According to the sources consulted and the documentation analysed, Clara had a brilliant scientific career at the university, and her CV announced that she would clearly win the post of permanent lecturer that had gone out to contest at the university against the other candidate who had a much lower CV, based on internationally recognised meritocratic scientific criteria, which were increasingly being adopted by Spanish evaluation agencies and the universities themselves. However, Clara had supported the victims of gender violence at the university and thus became someone to be expelled from the university.
The court chose the enemy of the victims and put Clara out of the university, thus demonstrating once again that the problem is not endogamy but feudalism: if the one inside supports the victims, someone from outside is preferred to side with the powers that be. To make this decision so negative for science, so reactionary for society, and so sexist towards women, the court resorted to criticisms of meritocracy that are presented as if they were progressive, social, and anti-neoliberal. The best scientific journals are criticised for their supposed subordination to capitalism, so “I will put in whoever I consider to be of the highest quality”, i.e., “whoever I want”. Of course, vaccines that have not been endorsed by Lancet, Nature, and other journals they criticise are not used.
Clara continued to support the victims, kept adding to her CV until she applied for a competition in which the selection board acted ethically, following the internationally published, transparent meritocratic criteria. Now a permanent lecturer, she has gone from being an isolating victim of gender violence to a survivor. Her contributions are helping to improve the meritocratic system with gender and, in general, social impact criteria instead of fostering a deeply sexist and reactionary anti-meritocratic dynamic.
