British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits a school in Coalville, England, on Aug. 26. JACK HILL / AP
It is a three-way duel and the Government of Boris Johnson is reluctant to lose it.
On the one hand, the British university students union, UCU (in its acronym in English), which warns that universities may be to the second wave of the coronavirus what nursing homes were to the first;
on the other, academic institutions that depend for their financing on a high number of enrollments and accommodation contracts;
and thirdly, an Executive aware of the international prestige of his higher education who considers some form of face-to-face return to the classroom as key to the “new normal”.
Around 2.3 million pupils enter Higher Education each year in the UK.
Almost 150,000 of them come from EU countries.
Another 350,000 come from different parts of the world.
UCU has accused the Johnson administration of having done poor and incomplete planning for the university reopening.
There is no, says the union, an adequate system for locating and tracking the infected;
systematic testing of students and teachers has not been foreseen;
The recent increase in infections among young people has not been taken into account and, to further aggravate the situation, the subjective - and arbitrary, for its critics - rating of this year's selectivity grades (the pandemic prevented the tests from being carried out ) has increased the number of students who can aspire to a higher education.
"The anticipated mobility of more than a million college students across the country is a recipe for disaster, and will turn poorly prepared institutions [for reopening] into the new 'residences' of the second wave," said Jo Grady. , the secretary general of UCU.
The union is backed in its battle by
The Independent Sage,
a scientific committee parallel to the expert committee that advises Downing Street (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE).
Directed and coordinated by David King, former chief scientific adviser to the Government, his absolute independence from political interests has made his voice increasingly taken into account in public debate.
It has required that all courses take place
online
at the
As far as possible
,
that the social relations between students are reduced to “residential bubbles” and that tests are carried out on a regular basis on campus.
The British Government has published a precise guide with the security measures that it considers necessary to establish in the university environment, but leaves the final decision in the hands of the academic institutions themselves.
"These are autonomous institutions, and we trust their good judgment when establishing preventive measures that comply with official recommendations," says the document published by the Ministry of Education.
"We support face-to-face classes only when possible and the proposed security measures are followed (...) and we will keep our recommendations under constant review," said a ministerial spokesman.
Beneath the apparent debate about the health risk that the reopening of universities may pose is another more prosaic debate: the risk of bankruptcy of many academic institutions that have been competing with each other for decades in a free market system.
“The practical reason why universities have put their priorities ahead of public health and student well-being is that the UK Government, faithful to market dynamics, refuses to guarantee funding to ensure the survival of these institutions ”, has denounced Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education at Oxford, on the website of the Council for the Defense of British Universities.
An increasingly important part of the income needed to survive comes from foreign students, attracted by the prestige of a UK university education.
The pandemic will mean a drastic reduction in this quota, which universities want to compensate at all costs.
The necessary reduction in face-to-face classes (Cambridge was the first university to announce that its master classes, the ones that gather the highest number of students per classroom, would be
online
) has discouraged many applicants who, no matter how many guarantees virtual education offers, believe that educational quality will be diminished.
Information about the coronavirus
- Here you can follow the last hour on the evolution of the pandemic
- This is how the coronavirus curve evolves in Spain and in each autonomy
- Download the tracking application for Spain
- Search engine: The new normal by municipalities
- Guide to action against the disease