The Universitat Politècnica de València has inaugurated the academic year 2022-2023 in an act in which the professor of the Universitat de València Jordi Garcés has been invested as doctor honoris causa. He is the director of the Institute for Research in Social Welfare Policies of the University of Valencia (Polibienestar) and doctor honoris causa by the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló. He has been a lecturer at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and the Erasmus University of Rotterdam (Holland) and a visiting researcher at the universities of Washington, Oxford and Cambridge.

Garcés works at Polibienestar, a centre specialising in public policy research and consultancy with an interdisciplinary methodological approach. His studies have focused on comparative European social policy, especially on ageing and social innovation and on increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of long-term care policies in Europe.

His appointment as doctor honoris causa was approved by the Governing Council of the UPV on 18 February 2021, at the proposal of the UPV’s ITACA Institute. The researchers Antonio Mocholí and Vicente Traver were the godfathers, the latter in charge of reading the laudatio.

Necessary syncretism between doing and thinking

In his speech, Jordi Garcés defended the need for the integration of social and technical knowledge and said that «just as the new ecological conscience feels that we must not dominate nature but learn to understand it and live with it, the Social Sciences must recover their innovative social function by making a pact with the Technical Sciences to build new epistemological formulations and socio-technical models». In fact, the new honoris causa of the UPV proposes reaching a «necessary syncretism between doing and thinking, between the technological future and humanism».

José E. Capilla: «Let us not make the same mistakes».

For his part, the rector of the Universitat Politècnica de València, José E. Capilla, celebrated the approval of the Science Act with parliamentary consensus but predicted a complicated future because «fiscal consolidation will arrive, probably in the 2024-25 academic year, and we have to ask our authorities not to make the same mistakes as in the previous financial crisis. That would be very serious. It has been shown that countries that continued to invest in education and R&D came out of the crisis better.

Diana Morant: «There is no better place to launch the Science Law than here, at the UPV».

The Minister of Science and Innovation of the Spanish Government, Diana Morant, an engineer from the UPV, also referred to the new law, which, in her opinion, will allow «our country to develop and invent new solutions to the great challenges, instead of being a country that buys solutions. Furthermore, there is no better place to launch the Science Law and make its debut than here, at the start of this academic year at the Universitat Politècnica de València».

During the event, the UPV’s annual report was also presented, and recognition was given to the teaching staff who obtained the fifth positive evaluation of their research activity.

Source: UPV’s Information Office