By MARILENA DE SOUZA CHAUI; LUIS CESAR OLIVA & HOMERO SANTIAGO*
Reflections on the new postgraduate model at public universities in São Paulo.
A few weeks ago, a new postgraduate model proposed by public universities in São Paulo with the approval of funding agencies (Capes and Fapesp) was circulated in the mainstream press and in USP's institutional media outlets; an announcement that was received with applause in the editorials of major newspapers.
A draft of the same project had already been floated at the beginning of Jair Bolsonaro's government, based on an agreement signed by USP and Capes and later shelved – or so it was believed. Therefore, not without surprise, the university community learned, mostly through the press, that this agreement had been revived, now including all public universities in São Paulo and, in addition to Capes, also Fapesp.
Although the top management of the universities and their postgraduate vice-chancellors have discussed the project at length, it is important to note that most of the professors and students of the universities did not take part in this discussion. All the motivations for such changes were identified and listed by the top management, not by the base, of the university community. And what are these changes?
Based on the premise that the process of training doctors in Brazil is longer than in central countries (i.e., North America and Europe) and supposedly unrelated to the demands of the job market, the project proposes, in practice, the elimination of the master's degree as an intermediate stage in the training of doctors. If they adopt the model, postgraduate programs, which currently have three independent entrances – the master's degree, the direct doctorate and the simple doctorate (for those who already have a master's degree) – will have a single entrance. Initially, all students would be selected for the first year of the master's degree, without a research project and without a supervisor.
During this first year, while taking interdisciplinary courses, including internships outside the university, students must “find” a supervisor and develop a research project, and at the end of the course they will be required to take a qualifying exam. In this exam, these students, who at this point will have barely outlined their research project, will have three possible outcomes: failure, approval to continue the master’s degree for a maximum of one more year, and finally, for no more than 30% of candidates, as provided for in the new model, transfer to a direct doctorate, which will be completed in four years.
In total, five years of training, with only four of them having a defined project and advisor. Those “elected” to continue their doctorate, if awarded Capes scholarships, will receive supplements from Fapesp until they match the amounts from this agency, but (a fundamental detail) there will be a maximum of 90 supplements for the entire USP (according to the draft of the project released by the management), which should correspond to one or two per postgraduate program.
For universities other than USP, even less so. In short, we will have a concentration of resources in a group of doctors who will graduate more quickly, in contrast to the current model, which foresees a master's degree lasting on average three years (with a two-year scholarship) and a doctorate lasting four years. In other words, from the point of view of the project's formulators, there will be greater savings and agility in the training of researchers for Brazil. The devil, however, is in the details.
That said, one might ask: why say that this will imply the elimination of the master's degree, if this title will continue to exist for 70% of postgraduate students? And why would such elimination be a problem?
Let's start with the second question. The master's degree is the time when the young researcher becomes familiar with the research tools in his/her field and experiments with his/her own capacity for conceptual formulation, resulting in work that is not expected to be radically original, but which will be new in its approach.
Regardless of the originality of the dissertation that crowns the process, the main result of the master's degree lies in the researcher himself, who becomes capable of venturing into a truly new and relevant project for his/her field during the doctorate, which would be impossible before mastering the research techniques and, above all, the intellectual maturity to do so. The autonomy of the researcher is not a “given”, but needs to be achieved during the training process, for which the master's degree plays an essential role, unless the research of the doctoral students is understood as a mere appendix to the work of the advisors.
It is also in the master's degree that many deficiencies in the basic training of students from less established centers are remedied, making them capable of undertaking doctoral research on an equal footing with students from major centers in Brazil and around the world. For no other reason, as is crystal clear to anyone, master's students from major Brazilian universities are successful when they go on to do their doctorates (or internships during their Brazilian doctorates) in Rome or the Sorbonne, even without having graduated from an Italian classical lycée or a French preparatory school.
It is also important to remember that in these major American and European centers, master's degrees still exist! They can have different formats, longer or shorter, more theoretical or more technical, but they maintain the same fundamental role in the training of future doctoral students or professionals who decide to go directly to the job market after this first research experience.
It is worth remembering that the formative importance of the master's degree does not eliminate the possibility of a direct doctorate, a modality already provided for in the current system, but which has not become a rule for all entrants.
However, the completion of a direct doctorate, without a master's degree, is only viable if certain conditions are met: (a) the originality and complexity of the proposed project, which, due to its difficulty in execution, demands a longer time than a regular master's degree; (b) the possession, by the postgraduate student, of the necessary instruments for such execution, which may involve, for example, ultra-specialized laboratory techniques or knowledge of classical languages, such as Greek and Latin; (c) the proven intellectual maturity of the postgraduate student, which, in many areas, is as important as it is rare in recent graduates.
All supervisors are aware of successful cases of direct doctorates completed by students who met the above conditions, but the exceptional nature of these circumstances requires a specific assessment and cannot become a general rule.
Having established that a master's degree is not a waste of time, nor a Brazilian jabuticaba, we can return to the first question and understand why the proposal in question puts the master's degree at risk. Even though it will not cease to exist, what will the master's degree represent in this new model? Instead of being proof that the student is ready to tackle innovative research independently, this degree will be the mark of his or her failure in the attempt to become a researcher.
Furthermore, since the master's student is required to complete a project in just one year that was completed at the time of the qualifying exam, it is unlikely that he or she will produce anything better than a good undergraduate thesis. More of a consolation prize than proof of qualification, the master's degree will remain on paper, but the master's degree will cease to exist as a stage in the researcher's training.
Furthermore, the proposal does not say how to establish the 30% winners of the fratricidal battle for qualification, considering that the dozens of panels will have different members who will not be able to compare each other's work. Nor does it say whether these 70% losers who will be transferred to the accelerated master's degree will have access to scholarships. Nor does it say whether these losers who completed the master's degree will be able to have scholarships for a possible simple doctorate completed afterwards.
Let us not be mistaken: in the areas of basic research, master's and doctoral students cannot support themselves without a scholarship, so not promoting them directly to a doctorate will probably mean the pure and simple exclusion of a significant number of young researchers, who will be expelled from the system before they have the tools necessary for research work. The assumptions of the reform are based on the diagnosis that the current system is exclusionary, because it requires a research project to enter the master's program, and unattractive, because it is so long.
Now, isn't the exclusion of 70% of eligible candidates much more exclusionary? Isn't the precariousness of accelerated training much less attractive, given that the essential function of a doctorate is to produce independent researchers? We should also not forget that postgraduate programs in Brazil have increasingly included affirmative action in their selection processes, understood as a fair demand in a society as unequal as ours. Everything leads us to believe that these beneficiaries will be among the first to be rejected at the end of the first year of postgraduate studies.
All these concerns could be put into perspective by considering that adherence to the new model is voluntary, so that each postgraduate program can freely decide, according to its own characteristics, whether to join or not. This is where the approval of the agencies (Capes and Fapesp) leaves us all insecure.
In the university corridors, there is fear that once the model is implemented (as early as 2025), programs that do not adhere to it will have difficulty in awarding Capes scholarships to their master's and doctoral students. In the case of Fapesp, where scholarship applications are individual, there is fear that resources will be prioritized and concentrated on students from programs that are part of the new model, to the detriment of applications for traditional master's and doctoral degrees. As long as this concern persists, there will be no talk of free participation in the project.
The discussion about the loss of training in the model, widely recognized by colleagues from various areas, is hampered by the conviction that the decision, in the end, will not be ours, but that of the agencies on which our students depend. It is from them, therefore, that we expect precise clarifications so that such an important decision for the future of postgraduate studies at USP can come from serious, considered and autonomous reflection of each program, and not with a knife to the throat.
*Marilena Chaui Professor Emeritus at FFLCH at USP. She is the author, among other books, of In defense of public, free and democratic education (authentic).
*Louis Cesar Oliva He is a professor at the Department of Philosophy at USP.
* Homer Santiago He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at USP.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
