The current crisis at the University of São Paulo has arisen through the revelation of the financial situation and the strike movements which lasted four months, and has been “diagnosed” as extremely serious and able to challenge the leaders of the institution to find solutions to problems of great complexity. According to political scientist José Álvaro Moisés, coordinator of the Center for Public Policy Research (NUPPs), "USP has accumulated serious challenges and is seemingly becoming less and less able to cope with the enormous changes taking place in society."
Motivated by the need to collaborate in the search for answers to these challenges, the NUPPs and IEA-USP’s Quality on Democracy Research Group, also coordinated by Moisés, have decided to hold the debate Reflections on the Crisis at USP on October 2 at 2 pm in IEA-USP’s event room.
The panelists will be Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz (scientific director of FAPESP), José Álvaro Moisés (FFLCH, NUPPs and IEA-USP), José Arthur Giannotti (FFLCH and CEBRAP), José Eduardo Krieger (provost for research at USP), José Goldemberg (IEE, IEA-USP and former president of USP), Elizabeth Balbachevsky (FFLCH, NUPPs and IEA-USP), Eunice Durham (FFLCH, NUPPs and IEA-USP) and Martin Grossmann (director of the IEA-USP).
The event will be broadcast live on the web.
CHALLENGES
According to Moisés, some of the challenges to be faced by the University are: to attend to an increasing and more diverse social demand, to require more flexible curricula for the training of new generations, to consider the increasingly close relationship between science, technology and development, as well as the growing influence of the new culture of information and its effects on teaching, research and administration, and the competition to guide its position among the world's best."
In his view, the crisis has also revealed "deep structural flaws in managing systems and representing the university, and the rigidity and complexity of its bureaucracy, which prevent full discussion of the institution's general policy." Moisés points out that there is a need to discuss a broad reform of the structure of the university, able to adapt it to address existing distortions in order to promote the budget’s balance and to keep safe against occurrences of new crises.
