Higher education in dark times: from the democratic renewal of Brazilian universities to its current wreck

Abstract

This article discusses the recent expansion and democratization of Brazil's higher education system from the beginning of the twentyfirst century to the present, concluding with its contemporary clash with the far-right government, which has placed universities and scientific knowledge under attackan experience had around the globe. In the last two decades, Brazilian public universities have become more diverse in terms of the class and racial backgrounds of students, as well as their larger expansion with new campuses in the hinterlands, the Amazon, and the peripheries of metropolitan areas. Private higher education has also expanded enormouslyin part, thanks to capital concentration, inflow of foreign capital, massive public subsidies and oligopolistic strategies. In both public and private sectors, Brazilian higher education has experienced a renascence. However, since 2018, the new power bloc, concentrated around President Bolsonaro and the far right, chose Public Universities and the National Science and Research system as one of its main targets. The current regressive moment in Brazil it is not an exception, in different countries universities and science are under attack. Ultimately, this article seeks to contribute, not only to a better understanding of Brazil's on-going experience, but also to the larger public debate on higher education policy in the Global South and other countries facing similar challenges.

Promoting inclusion and equity in Higher Education: Is this the role of distance learning in Brazil?

“…Economic support policies for low-income students and affirmative action such as ethnic quotas have provided equitable access to HE (RISTOFF, 2014). For Arantes (2021), HE in Brazil has improved access to quality Education and scientific production. Public universities became more inclusive through the Program for Federal Universities Restructuring and Expansion (Reuni) (PAULA; ALMEIDA, 2020), the National Student Assistance Plan (Pnaes) (e.g., BORSATO;ALVES, 2015), and the ethnic quota law (e.g., KIRAKOSYAN, 2014).…”

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

“…According to the Forúm Nacional de Pró-Reitores de Assuntos Comunitários e Estudantis (Brazilian National Forum of Vice Provosts for Community and Student Affairs), quotas increased the proportion of black and indigenous students in undergraduate cohorts from 36.2 percent in 2003 to 53.5 percent in 2018 (Fonaprace, 2019). They also notably improved access for students from low and lower-middle income families, who constituted 42.8 percent of the undergraduate student body in 2003 and 70.1 percent in 2018 (Arantes, 2021).…”

“…In Brazil, where the reproduction of "unpolitical" populations extends the legacies of slavery and colonial expropriation, the state has always treated a great many lives as disposable, even when this injustice is drowned out by celebration of the social diffusion of consumer power. Under the PT, public universities became spaces of social and cultural innovation that challenged the historical discrimination through which such injustice is rationalized (Arantes, 2021).…”

“…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.…”

A onda pró-ciência em tempos de negacionismo: percepção da sociedade brasileira sobre ciência, cientistas e universidades na pandemia da COVID-19

“…O governo federal, como denunciam estudos [6][7][8] , não apenas se omitiu na implementação de políticas mínimas de enfrentamento à pandemia como atuou abertamente pela disseminação da doença, agindo na contramão de orientações dos organismos internacionais, propagando desinformação, fake news e, em sua face mais grave, fake science. Na educação, seus ministros e apoiadores passaram a promover uma guerra ideológica e espalhar acusações infundadas e difamatórias, com ataques explícitos às universidades públicas 9 , locus da produção de mais de 90% da pesquisa científica do país, como mostram levantamentos de órgãos internacionais 10 .…”