By GASPAR PEACE*

Dissent as an opening of paths, as taking a position, which does not conform to irreconcilable compromises or tedious positions

“Hello, how are you? / I’m going, and you, are you okay? / Okay, I’m going running / to find a place in the future, and you? / Okay, I’m going in search of a peaceful sleep, who knows? / How long? / Well, how long? // Forgive me for rushing / It’s the soul of our business / Oh, you’re welcome / I’m also only going a hundred miles an hour…”
(Paulinho da Viola)

The song “Sinal próximo” (Closed Signal), by Paulinho da Viola, tells us about a furtive, evanescent time, where there is no room for longer dialogues. A time, as Olgária Matos said, suspended between monotony and acceleration. A time of indifference, which throws us into a kind of poverty. A time that is distributed in binary divisions (red/green), expanding the conditioning of anxiously going through the wait.

The strike by teachers, technicians and students at Federal Universities and Institutes (in 2024) shook up this stagnation, reaffirming the role of dissent in the university space and accumulating a significant political balance. It is worth highlighting some points: (i) The discussions that took place during this period allowed for more exchanges of information and, consequently, more knowledge about the intricacies and structuring mechanisms for the functioning of institutions (which also implied thinking about their failures and their dominant power structure).

(ii) The debates generated a wealth of reflections on the university, education and the Brazilian political panorama, showing the reverberation of a range of writings published in Brazilian alternative media spaces; (iii) The meetings provided a space for constructive criticism and the organization of consonant struggles, bringing out affection, exchanges and knowledge of work and research from various fields, which have been developed at Federal Universities and Institutes.

(iv) It was a time of understanding the tensions and power relations in institutions and in the country as a whole; (v) a time to reposition local and national agendas and struggles; (vi) a circumstance that preserved the right to a space-time of demands and ethical and political action; (vii) a moment of recognition of obstacles and obliteration of mobilizations and actions, which prevent the construction of an education open to popular desires and resistance.

Having made these brief observations, I would like to touch on a point that I consider crucial for thinking about the direction of the university: the situation of research and postgraduate studies. This desire for dialogue on the subject is not new and has already been raised in recent years at Adufes[I] and in other discussion forums at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (Ufes), but given the precariousness of research conditions in the country, it is urgent to rethink the evaluation model, the productivity-based demand for results (which requires an exhausting workload), and the operational-market-competitive bias of functioning and financing, three aspects that have become “naturalized” in Brazilian university spaces and that affect a chain of other problems that are growing, causing terrible working conditions and illness to those who work in these settings.

Since the beginning of the strike, there has been a call for dialogue on this issue. However, at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (Ufes), the teaching and student body was surprised by the official information that activities were back to normal when it came to issues and deadlines involving postgraduate studies. In the first few days, the PRPPG Ufes officially expressed itself in these terms. We believe, however, that the letter sent to the coordinators of Postgraduate Programs at that time vilified the teaching movement that fights for rights, for budget restructuring and for the functioning of Brazilian public universities, among other urgent issues, and missed the opportunity to re-examine the problems faced by the PPGs and their role in the university as a whole.

We are still in an exceptional situation in the national university scenario, without the proper replenishment of resources for universities and for the restructuring of Capes and CNPq, a situation from which the Postgraduate Programs are not immune (as shown by the reduction of PROAP in this year of 2024). It is also important to say that the restructuring of government funding agencies with the same physiologism of competence and competitiveness that has been disseminated for years is not ideal and is no longer acceptable for our universities.

Furthermore, the UFES rectory calculated that there would be a decrease of approximately R$14 million in the budget for 2024, which indicated the extent of the hardship that is affecting us today. Even with the PAC announced by the government, in a completely biased manner, on June 10, 2024 (after and due to the more than 50 days of teacher strike), rectors who make up Andifes judged that the resources proposed are insufficient to maintain the universities and their proper functioning.

The aim was – as a kind of scene game – to demobilize and demoralize the strike movements, with arguments of neoliberal economy and politics to induce Artificial Intelligence projects, in universities so dilapidated, that they do not even have rooms and laboratories with basic technological equipment (such as sound equipment, for example).

The greatest affront is that it is assumed that the university has discarded its critical potential and active resistance, to resign itself to the interests of private education and technology conglomerates, since they are certainly the ones who will benefit from this apparatus. And note that at the end of July, the Government announced a R$15 billion blockade in the Budget, with the justification of maintaining the fiscal framework target, a fact that affects Education by R$1,28 billion. This situation demands our attention, because this fight is everyone's.

The pro-rector argued that the PPGs of the Federal University of Espírito Santo “historically maintain normal activities during strike periods”. This position, which distanced itself from the struggles and did not consider the demands of 63 (out of 69) universities that joined the strike movement, also distanced itself from the changes that occurred in the pro-rectory of UFES itself, which saw exponential growth in the accreditation of master's and doctoral courses from the first decades of the 2000s, driven by the governments of Lula and Dilma (but who still remembers the investment horizon of the pre-salt and “Brazil, Educating Nation”?

Could this horizon have been lost amid tax waivers and exemptions, which according to Unafisco, will reach the figure of 524 billion reais in 2023? Just the exemption of profits and dividends distributed by companies amounts to 58,9 billion reais. The logic is simple, as Noam Chomsky says, if you give exemptions to businesspeople and deny raises to teachers and civil servants, you take from some to give to others: it is a choice). This growth, which was announced a few years ago on the PRPPG Ufes page, was not achieved without struggle and without the burden of the added value of the work of teachers, students and TAEs.

We must ask ourselves where we are today with education and public universities? What is the future?

It is important to reiterate that the environment of demanding results and productivity to achieve rankings of foreign institutions, and a series of other assessment requirements, have generated exhausting routines of overload, labor exploitation and illness among teachers, students and technicians. And all of this without the proper financial support for projects and research.

Teachers, in order to meet the indecent organizational criteria set by funding agencies, are divided into administrative activities (since the situation of the TAEs is discouraging); in prospecting for research resources (“entrepreneurs of themselves” in search of public-private partnerships to achieve minimum conditions for research and, even so, limited to the approval of themes and results by the censors of private companies); in the accumulation of teaching, research and extension workload, which does not fit into their PADs; in the competition between peers, which establishes who is productive and who is unproductive; in the lack of training, because the scarce time – ripped from the hours – is demotivating both for educational training and for the creativity necessary for research and dedication to the political construction of the university we want. This range includes, in a very worrying way, the lack of assistance and encouragement for master's and doctoral students at institutions (who, often, given the adverse conditions, are forced to abandon their research, with scholarships that are more than outdated and without spaces for study, without renewal of the bibliographic collection of libraries and basic equipment for developing projects and investing in training).

These and other issues reveal the frustration that takes over teaching life – with ever-increasing anguish and anxiety – as a result of the perception that their workspace is remotely controlled by the market, since the university itself takes on the air, standards and operations of private companies.

We are therefore witnessing the disintegration of public space, which is progressing rapidly, even if its insinuations are sometimes not perceived or naturalized. And, in fact, everything is done through disguises, precisely so that this disintegration becomes invisible in a kind of (dis)informational complexity. The uncritical use of technology, for example, is part of the masking that has generated the largest wave of non-attendance in educational institutions in the country.

This implies, without mincing words, the expulsion of students from the university space (especially quota students) and, therefore, as Florestan Fernandes said (in 1978), the withdrawal of the “cultural or political vitality” of the university. This results in what the Brazilian sociologist called the “university of silence”, because the silencing of the dictatorial years persists and deepens within the university, generating extorted communications, fatalism as the currency of speeches and power games, and the erasure of educational resistance, that resistance committed to the construction of another university, motivated by broad social commitment.

And that is why we need to revisit these points, unmasking what is most violent, legalistic, authoritarian and manipulative in universities, violence that has become even more acute since the 2016 coup and its destructive outcome in the years that followed (from 2019 to 2022). As Florestan Fernandes said, “If we do not do this, we will be trafficking in the error of a tacit alliance with the enemies of any and all profound institutional transformation, in any sphere of Brazilian society. This error has already been made in good faith before. Repeating it… would be political stupidity” (FERNANDES, 2020, p. 38).[ii]

All of this makes it clear, as philosopher Marilena Chaui pointed out, that “The role of the university is to be a part of the class struggle. The university cannot be just a place that reflects on the class struggle. It has to understand that it is part of this dispute, whether due to its student body, the division among its professors, or the role of administrations and bureaucracies, which often operate in favor of the ruling class. We are part of the class struggle and, as an educational institution, we are obliged to understand this role that we play in society” (CHAUI, 2018, p. 421).[iii]

This means that it is high time that we also take part in the collective discussion and decision-making regarding the budget and university construction, a task that is so often denied us. As Marilena Chaui says, “The university reproduces, in a small way, the general situation of Brazilian society, which executes orders dispatched in packages, without ever intervening in the discussion and decision-making of economic, social and political processes” (CHAUI, 2018, p. 233).

This inaccessibility is embarrassing, as it is reflected in discourses that deplore criticism, pointing to it as the cause of polarization, misunderstandings and misfortunes. To avoid this expedient, such actors invest in consensual decisions. Ultimately, this reveals the impossibility or the obstacles of politics, and the maintenance of a type of power that is sustained by an association of bureaucracy, legalism (as a coercive system) and the use of sad passions (such as fear).

Against the current of this consensus, we draw attention to the political-pedagogical role of dissent in the university space. Dissent as an opening of paths, as taking a stand, which does not conform to irreconcilable compromises or tedious positions that insistently exclude those who disagree. It is a matter of bringing another way to political struggles, a way of resistance and demand for the collective construction of the university's direction. It is time to continue the necessary struggles.

*Gaspar Paz Professor at the Department of Theory of Art and Music at UFES. author of Interpretations of artistic languages ​​in Gerd Bornheim (edufes).

Notes

[I] The topic was addressed, for example, in “The impasses of the Ufes Postgraduate Programs are accentuated during the Covid 19 pandemic”, a chapter of the publication Ufes and remote teaching in times of pandemic, June 2020. Available on the Adufes publications website https://wp.adufes.org.br/wp-content/uploads/Adufes-A-Ufes-e-o-ensino-remoto-em-tempos-de-pandemia.pdf

[ii] FERNANDES, Florestan. Brazilian university: reform or revolution? Sao Paulo: Popular Expression, 2020.

[iii] CHAUI, Marilena. In defense of public, free and democratic education. Organized by Homero Santiago. Belo Horizonte: Authentic, 2018.

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