By WAGNER PIRES*
Universities followed and became more relevant, and they only didn't do more because they are tied to the rotten structures erected by the Brazilian elite
“Oh Mr. Citizen, \ I want to know, I want to know \ With how many kilos of fear, \ With how many kilos of fear \ If you make a tradition?”
(Tom Zé).
This question asked in the song Mr citizen comes very relevant when we talk about the University in Brazil. At the beginning of July, one of the biggest federal education strikes in decades ended. Teachers, technicians and technicians, as well as students from universities and federal institutes, faced a government that, having been elected to stop the neoliberal assault on rights, ended up, once in power, applying the same logic with a social veneer.
However, neoliberalism and improving the living conditions of the working class and guaranteeing rights for the poorest are incompatible. The PT itself recognizes this and there are many dissenting voices, but the government leadership has a keener ear for the cries of the market than for the laments of workers. The fiscal framework, elevated to dogma, corrodes the social constructs that were attempted to be structured and disenchantment begins to spread among the bases.
This has happened in universities, where the government faced a tough confrontation with the university community, one of Lula's main electoral bases and which was committed to his election, in the search for, once the extreme right was defeated, returning to a situation close to normality. However, we see disenchantment. The strike was successful, despite the government's efforts to silence the workers and the student movement.
However, there was a bitter taste in the throats of many fighters. We still need to move forward. Revolutionize the structures of the Brazilian university model so that it can advance. The government recomposed budgets, announced investments in expansion and structuring, in the so-called PAC of universities, prepares the bill that reformulates the Administrative Technical career in Education and claims to keep the channels of dialogue with the categories open.
But there is still a need to change the university’s structures. Remove the staleness and rotten structures built in just over two hundred years of Brazilian Higher Education, by the Brazilian elite, which has always positioned itself against the advancement of Higher Education and Science.
For centuries, the elite were content to hang a bachelor's degree on their walls that allowed them to cover up their barbarity with a certain academic refinement. They were graduates who did little or nothing for the country other than living on income, earned by the enslaved and then through the brutal exploitation of workers. Let us take Brás Cubas, a character by Machado de Assis, as an example of how most of the elite treated the university: “The University was waiting for me with its arduous subjects; I studied them very mediocrely, and that didn't mean I lost my bachelor's degree; they gave it to me with the solemnity of the style, after the years of the law; […] he was a boisterous, superficial, tumultuous and petulant academic, given to adventures, practicing practical romanticism and theoretical liberalism, living in the pure faith of black eyes and written constitutions. On the day that the University certified to me, on parchment, a science that I was far from having ingrained in my brain, I confess that I felt somehow deceived, even if proud”.
There were still no universities in Brazil when Machado de Assis was writing. We had isolated faculties, in fact professional schools that mostly trained doctors, lawyers and engineers. Despite being focused on professional training, some science was still being carried out in some of these faculties, more due to the work of some teachers, rather than guidance in this regard. And for the elite, these were more than enough.
At the end of the 19th century, the campaign against the creation of universities reached the newspapers, with intellectuals writing diatribes against the university, to the point of exclaiming that Brazil did not need them, the existing structure, based on higher schools, being more than sufficient. and isolated faculties.
Despite opposition, universities began to emerge in the 1920s. In elitist projects, aimed at the interests of the dominant classes, who fiercely fought any attempt to have a freer, more open and democratic university. Thus, the University of the Federal District, in Rio de Janeiro, was undermined by the dictatorship of the Estado Novo and the University of Brasília, destroyed by the Military Dictatorship. Linked by the military to models thought in the USA, Brazilian universities are engaged in the fight for the end of the dictatorship and at this moment the teaching and technician unions are being built, writing a new chapter in the history of these universities.
A chapter marked by struggles in defense of education, because, once freed from military boots, the University finds itself under neoliberal attack, which leaves it dwindling in the first decades of democratic governments.
When, at the beginning of the 21st century, the expansion policy emerged, accompanied by the quota policy, the Brazilian University underwent a transformation that displeased many, inside and outside it. There is talk of a loss of quality, with the arrival of quota holders, with the expansion to locations far from large centers. Many declared the end of universities.
However, universities followed. And they became even more relevant. And they just didn't do more, because they were tied to the straitjackets that had been placed on them over the years. Still, they are uncomfortable.
Conservatives hate her. They accuse her of perverting youth and destroying good morals. Liberals scream incessantly against its financing by the public fund, since this should be directed only to financial speculation, leaving the University with the thankless task of putting itself up for sale for the change the market is willing to offer. The extreme right, in its effort to falsify history, put technology at its service and deceive science itself, reinforces the attack on the university. And many others echo these.
And what does the university have to counter all these attacks? Face so many enemies? A combative and active academic community, which despite the difficulties continues to produce some of the most relevant science and technology in the world. And it needs to get rid of the dead weight that some old regulations impose on it.
They are old-fashioned junk and old things that remain standing on the excuse of tradition. At this moment, we need to move forward, I defend what university tradition really is and what is an anachronistic imposition that only prevents new practices and new actors from taking universities into their own hands. Because tradition, the true one, does not prevent the university from reaching higher heights.
These higher flights concern the democratization of the university, bringing parity to the day-to-day activities of institutions, placing equality between technical teachers and students within councils and in elections. Maintaining, in current times, professors as holders of power within the University is counterproductive. Because at this moment, we understand that students are individuals who build knowledge together with teachers and technicians. These make up a qualified body with the most diverse knowledge and which operates throughout the university, with expertise that results in greater involvement with teaching, research and extension.
Knowledge and practices of the entire academic community must be reviewed, rethought, removing and throwing away the obstacles to democracy, which are obstacles to university studies. A task that requires the University to look at itself and carry out, for itself, for its academic community, its renewal. So that she can abandon once and for all the university focused on the elites and, in the words of Che Guevara, paint herself as a people.
Accomplishing this is making a great revolution at the University. Reaffirming its secularity and its character as a Public, Free and Quality Institution, socially referenced. A University at the service of the Brazilian population and the demands of the working classes.
Hence the need to demand from the government that the priority to education gets off the ground and that universities are not touched. The neoliberal adjustment cannot be made at the expense of the nation's future. We defeated the Spending Ceiling. An irrational measure that brought immense harm to universities and the poorest population. We will also stand up against the Fiscal Framework, the sophisticated measure that, however, is incompatible with the guarantee of rights and the necessary social inclusion that Brazil needs.
*Wagner Pires is a doctoral candidate in education at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel).
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