Brazilian public universities were stunned by the suicide committed by Dr. Luiz Carlos Cancellier Olivo, rector of UFSC. The tragedy highlights ethical, scientific and political problems that mark the dealings between power and knowledge in our land. The first trait to call our memory is found in something that disintegrates the entire society, especially that gathered on campuses. This is the abject denunciation that is once again used as a repressive instrument by State agents, in media sectors and in the university itself. In the case at hand, the trigger for the crisis lies in an accusation against the rector. The leader was arrested and subjected to public scorn without the minimum requirements of justice, such as the right to be heard before being imprisoned. The repressors and their allies in the press did not worry for a single moment about his honor and the dignity of the position he occupied. He was exposed to popular execration without any prudence. In a country where cases like the one at Escola Base occur all the time, lynchings reiterate the barbarity.
All researchers and teachers who think and act prudently remember the procedures imposed on academia after the 1964 coup. The revocation of employees, teachers and students announced the subsequent torture, death and annihilation of rights. Whistleblowers appeared like mushrooms in higher education schools, with their fingers raised against ideological opponents or successful competitors for positions, researchers with greater notoriety among public authorities, the global university community, the public. The USP Black Book brings nauseating reports of accusatory and anonymous practices, in which baseness emulated cowardice. Anyone who was denounced lost everything and was sent to prison or exile. The nominee, not infrequently, was placed in the “dragon chair” and other torments, after following the path of bodies such as the Dops in official vehicles, provided by university leaders to the police apparatus.
In a way, Brazil, in the dictatorship and apparent current democracy, resumes the feat that made part of the ancient Greek democracy infamous. There was a law in it, considered an example of injustice, which punished the “atimoi”. When an individual emerged with the strength to win elections, his enemies accused him of behavioral deviations (for example, of having had erotic relationships with adults, paid for by gifts). The candidate was deprived of citizen rights, condemned without trial and became a victim of the worst collective abuses. The processes record similar cases: whoever lost their rights in this way did not have their guilt declared by the courts. The accusation, which brought distrust, was enough to define the sentence. Hence the thesis of our contemporary jurists according to which those people would actually be sentenced without having been declared guilty. Douglas M. MacDowell: (The Law in Classical Athens, Cornell Un. Press, 1978) says that those accused of prostitution should “avoid exercising their citizenship rights, as they are considered “atimoi”, as they would be prosecuted if they ignored such a veto”. The penalty was death. At dokimasia, examination for entry and exit from public positions, it is assumed that “the athymia (loss of rights) may be a penalty for those accused of prostitution, but only for politicians, not for private citizens”, according to SC Todd (The Shape of Athenian Law, Oxford, Un. Press, 1993). This “only” is not reassuring, because the Greek is a political animal. The penalties of athymia They were also applied to magistrates who, without leaving office, did not pay their debts to the courts and the Assembly. Citizens who, called to join the army, did not show up were also subjected to full athymia. A politician's honor and dishonor were handed over to whistleblowers, interested in his expulsion from the public scene.
In the 1964 dictatorship, the accused were considered, ipso facto, as “without honor”, since they had been denounced by “honest citizens”. I remember the edifying example of a conservative but honest individual in those days of accusatory bacchanalia. The bishop of Marília, Dom Hugo Bressane de Araújo, an erudite specialist in Machado de Assis and a person easily adjustable “to the right”, upon receiving informers who raised their fingers against “communists” and “corrupt” people, asked for the following: “you (madam) ) go to the Notary's Office, write your complaint, notarize it and send it to me so I can study it.” The anonymous accusers of the Curia have disappeared. But religious and political authorities, especially the police, did not always maintain such ethical rectitude. And even after the authoritarian regime, the heinous practice of sycophants continued. When reiterated in all environments, it became ethics whose automatism generates a good conscience in dishonest people. After all, they imagine, they do everything for the good of the country by denouncing, without evidence and without foundations, their competitors, peers, political or ideological opponents. In legal proceedings, “plea bargaining” erodes ethical impediments. To guarantee the reduction of sentences, the prisoner's tongue articulates sentences whose content, often, advances untruths and slander. Almost all of them dictated by the owners of power.
When some public prosecutors, speaking on behalf of millions but without a mandate for such a role, presented the country with the “Ten Measures against Corruption”, I was called to the Special Committee of the Chamber that analyzed the resulting bill. There I criticized the use of paid informers – their profit, according to the text of the Ten Measures, would be 5% of the booty collected – and I recalled the Athenian sycophants, parents of all those who have denounced since then. Furthermore, I indicated how harmful the “suggestion” of setting up processes based on illicit evidence, but prepared “in good faith” was (check the official website of the Chamber of Deputies: “Experts point out flaws in measures to combat corruption suggested by the MP ”, 22/08/2016).
In addition to the ethical vice gathered in the word “whistleblower”, used and abused to persecute those who think differently than usual, with spectacular arrests and similar reports, we need to examine political practice within the campuses. The Federal University of Santa Catarina, the same as the deceased rector, has a melancholic history to be exposed. Before indicating the specific case, an essential ethical premise. If a rector is alien to knowledge and teaching, and acts with the dictates of State power in mind, he represents only that power on campus. If it brings into the university institution the interests of those immediately committed to power (oligarchies, market, religious or economic forces), it is harmful to the university, as in the company of those interests there comes intolerance, hatred, lack of respect for others, fanaticism.
At the Federal University of Santa Catarina, the aforementioned period existed for a long time. This procedure brought to the institution the petty political interests of the federal, state and municipal governments. Internal rivalry was increased by the techniques used to maintain control of the rectory. Until recently, in the UFSC rectoral elections, “all the names voted at the polls belonged to the political forces that had been directing the UFSC since its creation and that maintained peaceful coexistence or enthusiastic support with the military governments (...) The electoral process did not, therefore, as the forces opposing the military regime expected or aspired to, in this case the organizations of teachers, technical-administrative employees and students, make it possible for political groups not aligned with local and national elites to occupy the highest positions. of the university” (Pedro Antonio Vieira, The ballot box trap: 20 years of Direct Elections and Continuity at UFSC, in Waldir José Rampinell (ed.): The price of the Vote. Behind the scenes of an election for rector. Florianópolis, Ed. insular, 2008).
The corrupt custom of denunciations, coupled with the multiple interests present on campus, helps to understand the dean's death. It is time for the academic sectors to wake up, before it is too late, to reject summary accusations, without the right to defense. It is necessary, in the name of correct ethics, to prevent anonymous whistleblowers. If this is not done, we will soon return to the dictatorial 60s, when sycophants were cherished by the political regime, took on positions they did not deserve, and destroyed the bonds of trust and companionship that should prevail in intellectual life. If the whistleblowers are not arrested and academic subservience to the powers – Executive, Legislative, Judiciary and Market – continues, soon all those who do not bow their necks to the inquisitors will be placed among the “atimoi”. The dean's death is an ominous warning. Let's know how to take advantage of it.
