JJanuary 1978. After fourteen years in power, the military dictatorship shows signs of decline. The Court holds the Union responsible for the death of journalist Vladimir Herzog and, in the same year, then-president Ernesto Geisel revoked AI-5. Exiled since 1964 due to his work leading the National Union of Students (UNE), economist José Serra – elected governor of São Paulo in the 2006 elections – is preparing to return to Brazil. And it is through the doors of Unicamp, as a professor, that he intends to return to life in his country.

Although the prison sentence imposed by the dictatorship had expired that year, his re-entry into the Brazilian academic world would not be entirely smooth. Edges had to be trimmed. Serra had been on USP's blacklists since he was a student at the Polytechnic School, he had been exiled in Allende's Chile and, with the rise of dictator Pinochet in 1973, he took refuge in the United States, where he pursued an academic career. By 1977 he could be found at Princeton University as a visiting professor. The economists at Unicamp, led by João Manuel Cardoso de Mello, were eager to hire their colleague, but the process was stuck in the drawer of the coordinator of the Institutes, the physicist Sérgio Porto, who had a tantrum with left-wing intellectuals.

“I bet he’s just like you”, joked the physicist. “Yes, exactly the same”, joked João Manuel. Porto decided to put the weight of his position to end the struggle: “I won’t recommend it.” And he warned the group to admit teachers of another ideological line. “Why only people on the left?” he provoked. Annoyed, João Manuel threatened to create a scandal around what he considered the moral prohibition of a teacher, and the physicist quickly dismissed the process. Serra was hired, according to João Manuel, “without any hiccups”.

At the age of 36, José Serra took up undergraduate and postgraduate classes, teaching Political Economy, Politics and Programming, Macroeconomic Analysis, Brazilian Economy and Economic Theory. At that point, he was already more than just a teacher. His coexistence with heterodox economists from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), who counteracted the monetarists of the so-called “Chicago School”, stimulated the production of works that are still included today in the list of basic texts.

One of them, the well-known Além da Stagnação, written in collaboration with Maria da Conceição Tavares and published in 1970, would become a classic of Latin American developmental thought. At the time, the prevailing view at ECLAC – expressed by Celso Furtado, for example – was that the economies of Latin America, especially Brazil, showed a tendency towards stagnation. The published text criticizes this interpretation, claiming that the decline in growth rates in the Brazilian economy at the time did not represent a persistent tendency towards stagnation, but merely an episodic crisis, which could be overcome.

In 1981, three years after joining Unicamp, Serra would publish another important work: Cycles and structural changes in the post-war Brazilian economy. In it, the author describes and analyzes the main trends and transformations in the Brazilian economy in the period after the Second World War. “It is a reference text”, observes Paulo Baltar, professor and former director of the Institute of Economics, and colleague of Serra in the early 1980s. The production includes other works of academic relevance, addressing general themes such as The trajectory of development Brazilian from JK to the 80s, and other more specific ones, such as the tax system and healthcare.

In 1983, Serra graduated from Unicamp to take on the position of Secretary of Economy and Planning for the State of São Paulo in the Franco Montoro government (1983-1987). Subsequently, he was elected federal deputy and senator, appointed Minister of Planning and Health, and chosen mayor of São Paulo. The move to the political sphere did not come as a surprise among the professor's students. “Already back then he liked to debate politics”, recalls Claudio Dedecca, Serra’s undergraduate student and now on the faculty of the Institute of Economics.

“The classes were very participatory and debates were not uncommon,” says Dedecca. According to him, one of Serra's main traits as a teacher was clarity and organization. “He was very methodical and the classes were well laid out,” he remembers. In return, he demanded good performance. The tests were essay-based and the assessment was rigorous. “He didn’t give anyone a hard time.” Despite the rigor, the relationship with the group was friendly and informal. “As he didn’t drive, he was always asking students for a ride home.”

The same profile is described by professor Waldir Quadros, Serra's master's student and current municipal secretary of Citizenship, Work, Assistance and Social Inclusion in Campinas. “In class debates, he was very convinced of his points of view,” he says. “And he knew how to defend them”, he adds. The discreet, not very exuberant style, cited as one of Serra's trademarks, was soon assimilated by the students. “It was just his way.” In the postgraduate course, Serra's students would include Aloizio Mercadante, Antonio Kandir and Plínio Soares de Arruda Sampaio Júnior, among other names.

Not even his political career interrupted José Serra's academic bias. In fact, it was his student life that awakened the political activist. His career began at the age of 18, when he enrolled in the Civil Engineering course at the USP Polytechnic School, which he never completed. During this period, he was president of the State Union of Students (UEE) and the National Union of Students (UNE), in 1963. With the military coup of 1964, he went into exile in Bolivia, Uruguay and then in Chile, where He took the Economics course at ECLAC in 1966, specializing in Industrial Planning. He received a master's degree in Economics from the University of Chile (1968), where he was a professor between 1968 and 1973. In 1974, he received his master's degree and doctorate in Economic Sciences from Cornell University, United States. He was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Defeats in politics acted as a stimulus to intellectual development. When he lost the presidential race in 2002, he took a sabbatical at Princeton, in the United States, where he dedicated himself to studying development theories. “These are strategic stops for reflection,” he said at the time. In a way, this tendency to remain linked to the academic sphere perhaps expresses the desire to preserve one's own roots. And, although there is no longer what could be called ECLAC thinking, there are, according to João Manuel Cardoso de Mello, people who think creatively based on ECLAC heritage. “José Serra is one of them”, guarantees the economist who brought the elected governor back to Brazil.