Approach to Mariano Ruiz-Funes indictment of Spanish university under the Franco dictatorship and Republican exile education policy proposals

Abstract

This paper addresses the denouncing activity accomplished by academic Republican exile of the situation of higher education in the Spanish postwar period. It reconstrucs the participation of professor Mariano Ruiz-Funes in various exile organizations, from original sources in his personal archive, some of them little known up to now. They denounce both the university purging and the new organization system in the Franco dictatorship. They also reflect proposals that are made in the first exile to rebuild university education in Spain, within a expected process of democratic recovery, as a result of the new world order emerging in the last stages of the war and years immediately following. This work contributes to point out a supplementary and neccesay side for a period of the history of Spanish university, in which there was still room for the possibility of pick up the republican education envision again, before the definitive settlement of the Franco regime.