In a meeting held this Tuesday (03) with the president of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes), Anderson Correia, the rector of Unicamp, Marcelo Knobel, pointed out the need to maintain resources destined for financing scholarships and asked the body to favor universities that have a more aggregating agenda for society. Correia was at Unicamp as part of a series of visits scheduled to ten major Brazilian universities.
Knobel cited, as an example, the fact that Unicamp is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN). “We want to take a further step, implementing several actions and promoting interdisciplinarity and excellence initiatives, but all of this requires investment” pointed out the dean, who received the president of Capes during a visit to Unicamp. Unicamp's general coordinator, Teresa Atvars, who also participated in the meeting, noted that Unicamp has already suffered cuts in the past and highlighted the quality of the courses offered by the university.
During the meeting, the president of Capes confirmed that the body will block, starting this Tuesday (4), 70% of master's and doctorate scholarships from postgraduate programs that received a grade of 3 in the last two periodic evaluations. carried out in 2013 and 2017. The measure was announced when scholarships considered idle were retained, but its implementation had not yet been announced.
According to the dean of Postgraduate Studies, Nancy Lopes Garcia, Capes informed that it will also collect 70% of the scholarships from programs that fell from concept 4 to 3 in the last evaluation and, only in this case, Unicamp has a postgraduate program -graduation. Retention must occur as scholarships become vacant. The dean participated in a meeting with Capes directors before the courtesy visit to the Rector's Office. President Anderson Correia was accompanied by the director of Programs and Scholarships in the Country, Zena Martins, and by special advisor Dárson De La Torre.
In the second semester, as reported by Correia, Capes should continue the contingency measures, freezing thirty percent of scholarships for programs rated 4 in the last two evaluations. This rule is expected to impact seven postgraduate programs at Unicamp. “We will hold discussions between the programs to find out what can be done, if there is any possibility of merger”, noted the dean.
At the meeting this Tuesday (03), Correia praised Unicamp. He said that the university is an innovation laboratory for Brazilian postgraduate programs. “Unicamp is a model based on several indicators. First, it is the university with the highest number of patents in Brazil, first in Latin America in the Times Higher Education ranking. It has the highest number of publications by faculty in the country and the highest ratio of graduate students to undergraduates for a large university,” he highlighted.
Correia also highlighted that the majority of Unicamp courses have the best Capes grades and that the university has grown in a balanced way, maintaining its relations with industry. “Proportionally, it is the university that has had the least cuts because it presents all the quality indicators and these blocks that Capes has made have always targeted low quality”, he said.
A former student at Unicamp and former dean of the Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA), Correia said he wants to maintain a permanent dialogue with universities of excellence. “Our idea is that resources are allocated as a priority to programs that excel, to those who have done their 'homework'. Unicamp is an example. We also prioritize the regions of the country that need greater support from Capes, such as, for example, the Amazon region and some programs starting in the northeast region”.
