METAMORFOSES
OF BRAZILIAN HIGHER EDUCATION:
FROM
"ELITE FORMATION" TO "RAMPANT
PRAGMATISM"
Interview with Afrânio Mendes Catani
Marcos Marques de Oliveira 
Fluminense Federal University
Niterói, RJ, Brazil
Nevaldo Leocádia Bastos Junior
Fluminense Federal University
Niterói, RJ, Brazil
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22409/mov.v7i14.45472
In early 2019, the Pro-Rectory of Graduate
Studies, Research, and Innovation of the Fluminense Federal University
(PROPPI/UFF) launched another announcement of visiting professor. Jorge Nassim
Vieira Najjar, then Coordinator of uff's Graduate Program in Education, came to
us excited by the news about the possibility of having the presence of Afrânio
Mendes Catani, Full Professor of the Faculty of Education of the University of
São Paulo (USP), who was retiring.
With the endorsement of the collegiate, we did
the registration and we were waiting for the result of the popular edict -
which usually brings important researchers from various areas to reinforce the
master's and doctorate courses of the institution. The positive news was not a
novelty, due to the extensive and qualitative curriculum of our then candidate.
But it corroborated one of the main characteristics of the late Professor Jorge
Najjar: the intense dedication he always made available to honor the numerous
positions he held, inside and outside UFF[1].
It is in honor of him, therefore, that we
dedicate the transcription
of this interview with Afrânio Mendes Catani – who, to our honor, has just
renewed his contract for another year as Visiting Professor of the Graduate
Program in Education at UFF.
In this conversation, of almost four hours
duration, the central theme was around the metamorphoses that occurred in the
Brazilian higher education system, which according to the specialist has four
fundamental institutional milestones: the creation of USP, in the 1930s,
focused on the formation of São Paulo's elites; the university reform carried
out by the Military Dictatorship in the late 1960s, which marked a first
movement for the expansion of so-called Brazilian federal universities, with
the aim of adopting the departmental model of the American university; the
enactment of the National Education Guidelines and Bases Act (LBDEN) of 1996,
during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, which aimed to update our
higher education system to the privatist prerogatives of a project of
integration of the country to transnational globalization; and, finally, the
educational policies of the governments of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, who with
a view to configuring a new movement to expand enrollment in Brazilian higher
education, sought to combine initiatives that met both the interests of the
private education sectors, as well as the prerogatives of civil society
movements that act in defense of Public Education. "Due to the continental
extension of Brazil, as well as the intense conflicts resulting from the
interests of such diverse agents, all these 'reforms' were not effectively
completed – but somehow produced as a result the scenario that we have today.
Scenario, it should be said, that it is not the best, since we currently live,
in Brazilian society, a kind of ultraconservative, anti-scientificand undemocratic 'counterrreform', which has been putting in check the few, but
important, advances that we have achievedin the field of higher
education in recent years", said Afrânio Mendes Catani, who initiated this
dialogue telling us a little of his professional trajectory.
1. Good
afternoon, Professor. Before dealing directly with the main subject of this
interview, which is articulated with the theme of the issue of our magazine Movimento,which concerns
the transformations that have occurred in our higher education policies, we
would like to hear about your professional trajectory. How did this
transformation of a young bachelor's degree in Public Administration into an expert and recognized sociologist
specializing in educational and cultural issues?
— First of all, I would like to record the pleasure of
returning to contribute to the magazine
Movimento,which I have done there forthe 2000s, in an article with Mario Azevedo, a then
mentor who was Vice-Rector of the State University of Maringá (PR). Especially
now that I am as Visiting Professor of the Graduate Program in Education at
UFF. About the question, iníci osaying that I was raised in the interior of the
State of São Paulo, in the city of Piracicaba, which is 150 km from the
capital. My father, son of Italian immigrants, was a professor and became
professor of Analytical Chemistry at the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture,
the famous Esalq. Created in this environment, in the
phase of choices of continuity of schooling, I saw that there was no pending
for the so-called scientific field – which was what marked this region.
Differently, the closest we had was a Social Sciences course in Rio Claro (SP),
which is about 50 km away, but to be honest, no one knew very well what this
was – even confused with Social Work. Finally, almost all young people from
here went to the area of Agronomy, Engineering or Dentistry, which were strong
areas there. And I convinced my father, with some resistance, to leave home
talking about the course of Business Administration that existed at the Getúlio
Vargas Foundation (FGV-SP) – which he imagined, with some reason, to be
something close to the Economy. In this way, when I was seventeen years old, I
went to live in the capital. But i wasn't enrolled
yet. I did some courses and took the entrance exam. I ended up entering to do
Public Administration, a free course at the time. And it was lucky, because it
resembles a State School, French or American type. And, therefore, in it there
was a very powerful Department of Social Sciences in the field of Sociology. I
took classes with Maurício Tragtenberg, Sergio Miceli, José Carlos Durand and
Vilmar Faria, for example. And not only that. In the legal area, I took classes
with Eros Roberto Grau, who came to be Minister of the Supreme Federal Court,
and with Celso Antonio Bandeira de Mello, great name of Administrative Law. And
already in the second semester I started to act as a monitor, which already
demonstrated that my path was not to be an administrator, but that I would act in
the public area, but otherwise. I was a bourgeois little boy, but I had a
colleague who came from the simplest extracts of our population, and he told me
something that translates well this experience: "Getúlio Vargas taught us
to speak". I've even written an article about it. In high school, as it
was called at the time, it was terrible. We were in the middle of military
dictatorship, and the only possible participation was to be quiet and take the
tests. FGV-SP, on the other, followed the North American system that had the
famous participation score. I had the tests and work, of course, but everyone
was forced to do seminars and therefore forced to make guesses. Four years of
experiencing this model allows a great tracheo, we end up learning in the marra.
A complement is that we were in São Paulo, with great cultural offer,
especially cinemas – a habit I worked with my father, still in the countryside,
since Piracicaba, despite seeming a cultural environment
"suffocating" for a profile like mine, was a relatively developed
city. In the capital, of course, this cultural habitus has expanded, and others have been developed,
such as learning foreign languages. And it was in the monitoring, with Sergio
Miceli, that I started my studies on Pierre Bourdieu. I even had the
opportunity to be hosted by Miceli in France. Thus, a boy who had hardly ever
left Piracicaba ended up in Paris. He came back, and I ended up staying there.
On my return, finishing the course at FGV, I started my Master's degree in
Sociology with Professor Gabriel Cohn at USP. This movement, from people from
other courses to the Social Sciences, was not uncommon. Even if there was some
resistance from those who made the most traditional way. It is interesting to
note that the dissertation was based on the history of Brazilian cinema, having
discussed a lot with Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, the greatest Brazilian film
critic at the time. I had a scholarship from the São Paulo State Research
Support Foundation (FAPESP), which articulated with a discipline of the School
of Communication and Arts (ECA-USP), where I studied some subjects. And that's
where I arrived at sociology at USP, with the reception of Professor Gabriel
Cohn. Then, as a professor, as was very common in that period, I completed, in 1992,
my training in the area with a doctorate in Sociology, under the guidance of
Professor Heloísa Rodrigues Fernandes – again with a research on Brazilian
cinema. Parallel to this training process, with regard to the professional
trajectory, I started working as an hourly teacher at FGV-SP itself, at the
same time that I started writing for several places, to supplement income. And
then, in the early 1980s, I went to the campus of the Paulista State University
(Unesp), in Araraquara, in the area of School Administration, to collaborate
with Professor Jorge Nagle. In the mid-same decade, I made a contest for the
State University of Campinas (Unicamp), in which I stayed a short time. Soon
after, I came to the School of Education of USP, where I retired last year. One
final point to consider is that the fields of knowledge were not soídifficult.
We were, in fact, very intuitive and curious, since there was a small
intellectual division of labor – which allowed a great interdisciplinarity.
Today it is different, since we can not read or what comes out in our central
area of research – which denotes the need for intense specialization. They were
different assets, in which we had more time for training, to acquire a higher
broth of culture. Today, the requirement of curriculum and production are
higher for entering the labor market, in any domain.
2.
By your answer, we observe that you are not only a researcher of the
transformations of Brazilian higher education, but also a witness of the
changes that the Brazilian university has undergone in recent decades. It also
speaks of a very important period for the structuring of Brazilian higher
education, which is soon after the so-called University Reform of the Military
Dictatorship, which occurred in 1968. In one of your writings, you state that
this reform, despite having suffered the influence of the departmental model of
the American university, it was not fully successful. What did she actually
mean? [2]
— To talk about it, we will have to go back a little,
since I consider that there are four historical and institutional moments that
demarcation the main metamorphoses that occurred in the
Brazilian higher education system: the creation of USP, in the 1930s; the
university reform you cite, carried out by the Military Dictatorship in the
late 1960s; the National Education Guidelines and Bases Act (LBDEN) of 1996,
during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and, finally, the
educational policies of the governments of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. Due to
the continental extension of Brazil, as well as the intense conflicts resulting
from the interests of such diverse agents, all these "reforms" were
not effectively completed – but somehow produced as a result the scenario that
we have today. Scenario, it should be said, that it is not the best, since we
currently live, in Brazilian society, akind ofcounterto
ultraconservative, anti-scientific and undemocratic reform, which has been
calling into check the few, but important,
advances that we have achieved in the field of higher education in recent
years. But let's go back to each of them, based on a bibliographic reference
that I will use in my course this semester here at UFF, which is the work of
Professor Luiz Antonio Cunha, one of our greatest experts on the subject. In
summary, the model that Brazilian society tried to follow is a predominant
mixture of two aspects: Napoleonic and Humboldtian. The first comes from the
post-revolutionary French experience, based on Napoleon Bonaparte's mistrust of
the universities of the Old Regime, seen as remnants of the ancient stateorder
that survived the French Revolution. And what does he do? Something from which
fgv experiences are resulting: the creation of professional schools. We thus
have a university system that persists, alongside a system of professional
schools – the great écoles studied by Pierre Bourdieu, which form the
professional elites of the nation. As is the case today, in France and Germany,
for example – where many prefer to have power in a French state-owned company
than higher salaries in a multinational. Concrete examples: the Higher Normal
School, the School of Mines, the School of Bridges and Paths. Rather than what
the Portuguese administration does in Brazil, when the Royal Family came in at
the beginning of the 19th century. The point is that, here in Brazil,
institutionalization did not take place in a complete, robust way. Our
structure remained stable, as evidenced by the permanence of the Chair until
1968, which was extinguished by dictatorial reform. Extinct, but somehow
persistent in practice in various faculties, such as Medicine and Law, in which
there are still very clear domains of certain people and groups – who work, in
departments, as if they were Chairs, where everything that comes out of
"my laboratory, I am the author". It is what Charles Wright Mills
will call, in the 1950s, in the UnitedStates,
"Academic Statesmen" – people who do, of course, relevant works, but
who, after that, become administrators of true research complexes. Taking a
leap, and then returning, is what we have today, for example, in the area of
medicine, with electronic journals, with short articles and a very large number
of authors. Everything came out of "my lab", it's there, but what
counts is the first and second names, which were the ones who actually did the
research, and the last one – which is the Statesman' s. The university in
Brazil was slow to consolidate, perhaps by our cultural characteristics. A late
economy that was perhaps the last in Latin America to worry about having a
university degree. Estthe late
implementation of the university spirit ends up weighing in the
"frying of eggs". Even USP, at its beginning, was just a building,
some classrooms, a collective room of teachers and a secretariat. The expansion
– with architecture and adequate housing, especially laboratories – is slowly
occurring, according to the emergence of institutes and future campuses. Also,
following the North American trend, according to Jean Baudrillard, spaces
conducive to reflection and studies, due to the removal, but little conducive
to protests. It was, in the end, the scheme of Portugal: Court in Lisbon;
university in Coimbra. In the case of USP, it is worth remembering, that the
initial premise was that every student
went through the mater cell, which was the Faculty of
Philosophy, Sciences and Letters - which ended up not happening. Medicine, for
example, never made it to campus. Law remained close to the courts. And,
engineering has only recently come, the Polytechnic School. In any case, USP,
created in 1934, was an educational response of the Bourgeoisie of São Paulo to
its successive political defeats – which did not correspond to its economic
power. They sought to affirm, as Florestan Fernandes and Claude Lévi-Strauss
have said, that the model of domination based only on "the doctor, the
lawyer and the engineer", was not working. We would have to have a fourth
element: the Social Sciences. And the most complete
model of this fourth element was being implemented in the capital of São Paulo
itself, which was the Free School of Political Sociology (ELSP), created in
1933 – which was inspired by American sociology, of quantitative brand, based
on probing techniques, such as the famous Survey,
which would be, in theory, more able to capture reality. Initially, one of the
highlights was the election poll conducted by Donald Pierson. In the case of USP,
returning a little, we try to articulate this Napoleonic model of
professionalization with the Huboldtian, germanic base, which aims to
articulate teaching, research and extension – which, in essence, aims at
achieving a university integrated with society. It is good to remember that USP
was not the only attempt of this nature. We had other initiatives in Brazil.
And, even, I believe that there was a little more success at Unicamp, which
began its activities in 1966, through the work of the doctor Zeferino Vaz, and
at the National University of Brasilia (UNB), created in 1962, at the
initiative of anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro. The main meaning, at least initial
of them, was the connection with the respective communities, a university
integrated to the collectivity. Zeferino had a phrase that defined this purpose
well: "What is university? Brains, brains and brains that interact with
society." On the other hand, USP, whose size, in terms of enrollment, is
the sum of Unicamp and Unesp, ended up getting closer to the North American
model than the European model – even if we think about the sizes,
differentiated, of the metropolises of each region. And what did Unicamp get?
To be a university that combines well, including in number of students,
undergraduate and graduate. On the other hand, UNB turned out to be, it can be
said, but inclusive – following the tendencies of the federal, even more
contemporaneously, with the pioneering adoption of affirmative actions in forms
of quotas. The fact is that, as I said, Brazil is a continental country and,
although we welcome this so-called diversity of models, in quantitative terms
the growth was slow and below our needs. In fact, what we have is a hybrid, in
which so-called professional schools operate within the universities
themselves. And this is undoubtedly due to the university reform carried out
during the Military Dictatorship, which expanded federal units throughout
several regions of the country.
3.
We know that this expansion occurred linked to an authoritarian national
development project, as it could not fail to be in a dictatorial cycle.
However, it seems that this state-based structure, instead of gaining a
resignification for a period of re-democratization, ended up becoming functional. From
our point of view, the public university, after occupying an important place as
a locus of democratic resistance in the 1970s, maintained some legitimacy in
the following decade – which is proven by its recognition during the
Constituent Process of 1987-88. But soon after, already in the government of
Fernando Collor, elected at the end of 1989, a constant and radical
liberalizing threat came over her. This, in the educational field, indicated
the need for a more effective action of the State in Basic Education, while in
Higher Education a greater space would be opened for the private sector. Does
that line of reasoning make sense?
— Yes, it does. This issue goes back, even, to the very
harsh perspective that Professor José Goldemberg (former Rector of USP, who
held the position of Minister of Education, between 1991 and 1992, in the
Collor government) had of the federal system of higher education. He said, in
short, of course, the following: "We have, in Brazil, half a dozen
universities. The rest are great schools. And we have, therefore, to centralize
the resources on those who actually do research." Paulo Renato de Souza,
Minister of Education of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government, between 1995
and 2002, will take this tothe lastconsequences. For example, he implemented
the Teaching Stimulus Bonus (GED), which aimed to stimulate a larger workload
in the classroom, to the detriment of research and extension. An appeal, it
should be said, that it would not be incorporated into the salary – and that it
was also intended to discourage the strikes. It should even be said that there
was great uptake since there had been no salary adjustments for a long time.
But the important fact is that, somehow, this mischaracterized the university
model that seeks a balance between teaching, research, and extension. The FHC
governments, in fact, adopted
other hardening measures, reducing hiring even in the event of vacancy.
Somehow, it is how well defined another important scholaráofscience, Professor Carlos Roberto Jamil Cury, speaking of
ldben's role in 1996, said that she ended up "updating" the structure
of Brazilian higher education to the international scene. But, from my point of
view, in a form of internationalization, unfortunately, subordinate and
unautonomous. It would be an "evaluated autonomy."
4.
In your text already mentioned, analyzing what was happening at the time, you
went so long as to state: "In the 1990s [...] state and higher education
reforms had orthodox liberalism emulated by the World Bank as their theoretical
framework." And that, "at the beginning of the 21st century, any movement
of university reform that is intended to be implemented in the world, among
other inspirations and references, is obliged to mention the Bologna
Process". And you defined it: "Higher education as a public good,
assuming a social dimension and democratic public policy, appears considerably
neglected in the Bologna Process." How did this process go through the
debates on Brazilian higher education in the 2000s?[3][4]
— The Bologna Process is, yes, a watershed. And, for the
record, this article, written with two friends, generated a lot of controversy,
being perhaps one of my most cited texts. But the trends, incremented by this
document, are previous. A few years before its publication, I participated in a
table at a congress, in which were Pedro Krotsch, a deceased Argentine
professor, sociologist Luiz Antonio Cunha, and Juan Carlos Campbell Esquivel, a
retired professor at the Catholic University of Valparaiso (Chile). The theme
was about the relationship between the public and the private in Education. And
Cunha, at the time, wrote an article that has a very happy title: "The
public and the private: a frontier in motion". Until then we knew the
limits of this border: public, which was free; private, which was paid. And in
general, in the context of higher education, the public was better than the
private. In particular, the private occupied, we cannot deny, with more
excellence some niche markets. The border begins to move when evaluations
begin. Even with the members of many rectors who were previously against any
proposal for control. But as the results come out good, they change their posture.
Professor Krotsch, who ran one of the most important
academic journals in Argentina, Pensamiento
Universitário, said that the relationship between the public and the
private began to become blurry – that is, blurred. And Campbell
presented the Chilean framework, in which there were good institutions both in
the private sector and in the public sector. But with an aggravating factor:
none with gratuity. In the Brazilian case, the public sector significantly
dominates graduate school – with a large and complex evaluation system, which
is based on research funding agencies and peer regulation. Which has ensured a
certain quality. What operates at this level is, in fact, the control by
evaluation, through a series of indicators – especially those of publication in
scientific journals, with an increasing demand for internationalization. And a
kind of one-way internationalization, based on the predominance of the English
language, on the illusion that the works will be read by a supposedly larger
audience. And these criteria ended up, therefore, going through public tenders
– with this type of publication gaining more relevance than teaching skills and
outgoing activities. And, as is the case out there, what comes to prevail is
the profile of the "Academic Statesman", as Wright Mills already
said, when he analyzed the American scenario of the
1950s – which, currently, are true managers of research funds, including, as a
case I met in England, through the hiring of graduate students to teach in the
place of the teacher, so that he, in short, researches. If he doesn't, he won't survive in the academic system. On the
other side of the end, there are young graduates, newly graduated,
super-graduated, who need to teach in various institutions to survive. It is as
the British sociologist Michael Burawoy defines: The American universities
become business organizations, with two main characteristics. First, everything
is charged, starting with tuition. Second, salaries vary according to teacher
productivity. Another effect is budget cutting policies, which flatten the
salary base and employment contracts become temporary. Also, as I said, with
the hiring of graduate students in precarious situations. And those who still
have longer contracts, end up not being able to advance in the career. Finally,
as has also happened in Brazil, all other peripheral activities – safety,
transportation and, among others, cleaning – have outsourced contracts, whose
companies, in general, care little about labor issues. This is what we're
watching happen here, in the country. Budgets are now frozen when not
diminished. Thus, the nature of our work (in research, teaching and extension)
is transformed. If you invest, for example, in the production of individual
books, you make a wrong path. The incentive is for you to publish in already
qualified journals – in some areas, including having to pay. If possible, with
resources from funding agencies, to have more legitimacy. Another complementary
data is that this organization of business type ends up making students a kind
of workforce subordinated to the most qualified teachers, since their research
projects need to be anchored, in a kind of umbrella, to the research program of
the advisor. It is, in the end, a process of professionalization that casts the
scientific field, reducing the space for innovation and divergent thinking. In
graduate programs, for example, it only tells the evaluation what is done with
its students. Leaving aside other forms of production that involves different
ways of articulation and partnerships. From my point of view, it is a violent
process – which even stimulates competition practices that do not guarantee
academic quality, such as the dubious co-authorias in various texts
that are generally the fruit of an individual (although
well-oriented) research.
5.
In this historical journey, by its analysis, it seems that the said university
autonomy ends up being greatly compromised. A process which, also according to
its assessment, expressed in the text already mentioned above, has not changed
substantially in the PT governments. What are the continuities and
discontinuities, in the field of higher education, between the FHC and Lula
governments?
— In fact, there is a lot of continuity, some distinctions and certain ambiguities. For example, the case
of the Program to Support Plans for Restructuring and Expansion of Federal
Universities, which became known as Reuni. If, on the one hand, there was great
opening of universities without proper planning, to meet political clientelism
and diverse interests, on the other hand, the inclusive relevance of creating
courses and careers in remote places where there were no opportunities for
qualified access to higher education cannot be denied. But one thing still
little investigated is the period leading up to the beginning of the PT
government, when there were interesting debates about the public policy
proposals that could be implemented when Lula assumed the Presidency of the
Republic. One of them, for example, headed by the political scientist Wanderley
Guilherme dos Santos, who represented, unless mistaken, the group that would go
to the Ministry of Science and Technology, had very interesting ideas,ebased on
very reliableeconomic calculations, of
strengthening the research carried out in public universities. But, the
idandias that prevailed were those of Professor Fernando Haddad, who would
become, after Cristovam Buarque and Tarso Genro, the Minister of Education.
Generally speaking, he argued that the greater possibility of expanding access,
at low cost, would be for private institutions, whether community or
confessional. This is where the University for All Program (PROUNI) was
configured, which enabled the expansion of vacancies with resources from the
tax waiver mechanism. In numerical terms, it cannot be denied that it was,
rather, a successful project of inclusion – including the advent of
economicoand ethnic-racial quotas. But in the end, the major beneficiaries were
the "diploma factories", which were able to make a lot of money –
even though quality private institutions such as pontificalinstitutions,
confessionals and good-level communities could also be encouraged. But in the
end, it ended up favoring the commodification of higher education. Lula himself
did not admit criticism of PROUNI, even criticism st. Which is a questionable
position, since, after all, the role of academia is, yes, to criticize public
policies, regardless of our ideological and partisan positions. It is as Max
Weber has said: the intellectual is an unarmed prophet, stretched by the state,
to criticize the state itself. But no power likes that very much. And I've
always been critical in this sense, of collaborating to make policies better.
Also because it is not possible to deny that, in the short term, access mechanisms like this are important to
reach the unassisted, especially those who have had a low quality basic
education, who can there, in this experience, improve qualification and life.
This exists in much of the world, including the developed one, and which is
generally called post-secondary education. This can and should exist, as well
as Distance Education itself (Distance Education), also very stimulated in the
period. But not, from our point of view, as a priority public policy for higher
education, as Professor Haddad thought – who, not without a certain reason,
considered that investing resources, without due consideration and without
proper control, in federal educational institutions, would be a waste of public
resources. He regarded them as "bottomless bags", due to excessive,
almost automatic demands, for salaries and progressions – which invariably
resultin strikes and stoppages. Hence, it is also born that the afore mentioned
Reuni was born, as an attempt to refer this issue.
6.
In a text of 2005, you come to consider
PROUNI as a radicalization of the Fund for Student Financing of Higher
Education (FIES) – an old public policy, created still in the Military
Dictatorship, which had been reformulated by FHC, but which was also
strengthened under Lula. You even stated that by trying to combine citizenship
and privatization, the then government ended up strengthening private
institutions, even contrary to the current National Education Plan (PNE). He
added: "Some currents are broken that prevented access to higher education,
but there is no more than a fear of second-class citizenship to the
contemplated. In addition to the questionable quality of the courses offered,
the beneficiaries will have access to a privatist teaching and guided by the
lack of conditions that guarantee their permanence until obtaining the
diploma". Looking back to the past, it may be even difficult to imagine
that any party, whatever it was, could give up a government mechanism with such
political, electoral and institutional power. In this sense, it is worth
highlighting another dimension of continuity between the governments of the
PSDB and the PT: the claim that it would be possible to regulate this
educational market, through the National Council of Education (CNE), for
example.[5]
— Many researchers, including myself, who participated in
a group at the National Association for Research in Education (ANPEd) on the
subject, pointed out that these control mechanisms would not work. We did not
deny, as I said, the inclusive dimension of these actions, but we pointed out
that the private contingent is not satisfied with the limits. In the current
scenario, with the correlation of hegemonic political forces that we have, this
is even more evident. If, at the beginning, the concern was still noble, linked
to the formation of elites, currently what vige is a rampant pragmatism. Just
look at the commercials. I saw yesterday on television: "Take your course
without leaving home. It's only $99.00." It is very difficult today, this
type of offer to suffer some brake on the evaluation and control bodies. In the
PT governments, the list of enrollments, in undergraduate, between public and
private were maintained. There was an acute expansion, by the mechanisms we
have already pointed out, but there was a balance in the relationship, causing
the percentage of participation between public and private to be parked. In
recent years, we have even seen a decrease in the total number of students –
due to the economic crisis, which is expected to worsen with the pandemic we are
experiencing. But the trend, in the resumption, is a greater participation of
the private sector. At the present juncture, it will be very difficult to
contain the privatist lobbies, which represent very strong financial groups –
with great capacity for influence over the current government. And my
criticism, recalling what I have already said about what I think of the role of
the intellectual, in the sense pointed out by Weber, is that it is the great
historical bottleneck: several policies of governments, many even good, have
not turned into state policies. This demonstrates a great fragility of our,
political and societal.
7.
In this scenario, of unbridled pragmatism, as
you say,
in an increasingly unscientific social environment, is there room for the
survival of a Humanian model, albeit hybrid, of university?
— Even today the public sector concentrates many
so-called scientific careers. The private sector, on the other, invests more in
so-called professional careers. The only career that has a certain balance is
Medicine – with large public schools and expensive private schools. The
tendency is that the courses that havemercad are strengthened,
not only by reducing state investment, but also because competition, private,
by the resources of the public fund will tend to increase. In the Brazilian
graduate program, which is of excellence, the tendency is for gratuity to
remain, even with a slightly higher participation of the private sector – which
can only be charged in some areas where there is effective demand. In the area
of Education is that we have a relative exception, with great participation of
the private initiative – forged, even, with several retired professors from
state universities. In the area of cinema, for example, where I have also
worked, private participation is more robust than in others. That is, using
Professor Cunha's metaphor, the boundary between public and private will
continue to move. It will have differentiated impacts according to the areas
and courses. But the tendency to privatisation will gain more and more strength
– if there is no change in the social and political conjuncture that we are
living. But I doubt very much that this can happen in the short term, since the
conservative or reactionary forces have proved to be very actionable – even
attacking minimally civilizing public policies, such as affirmative action. And
not only attacking public higher education, but, in some cases, adopting
strategies of generational formation – as demonstrated by the most contemporary
studies of sociologist Maria Alice Nogueira, with which I have organized some
research on the work of Pierre Bourdieu – which do not dispense with what can
happen in Brazilian higher education. These elite contingents, including
university professors, are preparingutheir children to attend undergraduate
schools that specialize in niche markets, suchas fgv or INSPER, a famous são Paulo business school. Or,
as a complement, attend graduate school outside the country. The tendency, for
this audience, and also for some analysts, is that public universities look
like French university institutions: they will remain at a good level; but not
of excellence. Even by the sad assumption that there will be a fall in quality
by the public that begins to enter due to the so-called affirmative action
policies. The process, of course, is not irreversible. It will depend on what we
can do, internally and externally, to maintain the excellence of what we have
in graduate studies and also on the so-called less valued courses – including
in the field of Education, Pedagogy and other degrees. Taking advantage,
contrary to what some believe, even the strength of the new population
contingents that have entered and are still entering our courses, whose status
as a teacher, despite the proletarization process, is greater than the labor
markets that they could once achieve. From my point of view, we will live the
reclassification of some courses, with a potential positive repositioning of
their clientele. Not that I am optimistic, not least because our career will
remain under attack – especially for the kind of internationalization, as I said,
subordinate that we are adopting. And our category is still in a much more
reactive than affirmative posture. But we will have to learn to deal with this
situation to find ways of resistance and, more importantly, overcoming. One
challenge is to make what we do inside and outside the university more visible.
Not that we have to adopt common sense views on teaching work. But explain the
particularities of our profession. Some of the closest people, who are not from
the area, ask me, "Oh! But you don't show up on campus." I explain
that I am not a caretaker – that it is a noble but different profession that
requires physical presence. And that my research develops in the daily life of
society, in various spaces. And that, even, something unusual in other areas,
much of the resources I need to work are outside the university – including in
my home, in libraries, in digital files, etc. Perhaps the new media will make
this more evident, making dialogue, which is difficult, become more profitable.
In some way, the current coronavirus pandemic has allowed a greater
dissemination of scientific work. We will see if this trend will hold.
8.
And how could we improve the dialogue between the university and the rest of
the population?
— This is articulated with what we have just talked
about. It is very difficult for our population, which has poor access to Basic
Education, the understanding of the scientific way of working and the necessary
corresponding investment. And, also, with what I have already said about the reclassification
of some courses, with a potential positive repositioning of their clientele.
Bourdieu has a very interesting expression to define people of simple origin
who can, by opportunity, fiber and competence, enter environments previously
not intended for them. They are people, and here goes in a free translation,
which are "results of the commoner effort". And somehow these people
end up fitting, on some merit, to say, into the "self-fulfilling prophecies"rof
the education system – which often benefit students from more
"aristocratic" backgrounds. The challenge of this contingent is to
act in the new environment in a more democratic way – to do as fgv did with
some of my colleagues, from more modest backgrounds, teaching them to speak.
After all, the university is a transformative experience. And thus fulfilling
the function of denaturalizing the ideology of the gift – of the
achievableself-fulfillingdestinies. Questioning, therefore, the contradictions
and inequalities existing in the differentiated educational offerings put to
the various social classes. It is, in the end, the synthesis of Bourdieu's own
educational sociology, when he stated: more than one, between two young people
of the French bourgeoisie, goes to university; less than two, among a hundred
young working class, manages to get to university. Which is socially terrible,
since these selection mechanisms are heavy. And the young workers' families who
go, will suffer greatly. Most of them will still enter professional universes
that demand less cultural capital. But it is from this group, perhaps, in the
Brazilian case, that some forms of action can come that makes the best defense
of the public university – even if we keep in mind that social mobility is slow.
It's more a generational issue than an individual one. On the issue of gender,
for example. Maybe my daughter's grandchildren are the real witnesses to the
struggles we're fighting today. Just as we are witnesses of struggles that
preceded us. Hence the importance of being attentive to the real Brazil we face
today. An extremely harsh reality, in which we watch a shocking unscientific
spirit, based on a retrograde moral agenda and unrepublican religiosity, which
makes us wonder: where are we going to end up? Our role in this scenario is to
disseminate scientific thinking – not forgetting that, somehow, we are always
behind. And in increasingly difficult working conditions, they harvest us
because it is not part of the calculations of "academic profitability"
in force. In the case of graduate school, sometimes we end up being tougher on
us than the system itself.
9.
Speaking of Bourdieu, here is one last question, but that, in addition to
articulating with the issue of the expansion of higher education, the central
theme of the interview, is also in line with the interests of these
interviewers who toil in the field of Sociology of Education, in which the
respective French thinker is a great reference. How can we attract new readers
to the Bourdieusian universe – which, we know, is considered quite airtight and
difficult?
— This question reminded me of the times when I was a
research assistant to Sergio Miceli. In a discipline on Durkheim, the students
turned to me to ask the teacher for a "new" path to the author's
understanding – since direct contact with his texts was not being very
beneficial. Hence he recommended to us the reading of empirical foundations of sociological explanation,of the master
Florestan Fernandes. Well, the concrete fact is that the students decided to go
back to the originals of the French author. After all, Florestan had several
qualities, but his sociological texts, we can say, are not so easy, at first
contact. What is certain is that this is a difficult question to answer, since
it varies a lot of the type of teaching work and the student's repertoire.
Thinking about it, even by doing, with your permission, a self-propaganda, is
that we launched the Bourdieu Vocabulary. [6]It was a tremendous challenge, but I believe, modestly,
that it helps a lot. Bourdieu is an author that we, when we start to have
contact, do not know very well where to start. Almost all his texts are written
with many references, based on a practical epistemology that is very proper to
him – and therefore, at first glance, very airtight. For example, you cannot
dialogue with it if you start from a very broad generic premise, such as the
notion of "last instance." No, if the description of a phenomenon begins
already with some explanation of "last instance", it is because one
does not need to explain anything else. It is necessary to analyze and
understand the mediations that may even result in something that is called
"last instance". And our Vocabulary helps right there,
since it tries to identify a certain order in the constitution of the terms of
Bourdiesian sociology. And we used a notion that he liked very much, based on
the philosophy of Ludwig Wittengenstein, of using concepts as a
"toolbox" for the understanding of social reality and also of the
author's own work. There are also some new commentators who draw very
interesting maps. One of them, which I indicate, is josé Marciano Monteiro,
released last year, which is a beautiful introductory reading. In the field of
educational research, a good tip is a small essay by Tomaz Tadeu da Silva, who
is in the book Terminal [7]Identities.[8] And there he makes a similar warning to what I did
earlier. Those who arrive at university with a finalistic motivationto, as it is
not uncommonin Pedagogy, will have a
great disappointment. Bourdieu is somehow discouraging in this sense, since he
is very skeptical of the possibility of a strictly militant sociology. I
remember a student who, at the beginning of one of my courses, said to me,
"I'm not going to do this course because I don't like the author." I
asked why. She said, "I prefer [Antonio] Gramsci." Understanding the
issue, I tried to argue that the two authors – extremely important – are different.
One was a great political activist who produced seminal reflections, in a given
context, without empirical research – that is, taking his practice as his own
object. And the other has always been an academic who based his epistemological
assumptions on analysis of concrete issues, taking the various historical
subjects as "objects" – although with the care of not objecting to
them in an aprioristic theory. They are different paths of knowledge
production, not necessarily self-cancelable. Maybe they can be complementary.
I've had a lot of dialogue, but it didn't work. The girl's gone. And not just
her. But I'm so sure you've got a good class. It is that Bourdieu is really
very disamer to the perspective, common in our area, that through a long
(sometimes not so much) learning process opens the way to a collective, or even
individual, process of emancipation. It does not give because the very
production of knowledge, from the Bourdiesian perspective, needs to be
contradicted, criticized, and known. This requires a "fiber" of
self-criticism that can put into that our militant trust. From my teaching
experiences with Bourdieu, including extension actions for a larger audience of
educators, what I realize is that his work allows, in the end, a very deep
self-analysis of our own practices – and of the structures that condition our
subjectivities. It hurts a lot. It could be the beginning of an emancipation
process. But you don't guarantee it. And Bourdieu
applies this to himself, especially when he speaks of his family origins and
his own trajectory – of isolation and loneliness. Up close, when we stop to
analyze, you realize that Bourdieu was never a happy person. He has always been
a dissatisfied person and has always been displaced, in conflict with himself
and others – a person, this is known, difficult to live with, including with
his collaborators. In fact, he discovers the illusion that the academic
environment is a special place, separate from the world, as an exclusive
locus of virtue. But returning to the subject, one can start with his
classic texts, but there will be a lot of difficulty, by the type of writing
adopted. A good way out, perhaps, is to start with his last texts, the
so-called combat writings, such as
Contrafogos – in which he practices a posture of scientific[9]
dissemination more adjusted to the public. Anyway, this will always depend on
the type of audience, which is what will determine the paths that can alleviate
difficulties and resistances. Even taking into account the quality of the
translations, which are quite varied. Finally, one last tip: avoid making
condemnations to the author – and this is not just about Bourdieu – from the
current context. Every author is a person of his time. And that should be taken
into consideration. And Bourdieu, like everyone else, has his doors closed. But
in the end, his work remains powerful for the unveiling of the contradictions
of our education systems and unequal production of cultural capital. It is
worth it.
ABOUT INTERVIEWERS
MARCOS
MARQUES DE OLIVEIRA holds a post-doctorate in Political Sociology from the
State University of Norte Fluminense Darcy Ribeiro (UENF). Professor of
Sociology of Education at the Angra dos Reis Institute of Education (IEAR) and
researcher of the Graduate Program in Education of the Fluminense Federal
University (UFF).
E-mail: marcos_marques@id.uff.br
NEVALDO
LEOCÁDIA BASTOS JÚNIOR holds a Master's degree in Education from the
Fluminense Federal University. Graduated in Pedagogy from the Angra dos Reis
Institute of Education of the Fluminense Federal University (IEAR/UFF).
E-mail: nevaldojunior@id.uff.br
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
AFRÂNIO MENDES CATANI holds a
PhD and Master's degree in Sociology from the University of São Paulo (USP), livre
docente by the same University, professor titular apsentado da Faculdade de Educação da
Universidade de São Paulo
Universidade de
São Paulo ((USP),professor visitante da
Programa de Post-Graduação em Educação da Universidade Federal Fluminense(UFF)graduado in Public Administration by fundação
Getúlio Vargas (FGV/SP),p skierof CNPq (Level 1A), with studies in the area of
Education, with emphasis on higher education policies,
sociology of education and culture;and, dand Cinema, with
emphasis on the history of Latin American cinema and Universidade Federal
Fluminense ( Portuguese. He was coordinator
of the State and Educational Policy GTs (1996-1998) and Higher Education Policy
(2010-2013) of ANPEd and coordinator at the same entity
Scientific Committee (2008-2010).
E-mail: amcatani@usp.br
Received: 09.09.2020
Accepted: 12.09.2020