On October 14, National Police riot officers intervened against an information picket during a strike and academic stoppage at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). Students and university workers heading peacefully to the Faculty of Chemical Sciences were injured, arrested or detained. The university had not requested the operation, according to the account, which links the incident to a wider debate over police presence on campuses and the autonomy of universities.
University autonomy is not only a legal or administrative guarantee, but also the ability of a community to make decisions, organize itself and handle disputes through its own processes. In Spain, student activism during the Franco era helped secure university autonomy as a fundamental right in the 1978 Constitution. The account argues that this autonomy can be weakened both by police intervention and by cuts that leave public universities with fewer resources and less capacity to act.
The article describes a broader expansion of police involvement in education, from officers working in schools and police-led classroom talks to police-related degrees and postgraduate programs offered through public universities. It argues that these initiatives can normalize police as authorities on social issues while bringing security-focused and punitive approaches into discussions of conflict.
The author also points to an imbalance between institutions: public universities face funding pressures, while police institutions gain resources and opportunities to establish educational programs. In this view, universities can provide police with cultural legitimacy, just as police-linked programs may offer universities a source of funding.
The proposed alternative is to address campus disputes collectively, through deliberation and shared responses rather than defaulting to blame and punishment. The argument is not simply that police should stay off campus, but that policing should not become the dominant way of managing conflict there.
Sources: El País Sociedad.