At this time of strong crisis in Brazilian education, science and innovation, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) promoted the third edition of “Dialogues for Brazil”, with the aim of not only highlighting the importance of higher education for the country’s development, as well as raising problems and solutions regarding activities carried out in the academic field, with a strong focus on financing and collaboration with the productive sector. The topic “The intellectual, social and economic impact of the university in Brazil” was debated on November 12, in the Fapesp auditorium, in São Paulo. The two previous events took place in Porto Alegre and Salvador, with the intention of holding three more in different regions of Brazil.
“The idea is to discuss the issue of science and technology in the country and its consequences for society, at a time when the area suffers not only from the problem of financing, but also from a situation of obscurantism. It is interesting that we have these events to establish the position of science as one of the important possibilities for national development”, says Oswaldo Luis Alves, professor at the Institute of Chemistry (IQ) at Unicamp, member of ABC and member of the organizing committee of the “Dialogues for Brazil". “This topic at Fapesp disturbs us daily as it brings consequences – unfortunately, most of them negative – that directly affect the Brazilian scientific community.”
Professor March Antonio Zago, president of Fapesp, in his greeting to visitors, cited three examples to summarize the impact of universities and research institutes on the life of the state of São Paulo. “A group of researchers analyzed the return on resources invested in research in the agricultural area, one of the state's sources of wealth and which accounts for 13% of São Paulo's GDP. It was demonstrated that, for every real invested, we have a return of 11 reais in the form of taxes to the government – a return that also appears in the increase in production, jobs and rural GDP.”
Another example offered by Zago is that Fapesp directs around 10% of its investments towards innovation, with emphasis on the Pipe program (Innovative Research in Small Companies). “Over the years, more than 1.200 companies distributed across 20% of São Paulo’s municipalities were supported. The map shows that the presence of universities and their campuses attracts technological innovation and investment, which is notable in the interior, where companies are concentrated around universities, such as in Campinas, Vale do Paraíba, Ribeirão Preto, São Carlos and Piracicaba. Furthermore, the number of jobs in these companies increased by 40% after receiving financing and the tax return grew six times.”
As a third example, the president of Fapesp highlights a news story from the month, about a group from the Cellular Therapy Center (CTC) at USP in Ribeirão Preto, participating in one of the Cepid (Center for Research, Innovation and Diffusion) supported by the agency, which successfully applied a cancer treatment that is at the frontier of science. “The technique uses the patient's own cells, modified in the laboratory, to mount an efficient immunological reaction against the clone of neoplastic cells. This progress was only possible because of the continued support for 20 years from Fapesp and also from the São Paulo university system. Ensuring the stability of funding for S&T and higher education is an excellent path to regional and national development.”
Collaboration with companies
Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, scientific director of Fapesp, said at the opening conference that he has been dedicating himself in recent months to studying a measurement method for university-company collaboration. “Everyone says that this collaboration is incipient in Brazil, but no one shows it. One way to measure it, for example, is to see whether university-trained students create new companies – as the Americans and British like to praise – and we discovered that they did. Take the case of Unicamp, which has been dedicated since 2000 to following these companies [815 created and 717 active in the market]: the latest data is that they already have a turnover of 7,9 billion reais – four times more than the annual budget of the University.”
Amidst the slide with hundreds of “daughters of Unicamp”, the director of Fapesp points to the Brazilian multinational CI&T, created in 1995 by three students from the Computing Institute (IC) – César Gon, Bruno Guiçardi and Fernando Matt. “The company employs three thousand people in 40 countries, showing how to create development with good education. If USP were to list the companies formed by its students, professors and employees, we would have several slides like this; to ITA, it would be enough to add the Embraer logo. The university needs to tell society that these companies exist because it spent resources to train [the creators]. It's too slow. Considering the size of the attack on good universities in Brazil, it is surprising that they do not react by showing more of their work.”
Brito Cruz adds that another way to measure university-business collaboration is in databases such as Web of Science, which shows the number of articles that have an author from a Brazilian institution and another author from a company in another country. “Since 1980, growth [of this type of collaboration] has been strong, at 14% per year. A case of a collaborative article is by Paulo Gurgel Pinheiro, who came to Unicamp from Ceará and with professor Jacques Wainer [from the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, FEEC] created a kit to control the wheelchair by facial movements, of the head or iris.”
Comparing MIT and Unicamp
Professor Marcelo Knobel, rector of Unicamp, made up the first table at the event and recalled that the State continues to be the main source of revenue for the world's large research universities, regardless of whether they are private or public. “We have to get out of our little bubble and show society that the general benefits promoted by the university are greater than the investments. The University of Oxford, in England, receives 50% of its research resources from the government; the Technical University of Munich, 70%. The British government allocated 66% and another 11% came from the European Union (it is not known what will happen now with Brexit); in the United States, 54% comes from the federal government.”
With the exception that he was making a provocation, Knobel tried to compare numbers from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) with those from Unicamp, starting with the same number of professors: 1.872 and 1.867 respectively; 4.500 and 20 thousand undergraduate students; and 6 thousand and 16.600 in postgraduate studies. “The difference is in research and development spending, which is 5,8% of the state GDP at MIT and 1,5% at Unicamp. If the United States allocated 71 billion dollars to research in 2016, in Brazil it was 10 billion dollars in 2015, and we know well that this number has been falling drastically. The reason for MIT's leadership is the volume of resources for S&T. One provocation is: where would Unicamp go with an equivalent budget?”
Yellow flower garden
Débora Foguel, member of ABC and pro-rector of Postgraduate Studies and Research at UFRJ from 2011 to 21015, wanted to highlight her concern with what she considers an overvaluation of the discourse on innovation, making other aspects such as basic research and in particular areas of human sciences. “I confess that I even feel saddened by some of our managers in Brasília, and I see the scholarship modality as very focused on innovation. I'm worried because the idea of 'what is it for' [research] is permeated with, a very utilitarian thing. I wonder if we are not refunctionalizing our institutions, with name changes from MCT to MCTI and now to Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications (MCTIC).”
Making it clear that she is not against innovation – “yes, universities should do it, especially in Brazil” –, the UFRJ professor asks the scientific community to introduce into their speeches examples of public policies that were generated and had an impact on the country. “I ask that we police ourselves, even at this time when our colleagues in the humanities are being so attacked. Do we want 100% of universities to become entrepreneurial and innovative, redefining their missions? Of course, this increases the country's economy and the institution's finances (and salaries), but it can transform our university park into a homogeneous garden of yellow flowers. The Future-se project is a bit of a reflection of what is expected from higher education.”
Solid system at risk
Renato Lessa, currently a professor at PUC-Rio, gave a class on the history of the university and observed that, although the institution has a recent life in Brazil, compared to the experience of Spanish America that dates back to the 16th century, our country built a very solid university system from the 1930s onwards. “I want to draw attention to the fact that this system is at risk. We achieved considerable institutional accumulation, from the creation of CNPq and Capes, the establishment of the federal network, Finep and state foundations to support research. These are areas that have never undergone change, even though Brazilian political life has undergone countless changes in these five or six decades. It is as if an adjacent consensus had remained untouched, and even very authoritarian governments realized that universities and science were strategic for the country.”
Lessa pays attention to the picture of hostility that appears today, hostility inscribed in a more general picture of limits to education, culture, university life and science. “There has already been a restriction on resources, but there has been no prospect of destroying this institutional accumulation, a possibility that is very clear on our horizon. A very symptomatic phrase said by the supposed Minister of Education is that “the university does not train anyone, the family trains and the university educates”. It is important to read in these brands the perspective of reducing the presence of the public dimension in the social lives of Brazilians”.
In Renato Lessa's view, authoritarian models and fascism in general are characterized by placing society within the State, exercising the totalitarian state. “[As for us] we are living an experiment that deserves studies, which is to remove the State completely from Brazilian society. When the government decides to suspend insurance against traffic accidents, which has a fundamental impact on the victims, it means that people are left to their own devices, there is no regulation in relation to this. The idea that society needs to be returned to its total spontaneity has to do with the brutalization of social relations and the absence of mediation on the part of institutions of a public nature.”
University-business partnership
The morning table was mediated by professor Hernan Chaimovich (ABC/USP) and was also attended by Luiz Roberto Liza Curi, president of the National Education Council (CNE), who spoke about graduation and higher education policies in general in the country, with emphasis on the issue of increasing enrollment and student dropout.
At the afternoon table, moderated by professor Oswaldo Alves, the debaters answered questions such as: “Collaboration in research between universities and companies: how, why, how much?”; “Research collaboration between universities and government: how, why, how much?”; “What is the financing of research universities like? What about research groups at research universities?”; “What do research universities offer (or should they offer) to professors to help them do more and better research?” Elisa Reis (ABC/UFRJ), Gianna Sagazzio (CNI), Gilberto Peralta (Azul Linhas Aéreas), Luís Manuel Rebelo Fernandes (PUC-Rio) and Dácio Matheus (rector of UFABC) participated in the panel.
