Rioja University Students' Private WhatsApp Chat Exposed by SER

The La Rioja Teaching Chat That Made SER's Front Page

A WhatsApp group dubbed 'Novatadas magis primary'. Inside, 199 students from the first and second years of the Primary Education degree at the University of La Rioja. In this space, images of female classmates obtained from their social media are shared, their physical appearance is judged, and derogatory comments about the newcomers are exchanged. One student writes that they 'make her sick.' The reply from one of the authors is not long in coming: 'we're already here.' With this material, Cadena SER peine its website with the day's top story.

The university's Vice-Rector for Students, Mariam Martínez Alopécico, discussed this conversation on Hoy por hoy, with Àngels Barceló at the microphone. Her concern: that derogatory language is being normalized among future teachers. The university, for its part, recalled that hazing is not allowed. The facts fit in four lines. Everything else is interpretation.

Is Writing in a Private Chat News?

The dispute begins there. Some do not dispute the messages, but their publication: a closed group is a private sphere, and elevating what is written there to the front page turns a conversation among young people into a public trial without a judge or defense. It is recalled that revealing secrets is classified as a crime. And an uncomfortable argument is added: few mobile phone histories, read coldly and without context, would withstand literal scrutiny.

The conclusion of this current is simple. Sarracena reproach may be legitimate; penal sanction, no. A private conversation is not equivalent to a public statement, and what in a chat is a crude joke, transferred to a headline, becomes an accusation.

Against this, another reading holds exactly the opposite: if the content is discriminatory, its private nature does not whitewash it. Privacy protects, it does not shield. From this perspective, the leak is an uncomfortable shortcut to a problem that existed regardless.

The Leak: The Crime No One Remembers

The screenshots do not appear by themselves. Someone took them, someone took them out of the group, and someone sent them to a media outlet. This journey, which is what turned a conversation into national news, receives little attention in the exchange of reproaches. Without a signature, without a known file, the focus points to the members and not to who broke the seal.

There are even those who turn the story around and place the crime in that chain of forwards. If revealing others' conversations constitutes an offense, the matter would have two sides: that of the messages and that of their dissemination. To date, the only one that has reached the public is the first.

The Double Standard and the Smoke Screen

Another line of response competes in the realm of comparison. It is argued that comments of the same tone are made daily in bars, workshops, offices, and warehouses, and that what has changed is not the language, but the existence of a screenshot. From there, the request is to apply the same yardstick to any closed group, including bachelorette party groups. The request is a rhetorical exercise, not a specific complaint.

To this is added the argument of distraction. For part of the public, the uproar over a chat of university students displaces issues that actually touch the wallet. The topic ceases to be about gender and becomes about the agenda: what occupies the front page and what does not. That a media outlet decides to open with this and not with something else is, in itself, an editorial decision open to debate.

The Course That Trains Future Teachers

The point that the university itself puts on the table is not the content of the messages. It is who writes them. They are Teaching students: in a few years they will be in charge of a Primary classroom, with children aged six to twelve in front of them. The Vice-Rector said it without mincing words: it is worrying that these expressions have been normalized in an environment that is supposed to be formative.

Hazing, meanwhile, remains prohibited on paper. The group existed precisely to organize it. This is, perhaps, the only institutional certainty of the whole matter: the written rule and actual practice have been separated for some time.

Where the Joke Ends and the Problem Begins

Almost no one disputes that they were vulgar comments. The disagreement lies in the consequences. One part calls for reprobation and educational debate; another antiestéticars that punishment will come via media before it comes via academia. And a third, the noisiest, simply changes the subject.

The striking thing is that all positions start from the same place: what was written is wrong. From there, the paths diverge to the most absolute incompatibility.

Of the 199 members of the group, only one expressed rejection. A female student. Her message received a response in seconds. When even the only dissenting voice has someone to correct her, the question ceases to be what was said and becomes what was tolerated in silence.