Spanish views from a small town

Three weeks ago , t he students of the Education and Philosophy departments began occupying their main department buildings all day and night in protest, demanding the professors and funding they need for all their classes. They are still there. As one student mentioned, even though there are few students in those departments, they have still paid for their classes and have the right to be taught those subjects well, just like the students in the more popular majors.  During all those evenings and long nights, they don't only dedicate themselves to studying. They are, after all, young adults who would have naturally gone out and enjoyed some evenings on the town with their friends. It's part and parcel of a college education. Since they have begun their protest, though, they have supplanted those excursions with in-protest entertainment. The Philosophy students have a stash of board games of all kinds, cards included. They have a room set aside for different movies and docu...

I suppose every university has certain, problematic professors. One would expect that of a large, urban university with thousands of students and the necessary professors to teach all of them. But the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, though urban, is not that enormous. It’s even short professors, which is why the students of now three departments are maintaining the occupancy of the main buildings of their departments twenty-four hours a day. But there are, so far, three disturbing stories of professors acting abusively or discriminatorily that have at some time hit the news. The first one was reported about three years ago. A professor in the Education Department related homosexuality to child molestation, and affirmed that homosexuality was contagious and possibly congenital (where the logic is in that, I'm not sure ) . Apparently he was replying to a student’s question about child molestation just before beginning a class. The student complained to the dean. But the...

My daughter is majoring in philosophy at college. She has been reading the major philosophers and learning about its history and different interpretations, and other things philosophers philosophize about. She likes it and is interested in most of her classes (except Logic, but she has never liked to follow logical thinking). A liberal arts education here is not the same as in the U.S. Here a student studies only what they major in, never subjects that pertain to other departments. For example, the only class that can be called scientific in the philosophy major is Logic. And it is taught because it is pertinent to forming a good argument. Which is necessary for philosophy students to learn, because they will be forming arguments at some point in their studies. My daughter is learning other things, though, through her involvement in student associations. She has also been learning about student politics and activism. She is currently involved in a protest that students in both the De...