Brazilian Universities under Attack

Abstract

Brazil has around half of Latin America's twenty-five best-ranked universities, and all of them are public. Most Brazilian public universities are also socially embedded, building knowledge in dialogue with communities, and are involved in defending human rights, social justice, and environmental sustainability. They are a fundamental part of the Brazilian biopolitical pact that has prevailed in recent decades. Brazil's new, openly authoritarian government has chosen this public university system as a central target, pursuing two courses of action: one a radical neoliberal agenda and the other an ideological war on the production of critical, social, and scientific knowledge. For this regime and its necropolitical bias, public universities are no longer necessary institutions. Nevertheless, despite all the attacks against them, universities have acted as important institutions in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, defending life and human rights.

Brazil’s Cultural Battleground: Public Universities and the New Right

“…Over the past two decades, public universities have provided spaces for the cultivation of a new moral radicalism of the left, contributing to a progressive cultural politics that has stretched the moral contours of Brazil’s conservative society (Arantes, 2021; 2022a; 2022b). Broadly celebrated by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) during its time in government, between 2003 and 2016, this cultural politics was integrated into a social pact that promised freedom to consume for the poor and freedom to accumulate for the rich—a biopolitical pact to the extent that consumption enabled by targeted state assistance (that is, without fundamental challenges to neoliberal hegemony) was imagined as guaranteeing a humanitarian minimum of survival.…”