Del Bosco Factor
complicates equation
Mandarin politics

EIN FEBRUARY 1972, Santos deputy Joaquim Carlos Del Bosco Amaral learned that in Campinas, an emerging university center, there was a lot of confusion: a group of professors from Unicamp were questioning Zeferino Vaz's continued position as rector. According to the discontented, Zeferino's six years at the head of the university contradicted the 1968 university reform law, which established the rector's term in public universities at four years, with no right to reappointment. The crisis situation in a public institution that, in addition to being an excellent sounding board, had a trusted man in the system in charge, awakened Del Bosco's contestatory nature, after all, an opposition parliamentarian. He called the editorial office of O Estado de S. Paulo and asked journalist Ethevaldo Siqueira, who covered the technology sector and was a friend of his, for details. Ethevaldo suggested that he look for the philosopher Fausto Castilho, who had recently been dismissed from the direction of the Institute of Human Sciences due to disagreements with the rector.

The visit that Del Bosco made to Unicamp in the middle of that month began a series of confabulations with the dissident group, in Campinas and São Paulo, during which they discussed not only the legal details of the case but above all the character of the “atrabiliary” rector. and protector of smug and submissive scientists”, according to the harsh language that the deputy would use weeks later, in a speech made to the State Assembly. Zeferino was described as a stubborn man, obsessed with power and “unprepared to manage the university as he did not have sufficient democratic characteristics”. And as for the paragraph of the law that in theory would support his continued command of the university, Del Bosco concluded that it did not apply to Zeferino: Unicamp would already be established, its units were functioning perfectly and “all that was missing was the party”. For a 32-year-old parliamentarian who was programmatically committed to annoying the system's mandarins, and who had been a lawyer for political prisoners in 1964 and 1965, having himself been arrested three times, that mandarinate business was a big deal. His interest in the case took on the air of a crusade after, one after another, the Unicamp mutineers were removed from their positions: Castilho, Damy, Brieger, Murgel, Pinotti. On August 1972, 21, Del Bosco decided to attack with rigor and method: he made a recommendation to governor Laudo Natel suggesting “the convenience of examining the situation of the rector of Unicamp, who should have left his position on 12/70/XNUMX”. He got no response. A month later he returned to the charge, this time with heavier artillery, and managed to get a motion approved by the Assembly to the Presidency of the Republic asking for intervention at Unicamp. In an impassioned speech that impressed many, he denounced the anomie situation that Unicamp was experiencing at that time:

Four years have passed since the University Reform law came into force; however, Unicamp is run as if it were a private property. Employees are persecuted; promotions based on clear favoritism are made; there is a useless and expensive fleet of passenger cars that make the most unexpected circuits, transporting medallions and Unicamp employees; in a word: under the Unicamp sky, it is rector Zeferino Vaz who makes the rain and the good weather.
Do you, honorable deputies, know that, despite the federal law being strict in this regard, to this day there is no department at the University of Campinas that has a legal basis? The responsibilities that the Reform Law transferred to the departments in the administrative area, in the area of ​​teaching and research and in the area of ​​personnel allocation are exercised directly by Mr. Vaca. As at the University of Campinas there is no chair and Mr. Vaz does not allow departments to be established with the prerogatives of the law, instead of having a flexible structure, as the legislator predicted, we are faced with a fluid structure, or rather, the absence of any structure. This gives the dean all the powers that federal law transferred to the department.*

For Del Bosco, the rector of Unicamp is a “feudal suzerain who took possession, in the middle of the 20th century, in the most advanced state of the federation and under the eyes of the government, of a rich satrapy of which he is the régulo”, which “consecrates all his time preventing other sectors of the university from gaining legal status”.

Zeferino, who had a keen eye for nuances in language, probably found similarities between this baroque style and the one that, in Diário do Povo, classified him as “a gentleman with a cleaver and a cleaver” – in fact an expression he himself used to use. A sign of this was that, a few months later, he called the press to accuse Del Bosco of using untrustworthy sources – “well-known university informants whose interests were thwarted by the Board of Directors”. At the same time, he tried to form his shock troops in the Assembly – the situationist deputies Pinheiro Júnior, Ruy de Almeida Barbosa, José Felício Castellano and Astolfo Araújo were immediately enlisted – with the task of countering every sentence Del Bosco made against him or its administration. Pinheiro Júnior and Barbosa spent an entire day on campus, touring laboratories and visiting construction sites in the company of Zeferino.

In fact, the campus was a construction site. The Basic Cycle building had just been inaugurated and there, in addition to the main classroom complex, the Faculty of Education with its range of subjects for the degree curricula had been installed. The Technology Center with its specialized service provision programs to industry and internal units had also come into operation in its own building. And, around the large square that Zeferino had imagined as a Greek agora, the walls of the buildings of the Chemistry and Mathematics institutes, as well as the Engineering and Food Engineering faculties, rose. And, at the Physics Institute, Zoraide Argüello and his team produced the first semiconductor crystals in Latin America.

The State Assembly did not appear insensitive to this climate of “American progress” sung in prose and verse by Pinheiro Júnior in his speech on October 20th. Other voices rose in defense of Zeferino, such as that of deputy Sólon Borges dos Reis, for whom any intervention at Unicamp would be a grievance to São Paulo. Sólon, who chaired the Assembly's Education Committee, found a justification for the lack of turnover at the University of Campinas: “Zeferino Vaz does not hold office due to the lack of an electoral body that elects the rector,” he said. That is, not even the Board of Directors was official, as it did not have the prerogative to deliberate on the choice or appointment of rectors.

At the end of the year, giving full credit to the information emanating from Del Bosco, Estadão began a series of reports and editorials critical of Zeferino. Previously, in September, it had not gone unnoticed by the newspaper that the Campinas City Council had been finding it difficult to vote on granting the title of citizen of Campinas to the rector of Unicamp due to systematic obstruction by MDB councilors. Giving generous space to councilor Adauto Ribeiro de Mello, Estadão reported that Zeferino was considered “the number one enemy of Campinas” and that the title slept in the drawers of the Chamber “in the same way that the installation of the Faculty of Medicine of Campinas slept in other drawers”; in other words, political sectors of Campinas society gave revenge, almost two decades later, for the difficulties created by Zeferino in establishing a medical school in the city.

On November 24, the newspaper bitterly criticized the “excess of publicity” surrounding Unicamp's achievements: “It seems to us that the advertising promotion of Unicamp and its rector is already reaching the limits of reasonableness, which is now starting again with objectives that are not very important. clear”, writes the editorialist, characterizing as “advertising promotion” the series of reports published by his own editorial board, in the previous weeks, about the scientific and technological news being developed on the Campinas campus – which makes the complaint at least curious, if not an indicator of an editorial conflict within the newsroom. But it also reflects the concern of USPians sheltered at the heart of the newspaper, or more precisely the opposite, as some of its most experienced journalists were also professors at the university or maintained old friendships with intellectuals or directors at USP – not to mention the even deeper connection visceral that linked its CEO, Júlio de Mesquita Filho, to the very history of the university's founding by Armando de Salles Oliveira.

(...) since 1966 it has been possible to follow in the press the enormous fuss (surrounding the) repeated announcements of sensational discoveries from the new institution. We believe that this overvaluation of objectives and goals tends to deprive scientific work of its inherent balance and moderation.
To make this situation worse, there is a peculiar tendency in the publicity made around Unicamp, of not giving the other higher education institutions in the country, especially the University of São Paulo – its true alma mater – the credit they deserve. In fact, it is from USP that most of its professors left, sometimes attracted by offers of remuneration at odds with the professor's academic level, a situation that is tolerable, perhaps, in a university that is being established but not in an established center like USP.
(...) We see dangers in an attitude that leads the public and the government to expect fanciful results that are unable to materialize, with the risk of distancing teachers from the serious and patient work – fundamental to scientific progress – that many years has been held in numerous other locations, in addition to Unicamp, mainly in the largest Brazilian university: the University of São Paulo. **

A week later, the newspaper echoed the terms of the motion presented by Del Bosco, which the Federal Education Council would reject. After a four-month break, he returns to work with a new editorial in which he challenges the legality of Zeferino's continued leadership of Unicamp.*** The same text is reproduced in the Diário do Povo de Campinas, between threads, with the subtitle “ Upon request.” The editorialist repeats the dose three weeks later, repeating the same arguments and paving the way for the following day the report to highlight, in three generous columns from top to bottom, new and forceful statements by councilor Ribeiro de Mello. Mello accuses governor Laudo Natel of “imposing on Campinas, since 1966, a man who had worked against the creation of the university and who, after the institution was created, had no qualms about taking over the rectory”.

In July 1973, following the information provided by Del Bosco, Estadão dedicated a full-page critical report to Unicamp. In it, he states that in Campinas “a university has been led for six and a half years by a single man, without a university council, without valid regulations, without the institutionalization essential to the life of any organization of this nature”; and ends by making a serious accusation against Zeferino: that the cost of the physical works being carried out on the campus had suffered an accumulated increase of 2.900% in the last three years – this at a time when annual inflation was around 20%. At the heart of the article, he also criticizes the instability of internal directors in their positions (a real turnover, says the newspaper) and does the math: in the same three years, five units had no less than 14 directors. Not fortuitously, the same report appears reproduced in Jornal da Tarde – afternoon arm of Estadão – in its edition of the same day.****

The report was published a week after Del Bosco, from his tribune in the Legislative Assembly, reported that he was asking Unicamp for proof of a competition to choose the architectural firm Bross dos Santos & Leitner, which had designed and supervised the construction of several campus units. According to Estadão, “210 thousand square meters of works that should have cost a maximum of 20 thousand cruises ended up costing 594 thousand cruises in 1969 – 29 times more than what was authorized in the initial 1967 contract”.

Zeferino defends himself. On July 17, the newspaper published an extensive letter from him that began by denying any turmoil at the university. He gives as proof to the contrary the vast scientific production in progress and accuses Del Bosco's interlocutors: “Yes, the minds of the State informants are troubled, because petty personal interests have been thwarted”. He regrets that the newspaper published accusations without first hearing him – “against someone who has been working for science for 47 years”. Regarding the issue of remuneration for the Bross office, he argues that the buildings originally intended for classrooms “have proven not to meet the comfort required for teaching buildings due to the high temperature prevailing in Campinas during the summer”, making it necessary to build others. Interestingly, it is to another newspaper, Diário de São Paulo, that Zeferino explains the lack of a bidding process to choose the architect:
— The law is clear: the provision of specialized professional technical services does not depend on bidding.

On July 14, he called a press conference in which he made a dramatic appeal to journalists:
— Help me defend the name of Unicamp, as the name of Campinas and São Paulo is also at stake. Nobody was interested in Unicamp's problems while it was an embryo. When, however, it managed to acquire national and international scientific reputation, thanks to hundreds of original works published in foreign scientific journals, Unicamp began to become an uncomfortable presence and to awaken the aggressiveness of the forces of envy, routine and mediocrity, which did not they support the constructive realizations of the forces of the ideal.

Del Bosco, however, gives no respite. A month earlier, he had accused the head of the State government's Civil House, Henri Aidar, of intercepting his documents addressed to the governor, in a “sponsorship scheme” by Zeferino; and had challenged Laudo Natel “to publicly explain why he did not forward a query to the State Education Council on the legality or otherwise of the mandate” of the Unicamp rector. Two weeks later, Palácio dos Bandeirantes formally expressed its opinion on the matter: for the governor, there was no mandate, but only the exercise of the functions of the position of rector. In other words, the government considered that Unicamp was still in the implementation phase, with no legal need for there to be, for now, a rotation of command.

The impact of this statement was immediate. On August 15, the Assembly definitively rejects Del Bosco's motion asking for federal intervention at Unicamp, which does not prevent him from appealing again to the President of the Republic to order “the investigation of administrative irregularities at the University of Campinas”. At the end of September, he asked his peers and the journalists who covered the Assembly whether “a new JJ Abdalla was being born, this time in higher education”, in reference to the São Paulo businessman José João Abdalla, known as a bad boss — “the a slippery, deceitful bad boss who always escapes investigations”, in Del Bosco’s comparison.
For Zeferino, who had ordered a salary of eight thousand dollars to be paid to a newly hired director (this was what Berlinck received in mid-1972, to the astonishment of USP's tenured professors), the accusation of being a bad boss was already a bit much. In September, he personally went to the Assembly to present his views and display his assets. He arrived accompanied by Arlinda Rocha Camargo and as soon as they entered, they both ran into Del Bosco. Upon being greeted by the deputy, the rector turned to his general secretary:

— Is this the man who wants to take me down?

Del Bosco himself said no. What he wanted was only compliance with the law and the investigation of facts about administrative irregularities. “There are no irregularities”, replied Zeferino. During his speech, which was interspersed with applause from the Arenista bench, against a somber silence from the Emedebista wing, whenever he referred to Del Bosco he replaced his name with the periphrasis “the deputy unhappy with the success of Unicamp”. Del Bosco, every time he addressed Zeferino, called him “the magnificent veterinarian rector”.

Del Bosco's advances, although pared down or simply ignored by the government, never failed to cause disturbance in the CEE and even in the palace. In the second week of October, Laudo Natel tried to get around the problem using a method much appreciated by Zeferino when it came to defenestrating pupils: making them “fall upwards”. The governor invited him to occupy the Department of Education in place of Oswaldo Muller, recently appointed to the State Court of Auditors. To Laudo's surprise, Zeferino declined the invitation: Unicamp was not only the place where he exercised his mandate, but also his life project. And he appointed his right-hand man (or “left arm”, in Damy’s words), vice-rector Paulo Gomes Romeo, to the position. At the end of the year lunch

— I hope to leave university as soon as possible, and I will do so immediately after realizing that it has reached its maturity. After all, it must be allowed to acquire its own identity without the influence of its creator. However – she added, so as not to leave any illusions to those who imagined this moment would happen soon – as long as external forces can destroy or harm Unicamp, I will be here to defend it.

---

* Speech by Del Bosco Amaral at the Legislative Assembly on September 1, 1972.

** “Unicamp and the University of São Paulo”, O Estado de S. Paulo, November 24, 1972.

*** “The mystery of Unicamp”, O Estado de São Paulo, March 16, 1973.

*** “Unicamp, a troubled university”, O Estado de S. Paulo and Jornal da Tarde, July 5, 1973.

---

Continues in the next edition.