The Minister of University, Innovation and Digital Transformation of the Government of Navarra, Juan Luis García, has assured that the teaching offer in Basque at the Public University of Navarra has increased "progressively" in recent years, both in the volume of credits and in the number of partial or fully in this language degrees.
During the plenary session of the Parliament of Navarra, and following a question from EH Bildu, Juan Luis García stressed that "the commitment of this Government and its reflection in the future law of the university system is to cover the linguistic demand of our Community, responding to social reality".
However, he clarified that "the UPNA has university autonomy to define and develop its linguistic policy" and stressed that "this implies that both the design and deployment of the university's linguistic plan is a core competence of the center and that it is not determined externally, but rather responds to its institutional strategy".
In this context, García recalled that teaching in Basque is financed within the pluriannual agreement that the regional Executive maintains with the UPNA and added that "it is the Public University itself that determines how to make the distribution based on university autonomy".
The minister insisted that, "rather than making an assessment of whether the Basque offer is sufficient or not, what we do from the Government is to highlight with data the evolution of this offer, and the teaching offer in Basque has grown progressively at the Public University, both in the number of credits and in partial or complete degrees".
For her part, the EH Bildu parliamentarian Oihana Gallo stated that last academic year 27 degrees were offered at the UPNA and that "only three of them can be studied completely in Basque": Early Childhood Education, Primary Education, and Social Work. Furthermore, she pointed out that "of those 27 degrees, there are another four in which 50% of the credits could be taken in Basque. And there are degrees whose offer in Basque is nil. This is the picture. The offer is very scarce".
Given this situation, Gallo has called for, "to guarantee linguistic rights and advance in the normalization of Basque", the regional Executive must adopt "bold measures" that allow reinforcing the presence of this language in the university studies of the UPNA.