Salvador de Madariaga and the university

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Andreu Navarra

In 1975, the publishing house Destino brought out a collection of political essays by the veteran liberal writer, professor, and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga under the title A la orilla del río de los sucesos. The book enjoyed a degree of success, remaining in print a full decade later. When Madariaga managed to avoid arrogance, he remained an author of considerable interest. “The University” was one of the essays recovered by Destino to mark the death of the dictator—thus making this slender volume a kind of letter to the immediate future, a bridge between pre-war cultural life and the looming transition.

The former Republican Minister of Public Instruction wrote: “The organisation of Spanish higher education has become a topic of public debate since the official announcement of plans to establish three new universities. Yet the issue is perennially relevant, for the university is the brain of the nation: where the university does not govern, the brain does not govern”.

Madariaga recalled having once received a letter from a communist reader who described the university as “a nest of parasites”. In order to refute that characterisation, he set himself the task of rethinking a model for academic development.

The first conclusion he reached was that the university is far more than a teaching institution: it is also a centre of scientific speculation and research. Here he finds himself closely aligned with Ortega y Gasset, whose 1930 essay The Mission of the University had already argued that institutions of teaching and of research ought to share a common institutional framework, though not necessarily the same buildings or personnel. Madariaga put it thus: “The type of intelligence—and even temperament—required for teaching is quite distinct from that which research demands. I had, in Paris, two of Europe’s most eminent scientific minds as professors—Henri Poincaré and Henri Becquerel—and they were terrible lecturers. Yet I still recall a professor of higher algebra and another of geometry who have not entered the annals of mathematics, but who were brilliant as teachers”.

The essay then shifts course, sketching a university model based on territorial principles. In other words, for Madariaga, the reorganisation of Spanish universities was above all a matter of regional policy. Midway through the piece, he writes: “Today we find ourselves in a thoroughly bureaucratic and mechanical regime”.

He was not mistaken. Indeed, current tendencies in European funding increasingly separate research staff from teaching faculties, while bureaucratisation has reached unimaginable proportions. What Madariaga was contemplating, in essence, was the articulation of Spain’s stateless nations through the university—in other words, an early vision of autonomism grounded in academic structures. And all this in 1975! At a time when the liberal ideas set out by the Ortega of Invertebrate Spain (1922) were soon to lend a gloss to the emerging Autonomous State—through memories, surviving voices, and bridge figures like Julián Marías.

Madariaga envisioned the Spanish state as a complex mechanism of interaction between centre and periphery: a state in which sovereignty, as Ortega insisted, remained with the centre, yet one where the periphery served as a continual spur to administrative activation. The new universities would be of two orders: national (Madrid, Salamanca, and Barcelona), and regional—guarantors of internal diversity and pluralism, smaller in scale yet essential as mechanisms for territorial cohesion and national development.

Madariaga was a champion of a diverse Spain, though we should be under no illusions: his framework remained broadly menendezpelayano in character. It entailed a form of liberalism that had evolved, one attuned to the complexities of the twentieth century, yet he never entertained any serious federalist proposal. He simply observed that both homogenising centralism and separatism were “nonsense”. His moderate vision, as we have said, was the one that ultimately prevailed. The finest quality of his work lies in its cosmopolitan ease—a sound conservative instinct that managed to counterbalance the unreality of certain anti-Francoist oppositions and rise above the palaeotechnocratic mindset of the Francoist leadership.

Madariaga concluded his reflections on what a university ought to be with the following remark: “There are two extremes to avoid: living in the rarefied air of abstraction or turning into a public square”. This he grasped perfectly. Without a certain sense of elitism—understood as cultural and scientific elevation unmoored from social privilege—the nation could not be filled with serious study. Yet with too much elitism, one risked drifting into irrelevance. The university, then, had to function as a complex timepiece, in which the various fields of inquiry might freely contaminate one another. It had to remain sufficiently insulated from the world to produce fundamental science and speculative knowledge, but also capable of returning this knowledge to society in the form of material and ethical improvement. All of this, however, without descending into populism or surrendering to contemporary utilitarianism. Madariaga understood this well—he had, after all, taught at Oxford.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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