By EUGENIO BUCCI*
Our university needs to prepare itself and strengthen its alliances with its sisters in the north. The university spirit, all over the world, only survives and expands when it knows that it is one.
The most important event for the future of Brazilian public universities is not happening in Brazil. It is happening abroad. It is happening in the White House in Washington, the epicenter of a radioactive tsunami that is spreading across the country. college from Columbia in New York, from Tufts in Boston, and from Yale in New Haven. I read in a report by Jamil Chade, published on the portal UOL, that Donald Trump's Department of Education is investigating 45 of the most respected higher education institutions in the United States, including the University of Kansas, the University of Utah and Cornell.
In the vicinity of the Gulf of Mexico – a name that is threatened with extinction – many school libraries are already dealing with censorship. It is a witch hunt. The authorities claim that they are persecuting agents of anti-Semitism, without presenting any detailed evidence. They also say that they are combating racism – against whites. They target everything that goes against the obtuse doctrine of Trumpism. It is a cloud of silicon locusts that has begun to devour academic freedom.
People have also begun to be handed over. Illegally. Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk are being held in open disregard of court orders. Foreign scholars living there are threatened with expulsion. Students are being monitored. Denunciation among colleagues is encouraged or even imposed. Not since McCarthyism struck thousands of teachers in the 1940s and 1950s has anything like it been seen in the land of Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter, Andy Warhol, Kamala Harris and Timothy Leary. Corrosive rain. Soot in the sky. Darkness under the blazing sun.
Donald Trump plays the foolish Torquemada. Armed with his moral flamethrower, he incinerates the still-breathing professorships. Columbia suffered a $400 million cut in its budget from the federal government. Part of this was supposed to be used to fight AIDS. The financial and political blows have left the institution in a kind of knockout, a state of lethargy that is hard to understand.
Last week, Columbia announced the resignation of its president, Katrina Armstrong, who had served only a few months in the role. Other schools are rushing to remove terms that refer to sexual diversity or democracy studies from their curricula and programs. index of vetoes is detailed and humiliating. Surrender is already showing its signs.
And what does this have to do with public universities in our country? Well, everything. Absolutely everything. Everything and more. The repressive rage that has emerged from the Oval Office has intimate, even promiscuous, connections with anti-democratic far-right factions in several countries, including Brazil. For these forces, paradise is realized in tyranny and in the dull glow of fanatics' eyes.
Their strategy is to dismantle the autonomy of academic environments and lobotomize brains. Have you seen Jack Nicholson in The Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? That's it. What's happening in the United States today is a dress rehearsal for what's being prepared for the sad tropics. At the first opportunity, the troops will move in and come at us with their resentful hatred.
During his first term, from 2017 to 2020, Donald Trump faced resistance from his nation’s top schools. Lee Bollinger, a renowned expert on free speech who served as president of Columbia from 2002 to 2023, has repeatedly expressed his displeasure with the Republican’s growling.
Now, Trump, in addition to barking, begins to bite. Blood in his eyes. The 21st century inquisitor has redoubled the burden and promoted an “authoritarian occupation” (“authoritarian takeover”), to use Lee Bollinger's own words here, as reported by Guardian, in a report published on March 20. Lee Bollinger is no longer at the helm of Columbia, unfortunately. Donald Trump is back in the White House, even more unfortunately.
The unlikely reader should not doubt: what is not lacking today, whether in the National Congress or in the Palácio dos Bandeirantes, is people in ties who can't wait to copy the “authoritarian takeover”. Each of our universities will be gifted with a taylormade blitzkrieg. At USP, the attack will come in a personalized way, let's say. At Unicamp, in another way. Unesp will have its own itinerary. Similar attacks will come at federal universities.
We've seen this movie before. We've seen how it ends. We seem to have forgotten. Now, we're watching the same movie start all over again, as if it were a new attraction. In the United States, where the financial and technological elite have closed ranks with the state power, in an anti-democratic pact, we can see the trailer.
Our university needs to prepare itself and strengthen its alliances with its sisters in the North. The university spirit, all over the world, only survives and expands when it knows that it is one. The art, philosophy and science that make up the best universities in the world have no borders. This is true for times of great achievements and for times, like this one, when we have to defend ourselves.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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