In a statement, Fenprof also complains about the lack of “any measures taken by the tutelage to alleviate the burden on students and their families” with fees, along with other problems that “the pandemic contributed to make more evident”, such as “The chronic underfunding of higher education and science and precarious work.”

For union members, it is time to start reducing the value of tuition fees and revoking the status of research fellows, pointing to their integration into careers.

The union federation says that the pandemic has aggravated “bad practices and trends that already exist”, pointing to the use of distance learning, which it considers has been adopted in a “hasty and manifestly inadequate way”, leading teachers and researchers to being overworked and without a clear separation between private life and work, with “consequences for physical and mental health”.

That is why Fenprof demands that “the career statutes are respected, namely the scrupulous respect for the teaching load”.

Fenprof believes that covid-19 has called into question the “democratic, transparent and collegial” management of higher education institutions and recommends that its legal regime be reviewed.