A private university
CEU San Pablo University is a private, Catholic, and right-wing university, linked to the San Pablo CEU University Foundation, which manages several universities in Spain: CEU San Pablo in Madrid, CEU Cardenal Herrera in Valencia, CEU Fernando III in Seville, and Abad Oliba CEU in Barcelona. CEU stands for Centro de Estudios Universitarios (Center for University Studies). The San Pablo CEU University Foundation is, in turn, linked to an entity known as the Catholic Association of Propagandists (AcdP), an ultraconservative and ultra-Catholic organization with close ties to Spanish right-wing parties. The objectives of this Catholic Association of Propagandists are those that can be deduced from its very name: to propagate the Catholic faith and its apostolate, and also a certain type of denialism according to which the blame for the Civil War lay with the left and the evil government of the Republic.
It's interesting that CEU San Pablo is a foundation because, in addition to being an organization that can function as a powerful lobby, a foundation is also a legal entity that allows it to receive public funding, as abundant as the government in power deems necessary. This brings us to the Balearic government of the People's Party (PP) and Vox (formally, it's solely a PP government, but in practice, it's both), which, unsurprisingly, has enthusiastically welcomed CEU San Pablo's arrival in Mallorca. The Ayuso-style approach, the dominant doctrine within the PP, condemns everything public and instead rewards and vigorously promotes everything private. The fundamental idea is the same as always: the less public the better, and whatever there is, the better. For now, this is far from the truth, because public healthcare and education, in general, are of good quality in Spain. But to stop them from being so, their budget allocations are cut and the public offer is linked to controversies unrelated to their function: in the Balearic Islands, the Catalan language is used to try to create problems of internal cohesion, both in the educational and health communities.
CEU San Pablo will begin its university activity, fittingly, with medical studies. It will arrive in a region notable for two appalling statistics: the Balearic Islands are at the bottom of the national rankings in the percentage of young people pursuing university studies (barely 10%, compared to a national average of approximately 30%), and also in investment in research, development, and innovation (a paltry 0.4% of GDP). Given these figures, what a normal government should do is redouble its support for the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), which, in addition to being public, is the university conceived, developed, and deeply rooted in the Balearic Islands. But they prefer to roll out the red carpet for the friends of the Catholic Association of Propagandists and CEU San Pablo, and declare their project "of special strategic interest." The question is: of what strategy?
It is positive, meanwhile, that the Balearic Cultural Association (OCB) has submitted amendments to the draft law for the private University of Mallorca, aiming to guarantee the role that Catalan should have as the official and native language of the Balearic Islands (although it is foreseeable that they will disregard them). It is also positive that the OCB has reached five thousand members, demonstrating its strength and deep roots in society, precisely at the moment when the Government has withdrawn earmarked subsidies from the OCB and Jóvenes por la Llengua (Youth for Language). Governing, as they say, is about setting priorities, and those of the PP and Vox parties are crystal clear.
