The prestigious Dr. Nancy Olivieri from Toronto University who is an expert researcher on a strange blood disease called talasemy. She had faced herself against Apotex giant chemist by publishing that a this company´s pharmacon would be able to bring letal secondary effects on talasemy diseased people. The company which have contracted her, instead of worrying about public health, has calculated economic losses and so rushed her with an extraordinary discrediting campaign. Olivieri´s university, anything but supports her, dismissed Olivieri from her university hospital job, although later the hospital was forced to give back her job because of popular pressures. This is an illustrative example of what can happen when the university doesn´t place before the joint public well-being instead of the particular economic interest.

The university and corporate understanding, materialized in fundations, is one of the most important bridges where the students merge in the labour world. Otherwise, the managerial participation at the universtiy scope isn´t confined in economic terms, but also in an organic level. Actually, with the current Spanish University Directive, managers are one of the social agents in The Social Council, where decisions are made about yearly budgets and curriculum considerations among other issues. However, the University Directive reform, which has been proposed by the Spanish Government, would create a problematic lack of balance between the university spirit and the corporate mind, which started it favoring a private public High School Education System. And now, with the New University Directive, it´s attacking wildly the Universtiy as public service.

This reform would increase the corporate class participation on internal issues, to the dentriment of student representation which will be reduced to shameful minimums. We are not receiving the last consideration, neither from the Ministry nor from the rectors. And in our dispair our Government is bragging about the alleged blessing of its reform, and the politicial opposition makes a mountain out of a mole hill when it replying on this import from the hulking educational model of Eduardo Zaplana, president of the Country of Valencia. The political personality of the Government is so null on matters beyonding it our borders it has imported a model coming farther from the warm Valencian coasts. It comes from the World Trade Organization (WTO) which is going to meet in Qatar in November, including a proposal educational service as saleable in the General Agreetment of trading Services (GATS). In short, this Agreetment proposes that the Public University be turned into a simply human resources factory, customized according to the corporate demands, without considering the human potential that every student may evolve in common benefit. In the Spanish case, it would accomplish stumping the border that separate the public´s of the private´s, and thus the companies would be able to provide these human resources themselves in a cheaper way, thanks to the University Directive of the Spanish Popular Party, which companies would be able to inflict particular criteria on public university decision boards and, in consequence, using its patrimony position to build their own expensive private research centers which are scarce in Spain.

The way towards the privatization that is paving has started reintroducing the "reválida" on High Schools Education System, which is going to become a hideous University entrance multiexamination. Just in case, educative subject incontrolled liberalization proposed by the WTO, it is already making clear that the government will not be able to favor a education type, such as the public´s forehead the private´s because "this would favor a market sector". Likewise, technical or retraining formation programs achieved by public service of employment would be able to be denounced of "disloyal competition". In adding, because there are a potential customers based of about a thousand milion students in the world who are potential and also they want to push us into doing a wild consuming in universities turned into shopping centers. In fact, companies are being advertised in exam sheets in New Zealand.

Finally, anyway the Spanish University Directive is being finished, economic power must know clearly we will not to allow in any moment that the free speech at classrooms would was clipped, by means of concepts such as "image damaging" on abusive clauses in the contracts with our universities. Thus big companies which are globally knowed have tried in US campus, as a refreshment brand company caused by its abetment with Nigeria dictatorship,or as a sport designer company embroiled in child exploitation in Asian Southeastern countries. We deem there are social aspects which cannot be subjugated under economic criteria set up in costs reduction; and if it does not exist, students will reclaim that it exists, because another world is possible.

by Montxo Vicente i Sempere, Student Representative at Alacant University (http:/www.ua.es/en).