Mr. José Braun, President of ORT Uruguay; Prof. Charlotte S. de Grunberg, Director General; representatives from partner institutions; deans; graduating students; and family members. We are delighted to welcome you here today. This is a special occasion for all of us as the ORT community.
I would like to congratulate the graduates on the hard work they have done alongside their professors to achieve this result. We feel deeply honored and deeply responsible for the trust you have placed in us. We hope you have enjoyed and made the most of your time at the university. May you remember all the good times and gradually forget the rest. We ask for your understanding regarding any shortcomings you may have experienced, and we ask for your help and participation as we continue to improve.
I was very impressed by the graduates' speeches. When I see them speak with such poise to nearly a thousand people in our country's most prestigious amphitheater, I realize that they are a new generation of Uruguayans who will have a great deal to contribute to our country.
Taking this opportunity—and for those who thought our expectations ended with graduation—I have a mandatory request for you. Set ambitious goals and hold yourselves to high standards, because this is the prerequisite for being able to hold others to high standards—those who will one day be your colleagues, partners, suppliers, and customers. Act with professional, moral, and ethical integrity, for a prosperous society is built on trust, and society has the right to expect university graduates to be a moral vanguard. As university graduates, we are a privileged group in the knowledge society, and as such, we have a duty to help spread the benefits to others.
And I also ask you: give Uruguay a chance before you consider moving abroad. This doesn’t mean you should settle for what the country has to offer. On the contrary, I invite you to be part of a movement to set the country on a path toward an ambitious future. As members of civil society and as the new generation, you have every right to make proposals and demand to be heard as key players in this new chapter of our country’s history.
I believe you will play a fundamental role in the national dialogue in the coming years—a dialogue that is essential for rethinking our country. Our country is part of a wider world. And this world is profoundly and rapidly transforming the sources of wealth, prosperity, and international competitiveness. In this new world we now inhabit, value is created by adding knowledge and creativity to products and services. Wealth is no longer created primarily through the extraction of natural resources or in massive factories producing undifferentiated goods, especially in countries of our size, population, and geographic location. In this new world, some countries and regions will become increasingly prosperous as creative economies. The other countries will—or we will—become increasingly dependent on the former, relegated to extractive production of natural resources of uncertain sustainability or to repetitive production of low-value-added goods.
In this new world, the critical competition among countries is no longer so much over capital, but over talent. Companies and investments follow talent far more than they follow tax incentives. We no longer live in capitalism as it was traditionally understood, nor, of course, in socialism. We live in what I call “creativism,” where capital and labor are fused in people’s minds. And what is interesting—and dangerous for our country—is that this capital is extremely mobile, so mobile that 600,000 Uruguayans are living in other countries and continue to leave us.
In this new society, not everything is driven by economic incentives, and the boundaries between the public and private spheres are no longer what we traditionally imagine them to be in Uruguay. The Internet, for example, is neither a public nor a private project; it belongs to no one, just like Wikipedia, free software, or the human genome. All these major projects that are redefining our world do not fit into the dominant dichotomy in our country: the state on one side and a private sector on the other.
These changes present a tremendous opportunity for our country, which could reinvent itself as a true creative powerhouse. Like any change, however, they hold not only promise but also a threat. The threat is that if we fail to take the necessary steps, if we lack the will to change, to break with the past and move toward a new Uruguay, we will lose this historic opportunity and, in the new geopolitics of wealth, we will end up in the same or worse shape than before.
In the nearly quarter-century since our country’s return to democracy, we have been living through a slow-motion film, with few strategic changes in our social and economic structure. We lack the humility to acknowledge that we need to draw inspiration and learn from countries that we once considered “backward” compared to us in educational, social, and political terms. Yet countries the size of Uruguay, located in places just as remote—or even more so—from the rest of the world, have made far greater progress than we have over the past twenty-five years. Uruguay’s gross domestic product per capita in constant dollars grew 1.7-fold from 1985 to 2007, while that of South Korea, Ireland, Taiwan, or Singapore tripled. These are not abstract figures; a threefold increase in gross domestic product per capita means that people can eat better, buy a car (perhaps the first in the family), pursue university studies, travel, and generally build a more prosperous and fairer society for everyone. Equity and justice are achieved on the basis of prosperity, not the accumulation of declarations.
We must look at today’s outside world with humility, curiosity, and an open mind—not the world we remember or long for as if it were a chivalric romance. For example, our flagship investment of the decade is the forestry and paper industry, which used to be the foundation of the Finnish economy. We should aim to attract investments to Uruguay that are part of Finland’s new industries, such as telecommunications. We have an educational system that aspires to be what the French system was fifty years ago. Today’s French are surprised that technical and academic education are separate, that practical work experience is not an integral part of training, or that the state does not fund private schools when they follow the national curriculum. The new education bill is inspired, according to those who drafted it, by Argentine education legislation—an educational system described as “bankrupt” by the Argentines themselves.
Let’s consider our “creative balance.” Are we exporting talent—that is, people—or are we exporting the applied knowledge that results from that talent? Our goal must be to export knowledge, and to do so, we must cultivate talent, retain talent, and, if necessary, import it. Countries like Canada, England, and Singapore have active policies to import talent into their countries in order to export knowledge. What is the situation in Uruguay? In 2007, according to official figures from specialized institutes, nearly 8,000 people with university degrees left Uruguay—that is, a massive export of talent: doctors to Chile and Spain, programmers to Montreal, nurses to Switzerland, and graphic designers to Spain. On the other hand, our exports of high-tech products, according to last year’s official study published by the Chamber of Industries, were less than 2%. This “creative deficit” is the crucial problem we must solve.
As university students, we must bring this issue to the forefront of society, especially to our leaders. I’m not sure our leaders truly understand the magnitude and speed of the changes we’re experiencing. If, as a society, we had truly understood these changes, I believe we would see different attitudes from major social groups. We should see, for example, workers proposing to receive training within their companies, asking for a share in the intellectual property of their intellectual and creative contributions, and seeking flexible working conditions that facilitate the entry of women and people with disabilities into the labor market. I would like to see workers asking for equity stakes in company profits, the freedom to pursue personal projects, and legal flexibility to work longer hours to increase their income and take on greater responsibilities. I would like to see companies investing in the ongoing training of their teams, improving the quality and technology of their suppliers and even their customers, seeking knowledge-application projects with universities, and offering creative profit-sharing schemes to their employees. But according to the latest study published by the UNDP, only 3% of Uruguayan companies have a research and development department, whereas in Argentina, for example, that same figure is 20%.
I would like to see the government investing in knowledge infrastructure—such as the education system, international internet connections, and scholarships abroad—and fostering collaboration between businesses and universities. In this new world, universities are the new powerhouses that transform people’s potential into talent and knowledge into innovation. To thrive as a country in the future, we will need a high-quality university system.
One of the prerequisites for our development is reaching an agreement on major national goals and the strategies for achieving them. Spain, Finland, Ireland, and New Zealand are countries that, at the outset of their major economic transformations, reached a consensus in which major groups agreed on what constituted national interests over sectoral ones and what strategies to pursue in the medium and long term. I believe we have recently missed valuable opportunities to build consensus on changes in our country. One was the Educational Debate Congress, where instead of building consensus around education, all of us who were there actually displayed confrontations and divisions to the rest of society. The Tax Reform would have been a great opportunity to signal through the tax system that investment in knowledge is essential for Uruguay. We also missed a great opportunity to discuss the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. I’m not saying that signing it was necessarily the best option. There are good reasons to sign a free trade agreement with the United States or any other country, and there are good reasons not to sign it, but what we lost was the opportunity to discuss it in depth. And we now have the chance not to miss an opportunity, which is the Ceibal project. The Ceibal project will have advantages and disadvantages from a technical standpoint, but it is valuable because it is uniting all Uruguayans in anticipation of its contribution to students across the country.
Our responsibility as a university community is to propose alternative visions for the country, even if the time frame is long-term. People are willing to make sacrifices and contribute if the goals are communicated to them with honesty and conviction, and if they are assured of accountability. If we are going to ask citizens for additional resources for education, for example, we must define the goals and determine who will be responsible for achieving them.
The vision I propose for our country is to transform ourselves into a creative hub that attracts and retains world-class talent, draws in sustainable, high-value-added investments attracted by that talent, and fosters a national ecosystem of collaboration between businesses and the financial sector to drive continuous innovation. To become a creative powerhouse, we must build a knowledge infrastructure: a world-class education system; a business sector that demands innovative capabilities so that the professionals we train stay in the country; a cultural, legal, and tax environment that encourages continuous improvement and entrepreneurship; and sustained, effective investment in human capital evaluated through internationally comparable metrics. We should aim for universal high school completion—that is, for all Uruguayans to be able to finish high school, for all Uruguayans to be bilingual upon graduation, and for the quality of learning, as measured by international standards such as PISA, to rank in the top 10% of countries within no more than ten years. We must give all Uruguayans genuine opportunities to be part of the creative class through a real democratization of the education system, especially at the secondary and higher education levels.
Graduates and families. Today is a great day for all of us, as we take pride in the work we have accomplished. Let us help our society create a moment of change—a collective, democratic movement toward a modern country, driven by a national sense of purpose that excludes no one and leaves no one behind. Let us all work together for a prosperous and generous Uruguay, and above all, whatever your choices and paths may be, continue to be part of the ORT family.
Thank you very much!