University in Spain: time of change or changing time?

Abstract

The paper analyses the complexity of the process of change experienced by the Spanish university system since the last twenty years. Such analysis is developed attending legal transformations and both, the nature of the quantitative institutional offer and the new demands that society is actually putting into the university, considering also the crucial role that research is playing in the framing of the new reality. All that frames a scenario which is far from that of the past institutional uniformism, and that reality displays new challenges in two fields, that of the institutional development and that of its governance. Both needs, according to the author's point of view, can just be faced in a proper way, by considering as the main priority the nature of the human resources and the political decen-tralisation with social accountability, as the way of ruling universities.