respond to the problems of society. We add to this a behemoth that intends to intervene, regulate, the university, falling into political addictions of debts and favors between gamonales, since it does not matter that the teacher is a decontextualized subject without the production of scientific materials (and if they are produced, not all are worthy to read them more than in the weekly newspaper magazine). Teachers who may well have scientific knowledge are bypassed, but bureaucrats, technocrats, politicians, on duty who do desk education, are covered up. Hence the result: anyone manages to graduate as a teacher, under the pretext of inclusion and accessibility, anyone is apt to graduate easily, as if it depended on ethnicity or social condition or race; and after finishing his studies if he does not end up dedicating himself to something other than his profession, he ends up as a faithful bureaucrat or doing “favors” to politicians with whom he agreed to work. And that I have not talked about the problem of negotiated with degree thesis. (OR)

César Andrés Aizaga Castro, sociologist and psychoanalyst, Guayaquil