‘This health crisis is highlighting the need for strong and quality public services which are capable of dealing with exceptional situations’. With these words, the principal of the Universitat de València has made an institutional statement supporting the university staff in a key moment in which both the 2021 budgets of both the Spanish government and the Government of the Valencian Community are being formulated.

‘Last March, in just a few days, we went from helping the students mostly face-to-face to online teaching. Not only professors are behind this work, but also a wide range of technical, administrative and service professionals who make it possible for a great university as ours to function on a regular day-to-day basis.’, pointed out the principal, who added ‘I have thanked all of them on different occasions, and also publicly at institutional acts, for their efforts and dedication throughout the entire lockdown and for their excellent work to adapt themselves to this new normality, as well as to the preventive measures applied to fight COVID-19’.

In the current framework of formulating public budgets, and also of controversy in relation to public services in the midst of the pandemic, the principal has stated that ‘far from corporate doctrines, defending each job within the public sector is defending the interests of the citizenship; it is a guarantee of institutional functioning that has been proved effective in this exceptional time.’

This is ‘a work that is often invisible since we often do not realise that, what works every day for us, is the result of the work of many people who work in the morning, in the afternoon, but also at night and at the weekends sometimes’, the principal noted. ‘These are people who work with a vocation for public service, with high-mindedness, not only by understanding public service as a job but as a way of understanding the Welfare State of which the public university is the cornerstone’.

This statement took place today at the Anti-fraud Agency of the Valencian Community where the collaboration agreement between the Universitat de València and the Agency was signed. ‘Public employees are a guarantee of fraud prevention, the functioning of democratic mechanisms and a public administration that is at the service of citizens, guaranteeing legal compliance at all times'.

For all these reasons, the principal concluded ‘we must defend public services and public workers. In our case, the public university, particularly the Universitat de València. Those thousands of people who not only make a daily effort to carry out PAS tasks, teaching and research activity or the transfer of knowledge, but also to participate in university sports and in the creation and dissemination of culture. Definitely, they make it possible for us to be a benchmark and outstanding university in the main international rankings.

‘The Universitat de València is a university that we must esteem. It is the heritage of all of us, a quality public service that requires the support of the entire society in order to have the necessary resources which must be used in a transparent, effective and efficient manner. Hence, we will be able to still guarantee levels of well-being in our very own territory, making a better-trained, informed and learned society that yet enjoys a sustainable, intelligent and inclusive growth a reality’.