In the space of a week, the Spanish Supreme Court and the Catalan High Court have issued separate resolutions annulling manifestos of the University of Barcelona (UB) and the Polytechnic University of Catalunya (UPC) related to the Catalan independence process. In the first case, made public at the end of last week, the Supreme Court confirmed the annulment of the October 2019 resolution made by the UB faculty staff, which condemned the verdict in the pro-independence leaders' trial, with the judges arguing that a university faculty is a governing body representative of a plural university community and consequently cannot adopt resolutions as the will of the university that refer to issues of a political or ideological nature, which belong to social and political debate and are unrelated to the purpose and functions of the university, and which divide the public.
In the other case, this Monday, the Catalan High Court confirmed the annulment of the accord adopted by the UPC faculty, last September 2021, when it published a manifesto expressing its rejection of the bail bonds imposed by the Court of Accounts on more than thirty independence process leaders for the Catalan government's foreign promotion spending which included advertising campaigns related to the referendum of October 1st, 2017. Thus, the Catalan court was itself upholding the judgment of Barcelona administrative disputes court number 13, which in March this year decided to declare this manifesto null and void.
It is striking, these incursions by the courts into the manifestos of individual universities that, coincidentally, have to do with support for assertions that the 2017 pro-independence leaders suffered political and economic ill-treatment. As if Spanish justice doesn't want to let anything get past it, even if it means the response is just to pass resolutions - in my opinion debatable - against the manifestos, since the university faculties have the right to issue pronouncements on situations that go beyond their management scope. If this is not the case, an element that must be part of the universities' role is being restricted, that is, none other than the ability to express themselves freely in response to situations that also affect them - and it is obvious that the events of 2017 had an enormous incidence right across the Catalan territory. From this point of view, knowing what their thinking is - obviously never unanimous - is an important informative element for the entire university community to which they ultimately must respond, beyond their administrative management.
There is also a factor here that should not be forgotten: the democratic quality of a country, which is appreciated in even the finest detail of situations connected to freedom of expression. In this regard, what has happened to the University of Barcelona and the Polytechnic is serious, and the silence that has accompanied the court decisions is concerning. We are taking for granted that justice is a space for opposition to decisions that are adopted in parliaments or universities, a space for putting up barriers and trying to impose a strange law of silence. When this happens in universities, which are a space of freedom, teaching and learning, the matter ends up being particularly grave. A view that is too black and white, more typical of the world of the past than that of the present, ever more difficult though it may be to recognize in the century in which we are living.