Video installation ''About Academia," by Antoni Muntadas, in 2017

Based on his experience in American higher education, artist Antoni Muntadas inaugurates in Brazil an online interpretation of "About Academia." The project discusses the role and function of universities today, the place of art in this context, the relationship between public and private, tradition and contemporaneity, the future of universities and interdisciplinarity, based on interviews with professors and students.

"About Academia," a project originally presented at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, invited by Harvard University, during Antoni Muntadas' last teaching period in the program in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ACT MIT), in 2011, followed in different versions to cities like Boston, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Seville, among others.

The Brazilian version of the video installation "About Academia," which at first would occupy the Biblioteca Brasiliana at the University of São Paulo's (USP) Butantã Campus in São Paulo, translates as another work of the multimedia artist and professor, by creating a digital interpretation of the original installation, developed as a website, which can be accessed from April 30 at https://aboutacademia.iea.usp.br/. For the first time it is being shown in Latin America, with all its materials translated into Portuguese, in a bilingual version (Spanish), through a partnership between the Fórum Permanente, the Instituto de Estudos Avançados at USP, and the Biblioteca Brasiliana José and Guita Mindlin, with the support of the Government of the State of São Paulo, through the Secretariat of Culture and Creative Economy, and the Cultural Action Program (PROAC).

"About Academia" provokes a reflection through art about the American academic and university system, more specifically about the public/private duality, as well as the complex relationships that exist between the production of knowledge and the economic interests that influence education in its different forms of pedagogy. Muntadas' video installation considers the possible conflict between a faculty (and its values) and an administration (and its power). In order to have a fruitful circulation of the project in universities outside the US, Muntadas proposes round table discussions that contextualize the conflicts and difficulties peculiar to the university system that hosts it, confronting it with other models in different contexts and cultures.

Sketch by Antoni Muntadas for the video installation ''About Academia''

The project is composed of two sets of screenings and publications. While "About Academia I" (2011) addresses these issues from the perspective of professors and academics, "About Academia II" (2017) delves into its themes exclusively from the students' point of view. Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, the first exhibition of this project in the Southern Hemisphere takes place through a virtual room, on a website where it is also possible to access the three roundtables that take place on April 30 and May 10, and where two bilingual publications are available with the complete transcripts of the speeches of the interviewees, among them Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Carol Becker, Ute Meta Bauer, and the students.

The creation of the immersive, online, interactive video installation gives prominence to the two sets: "About Academia I" (2011) and "About Academia II" (2017). It thus respects the duration of the times of the videos originally developed by the artist for their existence in a real physical space.  Thus, despite the interactivity of navigation, it is not possible for the visitor to control the projected videos. The aesthetic experience in virtuality therefore has correspondence with the real time of the analog exhibition space.

Publications

The publications in Spanish and Portuguese versions are partially available on the exhibition site. In order to have full access, it is necessary to buy them for a symbolic price. The link for this purchase is through the exhibition site.

Round tables

The round tables will be broadcasted in the exhibition site and will be available later on this site and in the sites of the partners (IEA-USP, Biblioteca Brasiliana and Fórum Permanente).

Which university do we want? | Watch the recorded event

Friday, April 30th, from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm (Brasília time)

• Néstor Garcia Canclini - anthropologist, philosopher, chair holder at IEA-USP

• Eliana Sousa Silva - educator, socio-cultural activist, former chair former at IEA-USP

• Macaé Evaristo - educator, former State Secretary of Minas Gerais

• Ailton Krenak - philosopher, environmentalist, indigenous leadership

• Antoni Muntadas - artist

• Martin Grossmann (moderation)

Intercontinental academy | Watch the recorded event

Monday, May 10, from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm (Brasilia time)

• Nikki Moore - art historian - Wake Forest University (ICA-UBIAS)

• Érica Peçanha - anthropologist and post-doctorate at the IEA-USP

• David Gange - historian - Birmingham University (ICA-UBIAS)

• Julia Buenaventura - art historian - Universidad de los Andes

• Mariko Murata - media and museum theorist - Kansai University

• Martin Grossmann (moderation)

University and context | Watch the recorded event

Monday, May 10, from 1:30 pm to 4:00 pm (Brasilia time)

• Naomar de Almeida Filho - epidemiologist, former dean of UFBA, professor of IEA-USP

• Helena Nader - biomedical sciences, vice-president of ABC, Chair at IEA-USP

• Guilherme Wisnik - architect, curator, professor at FAU-USP

• Renato Janine Ribeiro (moderation) - philosopher, former Minister of Education (FFLCH-USP)

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Antoni Muntadas (1942, Barcelona, Spain - lives and works in New York)

Antoni Muntadas during his conference at the IEA in 2017

He studied at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales in Barcelona and at the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. A pioneer in the use of video since the mid-seventies, his production has expanded to the use of various plastic languages, media, and supports, with intervention in public space being one of his most radical forms of cultural criticism.

Muntadas is an artist and teacher of proven recognition, having been invited to give courses, workshops and lectures in several of the most important art schools and museums in the world, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - School of Architecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he taught the discipline 'Seminar on Public Art' (early 2001); he is a regular lecturer at Cornell University Seminars in the program 'Dialogues Art and Architecture' (early 2006) and professor at the IUAV Venice, Italy, (early 2004). His work has been exhibited all over the world, in events such as the Venice Biennale (1976) where later in 2005 he occupied the entire Spanish pavilion; the Kassel Documenta (VI and X Editions); the 16th São Paulo Biennale and the Havana and Lyon Biennales. He has exhibited, among others, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the MACBA in Barcelona. He is considered the father of Spanish net.art and defines himself as 'a translator of images of what is happening in the contemporary world'.

He has received numerous grants and awards, such as the 2005 National Prize of Plastic Arts, granted by the Ministry of Culture of Spain for his artistic trajectory and for being one of the most innovative artists of the Spanish panorama. Antoni Muntadas also has a long history of dialogue with South America, especially Brazil, a country that has been home to his work since the late sixties and where he has held exhibitions and taught courses in museums, biennials and institutions, including as a guest of the Department of Fine Arts at the School of Communications and Arts, USP, in 1996, 1987 and 1992. Among the lectures given in other institutions in Brazil, the highlights are those at the University of Brasilia in 2002 and 2003, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói in 2001, and at the public art event 'Artecidadezonaleste' in 1999, where he also developed an artistic proposal. He is an artist represented by Galeria Luisa Strina where, since 1970, he exhibits regularly.

Fórum Permanente

Fórum Permanente (FP) is a floating and ubiquitous platform for research, criticism, action / cultural mediation and cultural memory, acting, nationally and internationally, at different levels of the contemporary art and culture system. It has established itself in this scenario as a cultural interface, which constitutes itself, in a hybrid and simultaneous way, as an agora, a museum-laboratory, a multimedia magazine, a library, a living archive. In its national and international reference site <www.forumpermanente.org>, the FP, besides keeping the memory of the actions already carried out and in progress, hosts research projects in art and culture, makes available information and the memory of undergraduate and graduate courses in the area, dossiers from cultural institutions and organizations, as well as interviews and meetings held by its team and partners. The site's content is published under a free license, allowing full accessibility to its rich collection as well as reproduction for non-commercial purposes.

Brasiliana Guita and José Mindlin Library

Opened to the public in 2013, the Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin Library (BBM) is an organ of the Pró-Reitoria de Cultura e Extensão Universitária of the University of São Paulo (USP). It was created in January 2005 to house and integrate the Brasiliana collection gathered over more than eighty years by bibliophile José Mindlin and his wife Guita. With its expressive set of books and manuscripts, the brasiliana collection assembled by Guita and José Mindlin is considered the most important collection of its kind formed by private individuals. There are about 32 thousand titles that correspond to 60 thousand volumes, approximately. Part of the donated collection belonged to bibliophile and librarian Rubens Borba de Moraes, in whom José Mindlin recognized "a kind of older brother", owner of "a love for books and reading very similar to mine". The library formed by José Mindlin throughout his life was organized in four main thematic areas: Brazilian issues, literature in general, art books, and books as art objects due to their typography, layout, illustration, binding, etc. The collection donated to USP in 2006 remains a living library, according to José Mindlin's ideals, acquiring new titles and collections that dialogue with the initial sections of the collection, gathering material about Brazil or that, having been written and/or published by Brazilians, are important to the understanding of the country's history and culture.

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Antoni Muntadas: About Academia I-II, an Online Interpretation, 2011-2017 (2021)

From April 30 to October 31, 2021

Culturator: Martin Grossmann (Fórum Permanente-FP)

Executive production (Brazil): Diego Kerchove (FP)

Executive production (Spain): Andrea Nacach

Digital project: Arthur Lauriano do Carmo (coordination - FP)

Design: Arthur Lauriano do Carmo (FP) and Raul Luna

Programming: Marcela Mancino

Website: https://aboutacademia.iea.usp.br/

In addition to perspectives for universities, and urban and environmental concerns, the 95th issue of IEA's journal "Estudos Avançados," launched this month, also discusses the judicialization of health and the precautionary principle. According to editor Alfredo Bosi, "the current primacy of technology is one of the transversal themes that bring together articles about so diverse objects."

The issue also contains reviews of eight books on visual arts, literature, political science, economics, and globalization.

The opening section has "University" as theme and features an article by former president of USP Jacques Marcovitch. The professor, who has also been director of the IEA, analyzes three aspects: the Academic Performance and Evaluations project, coordinated by him; the transformations undergone by academic institutions; and the challenge of proposals that in his view would disqualify public universities, such as the implementation of tuition fees.

The need for universitary adaptation to a new reality dominated by information networks is analyzed by Luiz Bevilacqua, a visiting professor at the IEA from 2017 to 2018, in the article "The Last Train to Alexandria".

The articles that are specifically focused on USP present studies conducted by researchers Ricardo Terra and Carlota Boto. While Terra brings up a self-reflection on the institution, including its financial imbalance, missions and overall evaluation, Boto shows how the concept and the project of USP appeared in the discourse and in the actions of intellectuals in São Paulo and abroad in the early 1930s.

City and Environment

The urban degradation of large cities and the deforestation of vast regions in Brazil are two of the addressed themes in this section. Bosi emphasizes the conflict between defenders of a more humane style of housing and the "violent deterioration of the space where the lower-middle class neighborhoods and the slums on the periphery of large cities are examples and victims," as discussed in the articles "End of Utopias, The City of São Paulo and the Discussion of Contemporary Urbanism," by urban planner Antonio Claudio Pinto da Fonseca and historian Carlos Guilherme Mota, and "The Conflict of Space: The Tense Port-City Relationship in Urban Planning," by João Mendes Rocha, a specialist in public policy and government management.

Regarding the articles on environmentalism, the editor highlights the concern with "economic interests that promote the wild deforestation," remembering that "after a short period of relative control, the anti-ecological threat that reaches entire regions of the Amazon and the Northeast has returned." The theme is present in "Territories and Political Alliances of Post-Environmentalism," by experts from various institutions, and "Characteristics and Provenance of Firewood Used for Cooking in Brazil," by Adriana Gioda.

The other two sections are "Health," with two articles, and "The Precautionary Principle," with three collaborations. The first two texts discuss the guidelines of the National Council of Justice for the action of law professionals in the realization of the right to health, and techniques of welfare coaching in the change of lifestyle in the public health system.

In the article "The Adoption of Precautionary Measures Against Risks in the Use of Technoscientific Innovations," philosopher Hugh Lacey, a former visiting professor at the IEA and current member of the research group Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Science and Technology, discusses the responsibilities of scientists and institutions in conducting the research needed to inform precautionary measures. Lacey's text is accompanied by two articles by other researchers: one revises the precautionary principle in the Brazilian legal system to international agreements while the other discusses the main arguments involved in the scientific debate on the principle of substantial equivalence, which states that genetically modified organisms, popularly known as transgenic, are chemically equivalent to organisms selected by traditional breeding techniques and thus would not require additional toxicological studies.

The list below contains the names of the authors who have contributed with each one of the addressed themes:

Leading Article

Alfredo Bosi

University

Jacques Marcovitch
Carlota Boto
Ricardo Terra
Luiz Bevilacqua

City and Environment

Roberto Araújo, Ima Célia Guimarães Vieira, Peter Mann de Toledo, Andréa dos Santos Coelho, Eloi Dalla-Nora and Felipe Milanez
João Mendes Rocha
Thais da Silva Chedid and Edmilson Moutinho dos Santos
Adriana Gioda
Ranulfo Paiva Sobrinho, Junior Ruiz Garcia, Alexandre Gori Maia and Ademar Ribeiro Romero
Candido Malta Campos
Antonio Claudio Pinto da Fonseca and Carlos Guilherme Mota
Marcos Cesar Weiss

Health

Aline Marques, Carlos Rocha, Felipe Asensi and Diego Machado Monnerat
Luciana Oquendo Pereira-Lancha, Danielle Kallas, Paula Helena Dayan and Antonio Herbert Lancha Jr.

The Precautionary Principle

Hugh Lacey
Fernanda Viegas Reichardt and Mayara Regina Araújo dos Santos
Luciana Zaterka

Reviews

Leonardo Octavio Belinelli de Brito
André Roncaglia de Carvalho
Fabio Mascaro Querido
Ricardo Ohtake
Flávia Amparo
Marcos Antonio de Moraes
Ana Luiza Martins
José Augusto Ribas Miranda

In addition to being a professor at EACH-USP, Barreyro also works in two postgraduate programs at the University: Education and Integration in Latin America. Her main research focus is on policies and evaluation of higher education at the global, regional and national scales.

In these first decades of the 21st century, there is a phase within the process of globalization in which national states are increasingly less autonomous towards other institutions that make up the global governance of higher education, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO,) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD,) the World Bank, UNESCO, NGOs and various foundations.

This evaluation belongs to educator Gladys Beatriz Barreyro, a professor at USP's School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities (EACH,) and currently a participant of IEA's Sabbatical Year Program. She is developing a study on the impact of international university rankings on the institutional identity, and teaching, research and extension purposes of Brazilian research universities, having USP and UNICAMP as references.

Entitled "Internationalization of Higher Education: Use of Rankings," the research project aims to reduce the lack of studies on the subject in Brazil and disseminate the international literature on it.

Among the educational policies of this phase of globalization, Barreyro identifies the emergence of international university rankings as a new way of dealing with quality on a global scale in the first decade of the century, impacting regional and national scales. There is also a role model of the "world-class university," institutions dedicated to "applied and (if possible) profitable research."

For her, rankings have introduced the logic of competition between institutions in a global perspective and generated impacts on national and institutional policies, "despite their methodological limitations."

Part of the project was developed in the first half of this year, when she was at the IEA on sabbatical leave. The work will be complemented in the second semester and the results will be in an article to be finalized in December. She also intends to present them at a public event.

As it is an exploratory research, Barreyro is analyzing the material published by USP's Journal and UNICAMP's Portal from 2013 to 2017 on the positions occupied by both universities in the rankings. From this examination she will try to answer four questions:

• What is the use of the rankings at USP and Unicamp, and for what reasons?
• What changes in the identity and policies of these institutions have been produced by the use of these rankings, and what are the justifications for it?
• If institutional policies based on rankings have emerged, what are they?
• If the rankings are affecting the purposes of teaching, research and extension of both universities, what are the affected aspects?

The material is being studied from the critical analysis of the discourse oriented by categories, to be detected in the course of examining the texts.

In parallel to the survey and analysis of the materials published by the media of both universities, Barreyro has been dedicating to two complementary activities: the bibliographic review on international rankings in national and international literature, and on world-class universities; and the systematization of the place occupied by both institutions in international and Latin American rankings, and in the list of BRIC universities.

Globalization

In the final decades of the 20th century, the impact of globalization on educational policies began, creating an internationally structured agenda for the area, according to the researcher. "In the national education systems, there was concern about evaluation. In the case of higher education in the 1980s, policies to measure its quality began, initiating the first phase of the 'Evaluating State,' an expression coined by British sociologist Guy Neave in 2012."

She states that the reduction of expenditures since the 1980s, due to the crisis of the welfare state, "have motivated the adoption of accountability policies, such as evaluations in national education systems started in the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America, stemming from neoliberal reforms."

Two other aspects of globalization have influenced vocational training, according to Barreyro: the processes of flexible accumulation (also called toyotism, which provides for flexibilization of production according to demand) and the emergence of the knowledge society. "They have resulted in the need to train professionals for the so-called knowledge economy," which "put higher education in the spotlight."

"Once considered a public good for the purpose of reproducing values and training human resources, higher education has become a private good, a commodity subject to the rules of commerce," says the researcher. She highlights the contributions to that change provided by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT,) which was in force until 1994, and by the World Trade Organization negotiations for the inclusion of education in the liberalization of trade in goods and services.

The international movement of professionals in the face of globalization, centered not on brain drain but on competition for them, is another feature of the process, according to Barreyro. On this competition, she cites the evaluation of two authors, Rahul Choudana and Hans de Wit, who assert that the knowledge economies of the OECD countries require highly qualified professionals and must resort to immigrants with this profile, since their population is aging and has diminished the interest of their young people in the hard sciences.

In the global education agenda, quality and its assessment are one of the political priorities, says Barreyro. "In higher education, quality assessment began to be developed in the 1980s and 1990s in European and Latin American countries with the creation of accreditation systems and agencies." She says that these countries have transformed the US accreditation model - "regardless of government" - in the so-called Evaluating State, mentioned by Guy Neave.

Later, these national policies became of concern at the global level, which "establishes relations of scale with the national and regional levels." According to her, Portuguese education sociologist Almerindo Janela Afonso sees a later stage, called by him "Post-Evaluating State," in which the decision is increasingly shunned by the decision of the national states, especially in the peripheral countries.

"The advance of knowledge in recent decades has accelerated in such a way that it has generated a true cultural shock: one becomes aware of its impact after it has already happened and gone," says the coordinator of the Study Group "USP facing the challenges of the 21st century," Luiz Bevilacqua, a visiting professor at the IEA and former president of the ABC Federal University.

He believes there has never been a time like the present. "There is no prior experience, and there are no models or ready and unique solutions." And the university is not immune to this process: "Being a traditionally conservative institution, USP is subject to grave perplexities, which block the actions that are necessary to survive this shock wave."

Acting properly is an unquestionable need, according to Bevilacqua. "Given the uncertainties of the future, the best strategy is to loosen the ties, flexibilize, and broaden the spectrum of influences on university identity."

To survive the cultural shock it is indispensable to take risks, says the researcher. "It is within this framework that we intend to propose some changes that facilitate the passage through the turmoil of our times." Created at the end of 2007, the group is taking care to limit itself to plausible ("but not inconclusive") proposals, conscious of the "conservatism which imprisons Brazilian universities," according to Bevilacqua.

In his assessment, it is essential to reform undergraduate courses: "They need to undergo an academic and organizational transition. The idea is to offer them in interdisciplinary centers, new units structured from the thematic axes resulting from the convergence and articulation of the classic disciplines.

For the group, postgraduation and research already absorb the various forms of disciplinary convergence without difficulty, but the organization of undergraduation "remains petrified in the form of departments that often no longer respond to current challenges." The objective is to propose actions that allow the academic and administrative restructuring of USP, so the demands of higher education of this century can be met.

"It is necessary to reorganize the main themes, showing the interrelation between them, which was conquered with the recent scientific and technological development." In addition, undergraduation should be directed to the formation of people "with intellectual independence and low aversion to risks, so that the university is a place where learning prevails over teaching."

These changes should not only address the restructuring needs of academic management for professional training purposes. The group see this undergraduation reform as one of the components of a broad framework of changes that Brazilian universities must undergo in order to survive the radical changes that are underway, and continue to contribute to the development of the country.

Based on the identification of the obstacles that make it difficult for the institution to reform, the intention of the researchers is to find the solutions with greater viability - and less internal resistance - that can eliminate or circumvent them. The proposals will be discussed with various sectors of USP and forwarded to the pertinent instances.

The work has been developed in six modules:

• Cultural context of the 21st century: the cultural shock wave era
• International context - Impact on higher education
• Historical aspects of the Brazilian university
• The Brazilian university in face of the challenges of the 21st century
• Critical points of the Brazilian university and USP in particular
• Desirable, plausible and feasible proposals

Luiz Bevilacqua: "At university, learning must prevail over teaching"

In addition to Bevilacqua, other members of the study group are: Arlindo Philippi Jr., from USP's School of Public Health (FSP), Carlos Alberto Barbosa Dantas and Henrique von Dreifus, both from USP's Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME), Elizabeth Balbachevsky, from USP's Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH), Eugênio Bucci, from USP's School of Communications and Arts (ECA), Guilherme Ary Plonski, deputy director of the IEA, and a professor at USP's Polytechnic School (POLI) and at USP's Faculty of Economics, Administration and Accounting (FEA), Naomar de Almeida Filho, former president of UFBA and UFSB, Paulo Saldiva, director of the IEA and a professor at USP's School of Medicine (FM), and Roseli de Deus Lopes, a professor at POLI.

International context

According to the coordinator, although the academic world is partially responsible for the cultural revolution brought by digital technologies, universities do not evolve in the same speed as the contemporary context.

"Only three decades separate the invention of the world wide web and the virtually universal use of digital communication." For him, the speed of transformation reveals that it is not one more common evolutionary process, but a "shock wave" with the resulting discontinuity.

"It is clear that we are not facing a rapid evolution, but a leap into the future, in which sociocultural transformations also take place rapidly, which makes universities subject to discontinuity as well."

Another aspect of worldwide scope to be considered is the globalization-polarization dynamics of today, which "affects the evolution of scientific, technological, social and artistic ways," says Bevilacqua.

He points out that the main economic blocs have been promoting innovations in higher education, aiming to maintain leadership in scientific and technological production." Since 1999, the European Union has implemented a common model of curricular architecture, creating a network of cooperation between the countries that came to be known with the Bologna Process. The USA government and scientific organizations have recently launched several major university reform initiatives, especially at research universities. It is also necessary to consider the challenges that transnational university networks bring to national higher education systems in countries such as Brazil."

The huge contingent of Brazilians seeking access to higher education makes the country the target of initiatives that treat higher education as a business opportunity, he says. "This makes education a major national strategic issue. This framework has to be taken into account when planning the direction of university education, with academia taking a more proactive rather than responsive role."

The group believes that internationalization in the industry will influence interaction with the business sector in general and industry in particular, forcing the university to leave its walls and discuss the priorities of national development policy with government and business.

USP also needs to be more present in decision-making positions in international education institutions and organizations, as well as offer more programs that are capable of attracting students from all over the world, researchers argue. This presence must be accompanied by larger commitments for the expansion of technical, scientific and social exchange, and the mobility of human resources. This "requires a change of attitude that is not always considered."

"The external mobility of professors and students is intensifying. For the process to be effective, we must also stimulate internal mobility, still incipient in our universities."

Challenging projects

Brazilian universities have evolved faster than the industrial sector and this causes an imbalance between supply and demand of qualified personnel, particularly of masters and doctors, stresses the coordinator. "It is therefore urgent to revise the State's economic-industrial development policy in order to allow the original technological advances to be achieved and new horizons for graduate students to be opened."

In his opinion, USP must question the direction of state and federal development policies, which currently bring difficulties for graduates: "We should approach representative bodies of the business sector, and representatives of the Legislative and Executive Powers to formulate policies stimulating national development from major challenging projects."

"USP needs to be involved in this dimension of development policy for its own survival and for the good of its students." He emphasizes that it is also necessary to follow this line of action in relation to the social and human sciences by stimulating cultural projects.

The classification of universities by performance as a reference for priorities and investments is another issue to be analyzed. This can not be done without careful critique of the evaluation criteria, according to Bevilacqua.

"USP must interact with the State to discuss these criteria and standards of performance measurement. In addition, when analyzing the procedures of the various agencies, it must check how they interfere in its internal policy."

About Academia is the theme of the conference that Catalan artist and professor Antoni Muntadas, from the Institute of Architecture of Venice, will give on August 18, at 2.00 pm, at the IEA. He will discuss the project that he has presented in several countries. The event will be held in Spanish and broadcast live over the internet.

The project consists of an exhibition dedicated to the reflection on two aspects: the relationship between university teaching practices and academia - as an emblematic institution of knowledge in the West - and how the American system of higher education, with its public / private duality and its different cultural, economic, social and political forms, has influenced the education and consequently the different pedagogical models of the United States.

When promoting the discussion about the project in another country, Muntadas proposes to hold a debate about local teaching and education models. This will be the case of the event at the IEA, organized by the Research Group Fórum Permanente: Cultural System Between Public and Private and coordinated by Martin Grossmann, professor of USP's School of Communications and Arts (ECA) and former director of the Institute.

The first edition of About Academia was developed and produced between March 2009 and October 2010 in Cambridge, USA, at Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Muntadas taught in the Visual Arts Program of the School of Architecture from 1990 to 2014. The exhibition was first presented at Harvard's Carpenter Visual Arts Center in March 2011. It was then shown in Vancouver and in Amsterdam. From September to November this year, it will be the turn of Seville to host it.

The artist clarifies that the project has direct correspondence with the work "Between Frames: the Forum", developed between 1983 and 1993, in which he proposed the observation and analysis of the art system through interviews with more than 150 "players" from different segments of the area (museums, galleries, collectors, critics and means of communication, among others).

Artist and professor Antoni Muntadas

For the current project, Muntadas has researched the historical development of academia from its creation in ancient Greece, its refoundation during the Enlightenment and establishment in the New World, until its current conception. In addition, he has interviewed a group of renowned professors from Harvard, MIT and other American research universities. Some of them are Carol Becker, Noam Chomsky, John Coatsworth, Fernando Coronil, Thomas Cummins, Bradley Epps, David Harvey, Ute Meta Bauer, Doris Sommer, Mark Wigley and Howard Zinn. This group was expanded in other editions of the project.

Muntadas was born in Barcelona in 1942 and lives in New York since 1971. His projects address social, political and communication issues, such as the relationship between public and private space within certain social milestones or information channels and how they are used to censor or promote ideas.

In his works, Muntadas uses photography, video, printed material, internet, installations and interventions in urban spaces. He has participated, and organizes seminars and exhibitions in institutions in Europe, North America, South America and Asia. Reina Sofia, Tate Gallery, MoMA and MAC are some of the museums that have works by the artist, who received prizes and scholarships from institutions in various countries.

Photos: Antoni Muntadas's personal collection

José Teixeira Coelho Netto (left),
Jane Ohlmeyer and Guilherme Ary Plonski

It has been a while since it is rare to find research on natural sciences that does not involve interdisciplinary teams and the use of digital technologies. But the emphasis on these aspects is not exclusive of the natural sciences and is increasingly present in the social sciences and humanities.

The IEA hosted Jane Ohlmeyer, a professor of modern history and director of the Trinity Long Room Hub (TLRH), research institute of arts and humanities at Trinity College Dublin, on August 24, to address this issue.

The conference The Power of Interdisciplinary Research: the Example of Digital Humanities was coordinated by Guilherme Ary Plonski, deputy director of the Institute. The debater was José Teixeira Coelho Netto, coordinator of IEA's Computational Humanities Study Group.

This has been Ohlmeyer's sixth visit to Brazil. Her relations with USP are due to the interaction she has with the researchers of the W.B. Yeats Chair of Irish Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH).

Ohlmeyer has reported her experience in a characteristic interdisciplinary work of what can be done in digital humanities: the project in 1641 Depositions, a collaboration of researchers from the arts, humanities, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Jane has also presented an overview of the TLRH.

Infrastructure and networks

Building a broad infrastructure for digital humanities in Ireland and in connection with the European landscape of the area has been a fundamental condition for the project's success, according to Ohlmeyer: "I realized that from the start, a decade ago."

She said that the digital humanities are well developed in Europe and that the reference is North America, which is "one step ahead".

One of the top 12 strategic infrastructures for research in digital humanities in Europe is the DARIAH-EH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities). "It is at the level of the CERN or the large telescopes supported by the European Commission, not in terms of resources, as they demand more, but in terms of policies in the scientific field. It is a research infrastructure federation across Europe."

According to Ohlmeyer, the Irish government has decided to support the digital humanities because there was lack of coordination and strategy in the area, which contrasted with the strong presence of information and communication technology companies in the country, such as Intel, Google, Twitter and IBM.

Besides the establishment of a coordination and the encouragement of a collaboration between research institutions, an engagement with European initiatives such as Dariah has been promoted, as well as the participation of the productive sector (the 1641 Depositions had the collaboration of IBM).

Ohlmeyer believes that researchers should pay attention to their new panorama in the humanities, taking the following items into account:

• the access to a wide range of primary sources, especially manuscripts and printed material;
• the access to knowledge, expertise, methodologies and practices in various areas;
• the adoption of standards and best practices;
• the possibility of preservation of information in the long term and in a sustainable manner;
• the conduction of experiments and innovation in partnership with researchers from multiple fields and disciplines.

Model

At the conference, Ohlmeyer used the 1641 Depositions as model case: "These documents are considered the most controversial of Irish history. It is a unique source of information about the causes and events related to the 1641 rebellion in Ireland against England, when tens of thousands of people died, and for the social, economic, cultural, religious and politic history of the country. "

According to her, the 31 volumes of manuscripts with 8000 testimonies of Protestant men and women about the events related to the rebellion have been kept for hundreds of years in the library of Trinity College Dublin. "No one had access to them. They were only used for anti-Catholic propaganda in the past." The testimonies deal with loss of property and possessions, military activity and the alleged crimes of the Irish rebels, including murders, imprisonments, beatings and even denudation of people.

The first finding of the project's team was that it would be necessary to obtain € 1 million to do it. The funds were obtained from the Irish government, British universities (Cambridge and Aberdeen) and the collaboration of IBM.

The project has provided care to the conservation of the manuscripts and their digitization, transcription, transformation into digital text and online publishing, "but since I do not fully trust in the digital world I have decided to also publish them on paper," said the researcher.

Ohlmeyer said that the project's implementation has been an exciting challenge for computer scientists, because "they love the challenge of working with what they call 'dirty data'. In the case of the manuscripts, the 'dirt' consisted of lack of consistency and predictability in everything (capitalization, punctuation, spelling, syntax and semantics).

Other features of the project, she said, were the fact that the domain of the area is restricted to historians of the 17^th century, without the participation of computer scientists and computational linguists, and the difficulty in capturing semi-structured, structured and unstructured data.

The project was attended by 17 experts in history, computing, physics, mathematics, linguistics, geography, literature, gender studies, librarianship, archival science and conservation, with the support of IBM, which provided a natural language analysis software.

Launched in 2010, the website of the project now has 23,000 registered users from all over the planet.

Ohlmeyer said that the 1641 Depositions became the leading project in digital humanities because it has been done at a high level. It has received various resources in Europe and has expanded to other projects in digital humanities. "The most important derived initiative is the Cultura program, which deals with the standardization of 17^th-century English texts and their adaptation to modern English. Another result was the presence of the project in classrooms. Several other research projects related to it have also been carried out and presented in various publications."

Lessons

According to the historian, the main lessons learned during the development of the 1641 Depositions project have been:

• technology is transformative but not a substitute for reading the document and its context;
• infrastructure and standards are of fundamental importance;
• we need to do something sustainable which can migrate, be updated and become accessible in the future, for it does not result in a digital warehouse;
• the system should be developed in a way as good as the data, for it does not perpetuate mistakes;
• agility in identifying data is essential to the formulation of new questions in a survey;
• reciprocity: it takes a great deal of respect, trust and dependence among experts from the different involved areas to build a project like this.

Debate

After the conference, Teixeira Coelho asked Ohlmeyer about the real changes that digital technologies promote towards the humanities in order to work and educate in the universities. She said she realized that digital humanities were something specific when the Trinity College Dublin began to quote them in ads for hiring professors. "I noticed that they were a specific area. Currently there are six professors who are digital humanists at the university."

Martin Grossmann, former director of the IEA who coordinates the Research Group Permanent Forum - Cultural System Between Public and Private, commented on the problem of institutional assessment and researchers through their digital production: "USP promoted a process of evaluation in 2015 and the website of the IEA was not considered relevant by the people invited to evaluate the Institute. We are far from the moment when people will start using statistics for the evaluation of digital platforms." He asked Ohlmeyer to elaborate on this issue in relation to Ireland and Europe.

Ohlmeyer said that there is still the problem of evaluation of the production area for progression in the careers of researchers: "It is still made from printed material, with articles being evaluated by peer reviewers. Reviewers are not interested in digital publications. I think there is still a long way for these digital results start to be considered serious academic publications."

Arlindo Phillipi Jr., former Director of Evaluation at CAPES, commented on the growth in the number of proposals for interdisciplinary graduate programs in Brazil and how they are evaluated. For him, the difficulty is still the lack of qualified evaluators to analyze this type of proposal, although they are great specialists in their disciplines. "There is a continuing need to work with our colleagues, trying to insert the idea that what is at stake is to solve the problem we are going to analyze, and not the discipline that we are going to use. We need to check that subjects have to gather up to achieve a very well explained problem, how to find solutions to it and which multi or interdisciplinary strategy should be used."

"We have new doctors in Brazil with an interdisciplinary profile. They still face problems when competing for places in some universities, but as their presence is growing, we are reaching a new balance of powers. They have shown that it is possible to do good research within this new profile. The problem is that there are only a few interdisciplinary journals in the country."

In relation to interdisciplinary research, she said that there are two points to be analyzed. This kind of work takes time because it is not easy, so it deserves more understanding of development agencies, which need to allow more time for their implementation, especially for the presentation of results. The other point is the difficulty of evaluation: "We do not know how to evaluate an interdisciplinary approach; it is difficult to find someone who feels equally comfortable in various disciplines."

For Plonski, another vocabulary to address the issue might be necessary: "When using 'inter, multi and transdisciplinarity' we are still stuck in the paradigm, in the anchor of disciplinarity". He said that Simon Schwartzman argues that there are two modes of knowledge production: one of them is based on the paradigm of discipline and involves a specific agenda, stable groups, career plans, hierarchy and other factors; the other one is motivated by the problems to be solved and involves temporary groups, lead switching, no hierarchy and other components.

Anthropologist Massimo Canevacci, former visiting professor at the IEA, said that he had to change his research methodology with the Bororo Indians in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso because they are already used to using digital technologies. Given this degree of presence of these technologies in society, Canevacci asked Ohlmeyer if digital humanities will have an impact beyond the academic environment. For her, by observing Ireland and Europe, the digital humanities are becoming a part of the cultural heritage language. She cited the Cultura program as an example, which has the creation of internet tools to be used especially by museums and art galleries among its objectives.

Ohlmeyer has also been asked about the dilemma between using resources to conserve physical information sources (manuscripts, books, works of art) or their scan. For her, if there is no other choice, one should invest in preservation, as the material can deteriorate in five or ten years, getting inappropriate for scanning.

Photo: Leonor Calasans/IEA-USP; Trinity College Dublin

Michael A. Elliott, a professor at Emory University

The way how humanists convey their research to audiences that are external to the university, and the implications of new technologies and communication patterns will be discussed at a conference followed by a workshop with Michael A. Elliott, a professor of literature and culture of the United States at Emory University.

The Humanities and their Publics will take place on April 19, from 10.00 am to 12.00 pm, in the IEA's Events Room. Elliott will address the American academics' view of their role in society since the beginning of the 20th century. The possibilities and risks of becoming a public intellectual in the digital age will also be under discussion.

The workshop Research Without Frontiers: The Future of Academic Publication in a Digital World, from 2.30 pm to 5.00 pm, will be exclusive to guests. A work developed by Elliot for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will be used as a starting point for the activity. It is a project on how digital networks can change the academic monograph.

Both the conference and the workshop will be held in English and broadcast live on the web.

Jeffrey Lesser, currently a visiting professor at the IEA, will coordinate the activities.

Elliott specializes in the literature and culture of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to American cultures and the place of Native Americans in the United States.

He is the author of Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (2007) and The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism (2002), and co-editor (with Claudia Stokes) of American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader (2003).

Photo: Emory University

Some foreign universities have adopted new organizational frameworks to meet the peculiarities of interdisciplinary research. More than necessary, this restructuring is essential to consolidate the interdisciplinary model, according to the German sociologist Peter Weingart.

Weingart is an adviser and former director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF, in the German acronym) at Bielefeld University (Germany). The ZiF is a partner of the IEA in the Ubias network (University-Based Institutes for Advanced Study).

For him, in addition to adopting new ways to organize scholars, disciplines and teaching & research units, interdisciplinarity requires a solid epistemological foundation: “Without the good internal reasons pertaining to the development of science and without a willingness to deal with problems outside specific areas, it will not succeed.”

Weingart made these remarks at the conference Interdisciplinarity and the New Governance of Universities he gave at the IEA on July 28.

For him, “interdisciplinarity has been fashionable in academia for more than 20 years, with research development agencies in every country advocating it as a goal to be achieved; until recently, however, the term was devoid of meaning.”

Kinds of interdisciplinarity and ways to achieve it

Weingart said that during his term at the helm of the ZiF (1989-1994), the Center classified interdisciplinary relations into two types: small – when, for example, mathematicians and physicists get together, because “they can understand each other rather easily” – and large, as when a biologist and a sociologist discuss the biological foundations of culture and must overcome greater differences between their disciplines.

He also sees two ways that interdisciplinarity can be achieved. One is through the combination of disciplines, resulting in areas such as biophysics. “However, it does not take long for the new area to become a new major field, with the same dynamics and traditional format of a discipline, namely, ‘turf’ protection, demarcation of outside areas and internalization of communication, characterized by the interaction of peers with similar ideas and attitudes.”

The other way of achieving interdisciplinarity is “driven by a demand, often political, from outside the disciplines.” An example is environmental research, which according Weingart “has yet to succeed in becoming a discipline, because it is made up of a conglomerate of different disciplines cooperating among themselves.”

According to the sociologist, these two types of interdisciplinarity may face resistance in universities from well-established departments with whom it competes for funds. “Departments are interest groups and, of course, the strongest ones claim that only they are able to judge the quality and competence of scholars enrolling in the units and institutes of a university.”

Experiences

Weingart mentioned the University of Siegen (Germany) as an example of an institution that is striving to move away from departmental model and pursue interdisciplinarity. He acknowledges, however, that the case in point is not really persuasive, because it is a small and somewhat obscure university.

“The university regrouped its 12 departments into four faculties that, although maintaining the structure of disciplines, work on issues that arise from outside themselves.”

A more radical example mentioned by Weingart is Arizona State University (United States): “Because this university cannot join the elite echelon of American institutions, president Michael Crow decided to follow a different path and adopt a strategy he calls ‘scientific entrepreneurship’: he dissolved all the departments and created a completely new, interdisciplinary mix between the areas.”

Public demand

Weingart stressed that the euphoria over interdisciplinary research can also be justified politically, with research responding to issues external to the university, fulfilling public demands and being accountable to taxpayers. “It’s best that science do things that are valued by society rather that doing only what is valued by scientists,” he added.

Even with all the changes toward interdisciplinarity, he warns that “the democratization of science is not something that will abolish the trend toward specialization that we have witnessed over the last two centuries. The evolution of science depends on ever-increasing specialization and penetration, on plunging into unexplored territories, but the question we must ask is whether the model of disciplines, as created in the early 19^th century, herald the end of their own history or whether it is possible that something else replace them.”

Various questions from the audience have been made to Peter Weingart regarding his ideas

DEBATE

Weingart’s statements led to several questions from the audience in the IEA Event Room and from those who followed the conference via Internet.

The debate began with a question from IEA director Martin Grossmann, who asked the sociologist’s opinion regarding the role of institute of advanced studies (IAS) in expanding university interdisciplinarity.

Weingart said there are various ways to understand what IASs should do. One of them is that this kind of institute should promote a gathering of brilliant minds. For him, no one today still believes this is enough: “It’s great to have these people accomplishing things in the same place, but this only works to a certain point. Furthermore, it is a somewhat lavish solution, feasible only for those with large budgets; if you don’t have that kind of money, you’re better off considering systemic solutions.”

In his view, the first step towards establishing an IAS is to ensure that it has its own budget and research stations, with leeway to hire whoever it wants. With regard to their work properly, he believes these institutes should identify issues that cannot be studied in the departments, and also reflect on the relationship between scientific production and other spheres of social life.

The director of the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Biosciences, Gilberto Fernando Xavier, asked Weingart if the difficulty to establish interdisciplinary groups in a competitive environment was not more a sociological problem than an organizational one, “because to create such a group there has to be trust and a cooperative attitude among people.”

Weingart said this difficulty is not actually a sociological problem, but rather psychological: “Many academics are afraid and seek security; people like that are not good partners in groups, which require scholars resilient enough to sit down with someone and ask silly questions, because they know that silly questions need to be asked, that they need to learn, to start from scratch.”

Carlos Graeff Teixeira, from the School of Biosciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, asked by e-mail how university administrators may identify relevant social programs and if special groups are needed to accomplish this task.

According to Weingart, there is a no recipe to identify societal problems that deserve to be studied, but that creating groups of social scientists dedicated to this work or seeking information from concerned people elsewhere may be one course of action.

Leandro Giatti, from the School of Public Health, said we live amidst uncertainties and that experts do not have all the answers. He asked Weingart whether society shouldn’t participate more in discussions by scientists on matters of great uncertainty.

According to Weingart, we must overcome the model in which politicians pose questions to scientists who are well informed on all the evidence and the issue is thereby resolved: “We know that public policy makers are very opportunistic with regard to scientific evidence, accepting what they like and discarding the rest; furthermore, there is no way eliminate insecurity from the process, leaving us the alternative of establishing mechanisms that reduce the risks of receiving information or that allow postponing decisions, in keeping with the principle of precaution.”

Marcos Buckeridge, from the Institute of Biosciences, asked Weingart whether the systems of a university need both interdisciplinary workgroups using systemic tools and, at the same time, individuals doing basic science by themselves, and whether it would not be the case to create better connections between basic science and the systemic view.

Weingart said that the notion of system is very different in each context and that a common ground – a prerequisite for interdisciplinary work – will always be at a level above two or three connected disciplines: “It will be a set of problems competing with each other or trying to fit the findings of what is above the disciplines.”

According to Buckeridge, the University of São Paulo has mechanisms for this, but there is the problem of different language between different areas and the consequent need for “translators” (not people, but mechanisms that facilitate understanding).

Weingart said that specialization is the touchstone and this implies highly specialized languages: “It would be impossible to use ‘translators’ to make each discipline translatable; the best would be for different disciplines to confront one specific problem with the help of one ‘translator’.” As an example of this “translation” work, Buckeridge mentioned the books on popular science that many American and British scientists produce. Weingart agreed that this is a possible mechanism.

Silvio Salinas, from USP’s Institute of Physics and former adviser to the IEA, said that departments in the University of São Paulo are strong, well-established and productive, and that he considers concern with the comprehensive training of undergraduate students more important.

Weingart said that with the expansion of the contents of disciplines it is impossible to know everything. In his view, curricula in every discipline are expanding and, therefore, “we need a constant process of rethinking the curricula and deciding which skills are absolutely crucial and which should be abandoned.”

During the debate, the director of USP’s School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, Maria Cristina Motta de Toledo, who followed the event over the Internet, sent an invitation for Weingart to visit the school on his next trip to São Paulo. She said the school adopts an interdisciplinary, not departmental, approach to undergraduate studies, based on integrated subjects and activities, with the freshman year being a common basic cycle for all courses.

Photos: Leonor Calazans/IEA-USP

Interdisciplinarity and the New Governance of Universities is the subject of the conference that sociologist Peter Weingart, professor at Bielefeld University (Germany) will give on July 28, at 3:30 pm, at the IEA’s Events Room. The exposition will be in English, with simultaneous translation. The event will be broadcast live on the web.

Weingart will discuss the challenges to developing interdisciplinary courses at universities. It will focus on two major epistemological obstacles related to the nature of disciplines: deeply institutionalized forms of producing knowledge; and rigid organizational structures, enclosed in departments and faculties.

According to Weingart, interdisciplinarity is seen by academics and public policy makers as a response to super-specialization of science. However, very little has been done in terms of changes in the organization of universities or in the actual behavior of professors and researchers.

“But now there are signs that this may change,” he says, noting that universities have launched pioneering initiatives to transform their organizational structure to “facilitate and encourage intellectual exchange and cooperation across disciplinary boundaries.”

In his lecture, Weingart will discuss the scope and limits of these initiatives. Toward this end, he’ll present cases of universities committed to modifying their organizational structures as a way to optimize responses to new problems facing science and society.

Among the topics that will be discussed are: Will the efforts to establish new interdisciplinary fields outside departments and disciplines be successful? Will the movement toward interdisciplinary organizational structures in universities lead to the replacement of disciplines as the dominant form of producing knowledge?

The lecturer

Peter Weingart is professor emeritus of Sociology, Sociology of Science and Politics of Science at Bielefeld University, where he was also director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and of the Institute for Research in Science and Technology. He conducts studies on the public perception of science and technology; the relationship between science, media and politics; bibliometrics, research evaluation and development of indicators; the dynamics of knowledge production; political, scientific and media discourse on global warming; and the knowledge society.

Photo: Personal archive

Universities of the future will vary in their focus: some will dedicate themselves more to teaching, others to research. Interdisciplinarity will become the teaching & research paradigm. Instructors will no longer be conveyors of knowledge, but rather tutors who guide students in learning. Information and communication technologies will be intensely used. There will be greater commitment to the numerous problems faced by society.

This prospective overview summarizes the debate The Future of Universities, held on April 24 as part of the “University” program of the Intercontinental Academia.

The expositors were John Heath, pro-vice-chancellor for estates and infrastructure at the University of Birmingham (UK); Naomar de Almeida Filho, president of Southern Bahia Federal University (UFSB); Luiz Bevilacqua, former president of ABC Federal University (UFABC); Klaus Capelle, president of UFABC; Carlos Vogt, president of the Virtual University of the State of São Paulo (UNIVESP); and Marco Antonio Zago, president of the University of São Paulo (USP).

The panelists of the event were Helena Nader, president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), and Marcelo Knobel, from the Institute of Physics of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). The event was moderated by journalist Sabine Righetti, specialized in science and technology policy and in science journalism.

Expositions

For John Heath, digital technologies, now available to a considerable segment of the world’s population, will increasingly impact the modes of learning, enabling a 24/7 approach to education and significantly affecting how research is carried out.

Heath said Birmingham already offers online classes, whereby students in the United Kingdom, United States, Hong Kong and Canada can interact, an experience they deem “transformative.”

The internationalization of education, in his view, will not lead to some kind of educational colonialism. On the contrary, he believes that globalization will actually reinforce the importance of diversity and buoy up the culture of each place.

For Naomar de Almeida Filho, we should consider various possible futures for universities, because he does not believe there will be a single model. In his view, today’s political, economic and social milieu makes it necessary for us to elect knowledge as society’s central and main asset.

For him, contemporaneity implies certain epistemological keynotes, now that time is being cast forward into future. “One feels one is living in a ‘liquid time-space’ [referring to sociologist Zygmunt Baumann’s concept of “liquid life,” precarious and fraught with uncertainty], with enormous diversity, which also causes friction.”

That is why the thought of philosopher Edgar Morin is so relevant today. For Morin, “education is the ‘force of the future,’ because it is one of the most powerful tools for effecting change.”

Like the trivium and the quadrivium, the sets of disciplines that  defined education in the Middle Ages, Almeida Filho lists five characteristics he deems fundamental to contemporary education: communication (skill in using lingua francae); connectivity; proficiency in interpretation; teaching/learning; and listening.

He said it is essential that the university be decolonized and recreated as an effective vector capable of transforming its environs.

For him, inequality in Brazil is fueled by a perverted kind of education. “Given the regressive taxation of our tax system, the State is financed by those who enjoy the least benefits. Thus, the primary and secondary education of a privileged minority is subsidized, leading them to enter the best public [and free] institutions of higher education.”

As for the less privileged, “if they ever manage to overcome their difficulties and begin their higher education, they have to pay.” He acknowledges that there are several mechanisms to facilitate access to university of the poorest youth – e.g., PROUNI, FIES, quotas –, “but these do not change the structure of the system.”

Like Almeida Filho, Luiz Bevilacqua stressed the complexity of the transformations society is undergoing. He called our current period “a time of culture shock” and made an analogy with surfing: “A wave on the beach is, technically, a shock wave and one should not attempt to swim it; one must have an instrument (the surfboard) to ride it.”

For him, “the university, in its current model, is finished and is unlikely to flourish. And there is not much time left to make the appropriate decisions.”

Bevilacqua also does not believe in a single model, but rather in certain guiding principles of transformation: the university should be, above all, a place where learning prevails over teaching; where research advances knowledge instead of enlivening the résumé of the researchers (reversing the current model that emphasizes quantity over quality); and where interdisciplinarity is seen not as a cause, but as a result of the convergence of disciplines.

Klaus Capelle preferred to speak about the future from the perspective of the history of universities, listing the duties that were conferred upon them over time.

He recalled that the roots of the university lay in the academies of the philosophers of ancient Greece, and also in institutions controlled by the Church in the Middle Ages. These institutions were devoted exclusively to teaching. “The significant change took place a little over 200 years ago, when Alexander Von Humboldt, in Germany, proposed a model of autonomous university that incorporated research.”

Capelle identified the 1970s as the time then the maintenance of public universities became so taxing that their members began finding it difficult to “justify their existence to the public ‘merely’ with the benefits of teaching and research.” Thus, the tripod of university action – teaching, research and extension – was strengthened approximately 10 years ago.

“However, at present, society demands from the university not only dedication to teaching, research and extension, but also a series of other purposes, such as social inclusion, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, internationalization, distance education and sustainability.”

For Capelle, too much is demanded from the university and there is too little time to achieve all that is demanded. But he believes the university will maintain its resilience in the face of the new demands, thanks to technological development and to changes in how knowledge is organized.

In the future, he predicts some changes that were unanimous in the debate: the massive use of information and communication technologies; interdisciplinarity as a solid paradigm (“without eliminating disciplinarity”); and the specialization of institutions, because not every university can do everything.

Carlos Vogt said that society has gone from a classical culture of “formation” to one of “information” and constant “transformation.” “Although we may not yet be aware, the university is already living the future, the process of permanent transformation.” This process is based, he said, on the “surfboard” (mentioned earlier by Bevilacqua) of information and communication technologies.

He mentioned UNIVESP’s main characteristics as an example of the use of new technologies, allowing 3,500 incoming students every year to attend one of two engineering courses (production and computation) or one of four courses leading to high-school teaching degrees (mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology).

After two years, UNIVESP’s students receive a certificate of higher education. If they want an engineer’s degree, they must complete three more years; a teaching degree, two more years.

As an example of using technology to educate students, Vogt mentioned the dedicated television channel UNIVESP TV and the university’s YouTube channel, which has already had 30 million hits.

Following up on a comment by Capelle about the history of universities, Marco Antonio Zago said that universities were previously no more than a depository of knowledge, but the period between wars in the 20^th century saw the consolidation of the model proposed by Humbolt, incorporating teaching and research.

For Zago, the missions of the university defined by Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset (1885-1955) and the German thinker Karl Jaspers (1983-1969) remain valid.

He quoted an observation by Ortega y Gasset in his 1929 essay “Misión de la Universidad” on the aims of this institution: “Transmission of culture, education for the liberal professions, scientific research and the development of new men of science.”

He also cited the words of Jaspers: “The university is a school – but of a very special sort. It is intended not merely as a place for instruction; rather, the student is to participate actively in research and from this experience he is to acquire the intellectual discipline and education that will remain with him throughout his life. Ideally, the student thinks independently, listens critically and is responsible to himself. He has the freedom to learn.”

Zago recalled the aims of the University of São Paulo, as stated in Decree No. 6283, of 1934, which established the new institution:

a)     To promote, through research, the progress of science;

b)     To convey, through teaching, knowledge that enriches or develops the spirit or is useful to life;

c)      To train specialists in all branches of culture, and technicians and professional personnel in all professions that require a scientific or artistic background;

d)     To accomplish the social work of popularizing science, literature and the arts through synthetic courses, conferences, lectures, radio broadcasting, scientific films and the like.

For him, these goals already contained the embryo of what the university is today, when a new one has been added: the relationship between the university and society.

In his view, this new mission includes formulating proposals to solve the great problems of society, strengthening the relationship with other institutions, and concern about several other issues, e.g., the environment, population growth and changes, food production and the portability of information services. [To demonstrate this, Zago used his cell phone to quote Ortega Y Gasset, Jaspers and the decree that created the University of São Paulo).

Zago believes one specific issue deserves an intense debate, namely, how to deal creatively with the conflict between academic quality and universal access to higher education.

The Debate

Helena Nader, one of the panelists, asked the expositors about the governance of Brazilian universities, which “is distinct from that exercised in every other country represented at the Intercontinental Academia.” She also said that the autonomy of Brazilian universities “is established on paper, but doesn’t exist in fact.”

Regarding the diversity of universities advocated by the expositors, Nader asked whether a university that does not conduct research should be called a university.

Another aspect she highlighted is how Brazilian universities will deal with globalization, “when many models arrive here from abroad and impose themselves, including through economic pressure.”

Marcelo Knobel, the other panelist, questioned the lecturers about the importance given to undergraduate education, which, in his view, "is undervalued vis-à-vis research.” Secondly, he wondered what recommendation they might have to the young researchers participating in the Intercontinental Academia.

Responding to the panelists, John Heath said that higher education in Europe is a free market, with variations: “In Switzerland, it is free of charge; in the UK, it is very expensive.”

As for undergraduate education, Heath chose to highlight what should be the instructors’ role: “They are no longer the owners of knowledge, as the monks were in the Middle Ages; the modern role of a university professor is not to be an authority, but rather a moderator or coach.”

With regard to management, Naomar de Almeida Filho said one of the dilemmas of the university is how to submit its governance to society’s scrutiny. He also stated that autonomy has been often used to maintain the status quo.

He believes that we can move forward on this, as exemplified by an UFSB proposal establishing two councils: a university council, concerned with academic matters; and a strategic-social council, with representatives from the surrounding society: social movements, indigenous communities, trade unions and other organized bodies of the population.

For Vogt, the challenge is to find the balance between generality and specialization. “This cannot be done through the dissection of fields, but rather by aggregating them.” For him, aggregation also involves the question of university governance, “because we have a framework that was compatible with the 1960s, but today we know that the departments have not kept up with the dynamics of groups and of academic life.”

He said that in the 1990s he tried to deal with this problem at UNICAMP, but the corporatist reaction did not allow the discussion to go forward.

This challenge is associated with another one, he warned: “We must avoid the unionization of knowledge.” Vogt said the rationale of trade unions is important, but it cannot override the rationale of knowledge.

On the other hand, he said that what makes universities permanent and longstanding is their conservatism, much like what happens with religious institutions: “We want change, but not to the point of a final vertigo.”

On the importance of undergraduate education, he said it is key, because “you cannot prepare good researchers without preparing good undergraduate students in every field.”

Capelle, answering the question about management, said that presidents of federal universities in Brazil are in a unique position: they are legitimized by their election, but are subject to internal and external constraints that prevent them from fully exercising the governance of the institution.

With regard to undergraduate education, he believes it is wrong to think of it in isolation. “The solution thought out at UFABC is to forgo the tripod of teaching, research and extension, and accept the entanglement of activities, with graduate students teaching extension courses or taking part in research, for example.”

Luiz Bevilacqua said the governance of Brazilian universities is still a cultural issue and each institution has a proposal to improve it.

With regard to undergraduate education, he said the problem is that Brazil has a culture of diplomas, not of competence. “The model of colleges and technological institutions is very important and does not stanch student creativity.”

He also reinforced the view of other expositors on the need for another model of student/teacher relationship, whereby learning occurs not because instructors teach students, but rather because they provide the means to learn: “You have to make students advance on their own.”

Zago answered two questions from the panelists. First, regarding the profile of universities, he said it is not true that all universities should do research: “There is not enough money or resources; and this need not be so.” He said research universities in the United States number no more than 100, several from the first and second echelons, but many of inferior quality.

With regard to the University of São Paulo, he said its gigantism prevents it from growing even more or from making individualized proposals to its students. As for undergraduate education, he said that it is very important, but has not been given its proper value at USP.

As a recommendation to the young researchers of the Intercontinental Academia and their task of producing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) about time, Zago suggested they question why they should be doing this, and for whom they are doing it (without forsaking how their work ought to be carried out), so that every interested party can benefit from the teachings about time contained in the course.

Opening the debate to other participants, biologist Eduardo Almeida, one of the young researchers of the Intercontinental Academia, asked the expositors how young professors might make a difference in the university of the future.

Marcos Nogueira Martins, professor at the Institute of Physics, asked how one should elevate to higher scientific levels the students who arrive at university with meager scientific culture.

Caio Dantas, former dean of undergraduate courses at USP and currently a researcher at the IEA, asked Naomar de Almeida Filho how it might be possible to reshape the university in very conservative regions. To Carlos Vogt, he asked how it is possible to deal with the labor union aspect of academic institutions.

Luiz Bevilacqua said there is no problem in extending the length of stay at the university of students with scant scientific culture. He added, regarding the necessary changes, that universities must learn to dialogue with members of Congress, because the military dictatorship accustomed every official to address only the executive branch of government.

Answering Caio Dantas’ inquiry, Almeida Filho said that one of the agents of transformation are the public policies for social inclusion that give voice to the population, even if part of it has a conservative mindset: “The university cannot be remiss; it has a civilizing role to play.”

For him, given today’s massive relativism, some values ​​have been lost and the bond between university and society is faltering. “For a university to isolate itself is gruesome. It should incorporate into the cultural milieu those who have been first, and most recently, included in the economy.”

He also commented on university autonomy: “You must think differently about it. The concept of university autonomy thrived in the late 18^th century, after the French Revolution, and in the early 19^th century, at a time when the university had lost its social accountability.”

As for the trade union activism of faculty and staff, he said that “the rupture of the dialogue between university and society opened spaces for union activism.”

Carlos Vogt added that trade unionism in universities is one of the key issues, “but it is not a matter of preventing unionization, but rather of strengthening the academic rationale, of having clear academic projects.”

Klaus Capelle closed the debate by answering two questions: regarding young instructors, he ascribes them a key role in universities that are in the process of consolidation; and regarding less prepared students, he emphasized that they don’t always lack talent and many go on to become success stories: “We must help those whom we want in the university.”

Photo: Leonor Calasans/IEA

Coordinated by the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (IHS) of the National Taiwan University (NTU), the event will have the theme Breaking Through Boundaries and Old Paradigms in the New Age of Globalization and a special focus: Rising East Asia in the New Age of Globalization.

Over four days there will be a series of panels and conferences. Among the issues to be addressed in addition to the specific themes of the meeting there are the contributions of thought in East Asia, Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula to the global scientific production; the potential of the UBIAS network; creativity and interdisciplinarity; models of cooperation between the institutes linked to the network; research leading in the field of natural sciences and technology in institutes of advanced studies; and the importance of social sciences and humanities in the discussion of pressing issues (see schedule).

Held annually, the meeting of directors is an opportunity for network members to share experiences, promote cultural and scientific exchanges, and articulate inter-institutional partnerships, such as the Intercontinental Academia (ICA). Synthesized in the concept 2 + 2 + 2, the initiative is an international academic cooperation project, which aims to bring together two institutes of UBIAS, in two different continents, over two interdisciplinary workshops. to develop a joint research focused on a cross-thematic topic.

Under the responsibility of the IEA-USP and the Institute for Advanced Research (IAR) of Nagoya University, the ICA pilot project will have "Time" as its theme. The activities will begin in April 2015, when the first workshop takes place in São Paulo, and will continue until January / February 2016, the period for the second one, to be held in Nagoya.

Issues relating to the general planning of the ICA, the programme of the workshops and the selection of participating researchers in the pilot project will be discussed during the meeting.

IEA-USP's PARTICIPATION

On the first day of the meeting, Martin Grossmann, director of the IEA-USP, and Cai Dapeng, associate professor of the IAR, will talk about the progress of the ICA on the panel São Paulo - Nagoya Intercontinental Academia 2015: Overview, Prospects, and Progress Report. The presentation of Grossmann and Capeng will be moderated by Yun-han Chu, professor of political science at the NTU.

Grossmann will also give the talk The challenges of the University in the 21st century: nowadays and in possible futures in the panel Thinking from Latin America and Iberia, to be held on November 29. The other panel speakers will be José Vicente Tavares dos Santos, director of the Latin American Institute Advanced Studies (ILEA) of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and Rocío Davis Garcia, representative of the Instituto Cultura y Sociedad of the University of Navarra, Spain. Moderation will be in charge of Luisa Shu-Ying Chang, director of the Office of International Affairs of NTU.

The lag of the universitary system in relation to the current dynamics of knowledge will be discussed by Luiz Bevilacqua, professor emeritus from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), at the conference The University in a Time of Culture Shock, to be held by the IEA-USP on October 10, at 3 pm, in the Institute’s Event Room.

Organized by Renato Janine, coordinator of IEA-USP’s Research Group The Future Questions Us, this will be the fourth meeting of the cycle of seminar Carioca Afternoons: USP Listens to Rio de Janeiro, which aims to strengthen the dialogue between thinkers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro through the discussion of social issues linked to human relations.

To Bevilacqua, the advances of science and technology in the last century have not generated an update of academic and pedagogical structure of the university, since this would keep "the classic attitude of preserving knowledge niches that have given outstanding contribution in the past but need to be reviewed within a perspective 'of a new science', often seen as interdisciplinary”.

According to the lecturer, this immobility makes the current universitary model incompatible with the typical processes of training and scientific production of the culture shock we undergo, both in terms of a thematic convergence with a potential to create a new core of knowledge and the development of an innovative curriculum design that provides future generations with the necessary instruments to operate in the scenario of mutations.

"Courage, courage, humility, reflection and hard work are absolutely necessary ingredients to beat the uniqueness of modern times – where the past hits the present and wants to intrude the future - without being overwhelmed and without getting hopelessly in the wake of science and technology, once again and perhaps for countless generations," he says.

The event will be broadcast live on the web.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCIST

Luiz Bevilacqua has graduated in Civil Engineering from UFRJ, where he is a professor emeritus at the Alberto Luiz Coimbra Institute of Postgraduate Studies and Research in Engineering (COPPE), and holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Stanford University. His recent research focuses on the dynamics of fractal structures, on modeling biological and social systems, on cognitive processes, and on mathematical and computational modeling in biology.

Bevilacqua has been Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), Director of Research at CNPq, Scientific Director of FAPERJK, President of the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB), Coordinator of the academic structuring committee of the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), where he has also been President, and member of the founding committee of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research.

Currently, Bevilacqua is focusing on the implementation of the Espaço Alexandria UFRJ. Developed with the support of the Provost for Research and Graduate Studies of the University, the initiative aims to stimulate interdisciplinary integration in projects for the advance of the frontiers of scientific knowledge and for the paradigm shift.

Honorable vice-governor of the state of São Paulo, Dr. Alberto Goldman;

Honorable assistant secretary for Economic Development, Science and Technology of the state of São Paulo, Dr. Nelson Baeta Neves Filho;

Honorable minister of Science and Technology, Prof. Dr. Marco Antonio Raupp, in whose name I greet ministers, legislative representatives, secretaries of State and members of the political class present at this ceremony;

Honorable mayor of the city of São Paulo, Prof. Dr. Fernando Haddad;

Honorable president of the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), Prof. Dr. Celso Lafer, in whose name I greet officials from all academic support agencies, presidents of universities present at this ceremony, former presidents and all professors emeritus of the University of São Paulo;

Honorable professor Hélio Nogueira da Cruz, acting vice-president of the University of São Paulo;

Honorable professor Dr. Marco Antonio Zago, president of the University of São Paulo;

Honorable professor Dr. Vahan Agopyan, vice-president of the University of São Paulo;

Honorable ladies and gentlemen, members of USP’s University Council;

Dear teachers, students, staff, family, friends and all those attending this ceremony:

On behalf of the University Council, I salute the new elected presidency, appointed by the state governor for the 2014-2018 term, at this very special moment. The induction of new university leaders is always a turning point. It behooves us to reflect on the advances that have been made, the challenges that were faced, the promises that could not be fulfilled. It is also an opportunity to renew and reassert expectations. This is a truly unique moment, because the new presidency is taking office just as the University of São Paulo turns 80 and the city of São Paulo commemorates its 460^th anniversary. Compared with other European and North American universities, USP is still very young, with sundry tasks and challenges ahead.

The University of São Paulo was created in 1934 as a project of higher learning drawn up by economic and political elites. Strongly inspired by the Enlightenment, the project strove to establish the foundations for renewed and innovative intellectual and professional education, conferring upon science and culture the mission to transform existing political habits. This purpose comprised a set of objectives aimed at a) promoting social and economic development, and strengthening liberal democracy in society; b) changing a mindset anchored in tradition and in personalistic of social relations; c) preparing a capable ruling class to modernize the country, affect social consciousness, and propose action plans to solve the nation’s problems; d) preparing students for all professions and, thus, expand markets and provide competent staffs for the state bureaucracy; e) expanding the intellectual and scientific horizons by stimulating exchange with what the most advanced universities, research centers and cultural centers abroad had to offer; f) stimulating, as it was said at the time, higher studies in broadly diverse fields of knowledge, from experimental sciences to humanities, from technologies to the arts.

In the recollections of former faculty, former students and former employees, there is frequent mention of the stringent requirements that overlaid academic activities. Classes demanded hours and hours of copious preparation and consultation of books and bibliographical references, oftentimes in the faculty’s own libraries. In turn, and no less arduously, the almost encyclopedic learning called for by certain contents demanded from students hours of concentration and often solitary study. The science produced within laboratories and facilities still being built depended less on existing resources than on innovative and creative genius. Science was unbiased, barely influenced by external factors, whether from the marketplace, the political milieu or social movements.

Science and cultural events went hand in hand. Full-fledged scientists not only were engaged in science tout court, but could also converse about literature, visual arts, performing arts, music, iconography. Side by side with physicists, chemists, biologists, technologists, historians and social scientists thrived good memoirists, philosophers, storytellers, chroniclers, composers and painters. A visit to the library of any venerable scholar was enough to observe that science and culture, truth and philosophy, are inseparable.

University administration, seen as a means and not an end, went beyond the mere management of human and material resources. It was at the service of an enabling academic project aimed not only at facing the contemporary challenges and dilemmas of Brazilian society, but also at thrusting science, culture and the arts for future generations and the ensuing decades. Herein lay the political role of academic leaders: to make wise, bold decisions and to dare to merge imagination, utopia and the cumulative experiences in exemplary academic careers.

To be sure, those early years would not have pointed to a promising future had it not been for the contribution of foreign missions that put us in touch with both young and experienced scholars. These missions acquainted us, so to speak, with the prevailing habits in the international scientific community.

They helped to enroot in the USP community the notion of the indivisibility between scientific investigation (and its rigorous methodological standards), teaching, learning and the dissemination of knowledge. No less important was the dedication of young professors, including the first women, who excelled in all fields of knowledge and faced the institutional challenges of building the University of São Paulo. This university was cast 50 years ahead of its time.

It is difficult to assess how much this nostalgia corresponds to the facts. Precisely because it is nostalgia, it has become part of our collective memory and the selective construction of history. Despite the virtues underlying the narrative of these early events, one must be aware of its limits: after all, it was an elitist, almost aristocratic, model, submitted to the ironclad control of professorships, founded on an hegemonic concept of science and, perhaps, even of culture and the arts.

These limitations have led, throughout USP’s history, to cumulative tensions and conflicts, and even stimulated the radicalization of differences. This was rendered even worse with the advent of the military dictatorship, which violently imposed silence upon dissenting voices and, through mandatory retirement and political persecution, removed important academic and scientific leaders. Still, among those who managed to remain and to resist the modernizing project of an authoritarian government, it was possible to preserve traditions and secure the fundamental principles that, so to speak, are in the DNA of this academic community: freedom and autonomy. What distinguishes us is the undeniable exercise of freedom in intellectual creation and our autonomy in research, teaching and dissemination of knowledge.

Freedom in the sense of absence of constraints on thinking and its manifestations, save those determined by scientific and professional ethics. Autonomy in the sense of being able to act independently from any type of private interest alien to the purposes and mission of the university. It is the preservation of these principles that allows the University of São Paulo to properly fulfill its inherent paradox, to wit, being part of society and, at the same time, a space of creative and constructive criticism of society; being an institutional space attentive to the problems and demands of society, but also a community capable of thinking differently from the society at large and providing relevant answers to complex problems.

At this moment, when the anniversary of the University of São Paulo mingles with the inauguration of its new president and with the anniversary of our city, the University Council wishes the new leader a most fruitful mandate. May he harmoniously combine prudence and daring, respecting tradition while overcoming resistance to change. May he listen to dissonant voices in pursuit of a possible consensus, however transient, in every field of intervention: research, teaching, culture and extension, academic exchanges, management of material and human resources, relationship with external agencies to support their core activities. And may he maintain an ongoing dialogue with organized civil society and opinion makers, even as he faces the challenge of establishing a new foundation for the relationship between the three bodies that compose the university: faculty, students and employees.

We all know that the new president possesses all the intellectual qualities needed to face the immense challenges that lie ahead. We are also aware of his successful experience in various positions of academic management. The confirmation of the academic election and his recognition by the highest authority of the state of São Paulo are unquestionable expressions of his prestige and of his acceptance both within and outside the USP community. At the same time, these qualities place on his hands the challenge of governing the University of São Paulo in a time of dramatic change and adversity. The University Council wishes the new president energy and strength to carry out his program for the management and governance of the university.

* This salutation makes reference to arguments, ideas and formulations I previously developed in ADORNO, S. Universidade em crise. Le Monde Diplomatique. I:4, Brazil, November 4, 2007, p. 34-35.