Report on Visit to Brazil (July 25 - August 8, 1976)
Joseph Ben-David
published in Portuguese as "Relatório de uma visita
ao Brasil, Ciência Hoje 7, 37, 1987, introduction
by Simon Schwartzman
Activities:
The visit was carried out with minor changes according to the plan. Some
meetings and seminars were added to those initially scheduled, and because
of shortage of time, the trip to Brasilia was canceled. I had five meetings
with the president and members of the staff of FINEP; two with members of
the CNPq; one with the president of the Fundação João Pinheiro at Belo Horizonte;
one with Dr. Oscar Salla et the University of São Paulo; two with the director
and members of CEBRAP in São Paulo; two with faculty members of the University
of Campinas and one with the President and some of the members of the Brazilian
Academy of Sciences. I conducted a seminar at the Hotel das Paineiras for
participants representing different organizations and universities, and
several smaller seminars at FINEP in Rio and at the University of Campinas;
and gave public lectures at the CDA at Belo Horizonte and at the University
of Campinas.
The subjects discussed at the meetings and the seminars were the organization
and the development of science in Brazil; the transplantation of science
and technology from the advanced to the developing countries; the relationship
between universities, research institutes and industry; problems of science
policy and planning; and the recruitment and training of research administrators.
The public lectures were on "Changes in Higher Education Since the Last
World War."
Comments:
This was my first visit to Brazil, and it was a very short visit. My time
was spent partly by trying to learn from my extremely kind and helpful hosts
as much as I could on Brazilian science, technology and higher education,
and partly by trying to answer their questions about similar problems in
countries with which I was acquainted. Evidently this is no sufficient basis
to saying anything very pertinent on scientific problems in Brazil. But
I shall attempt to give a brief account of the impressions gained from my
meetings and observations in Brazil, realizing that most of them are probably
superficial or trivial, but hoping that some of them may contain points
of view worthy of consideration. For the sake of clarity, I shall summarize
these impressions under several headings.
The institutional Structure
One of the main problems was to get accustomed to the unprecedentedly rapid
development of Brazil in general and Brazilian science and technology in
particular.
The large cities of Brazil are in many respects among the most "developed"
parts of the world, and my meetings and visits brought me into contact with
people as well trained and competent as their counterparts in Europe or
the United States, and with institutions as well equipped and appointed
as any. It was difficult to believe that as recently as 1963 there were
only 124,000 students enrolled in universities - compared to more than a
million today - and that even in the 1960's there were practically no doctoral
training programs in the country, whereas today all the major universities
of the country have at least the capability of having such programs.
New organizations and universities, such as FINEP, the João Pinheiro Foundation,
and the University of Campinas had an atmosphere of vitality and optimism
reminiscent of the period of twenty - thirty years ago in the United States
when science was conceived of as an endless frontier, and great statesmen
and organizers of science created an entirely new structure for the advancement
and support of research, such as the National Science Foundation, the National
Institutes of Health or The Ford Foundation. At a time of crisis in the
funding of research, standstill in the growth of graduate education, and
a general atmosphere of pessimism concerning the future of research, in
the scientifically advanced countries of North America, Europe and Asia,
it was a relief to be in a country in which there were still sufficient
resources to support every worth-while project and to employ every good
scientist, and in which the leaders of science were full of enterprise and
optimism.
At the same time, I was puzzled by the apparently rapid rate of obsolescence
of institutions, and the rigidity and complexity of this young scientific
system. The history of scientific institutions in Brazil began only with
the assumption of the directorship of the Manguinhos Sero-therapeutic Institute
in Rio by Osvaldo Cruz in 1902 and the directorship of the National Observatory
by Henrique Morise in 1908; and that of the universities began only in the
1920's with the foundation of the National Institute of Technology, and
the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Brazil (now of Rio) and culminating
in the foundation of the University of São Paulo in 1934. Yet I was told
time and again about institutions that had managed to decline. It appears
that there were no institutions capable of maintaining excellence for longer
than the generation of their founders. After the elapse of 20-30 years -
and in most cases less - institutions (including universities) developed
rigidities and inefficiencies seriously hampering research, and the absorption
of young scientists and scholars.
It has to be stressed that this impression of institutional obsolescence
is based on accounts given to me by a probably unrepresentative sample of
people. While there have been few contradictions in the accounts concerning
the rise and decline of certain research institutions and schools of technology,
there was a discrepancy concerning the evaluation of the universities. Junior
people were rather scathing in their criticism, senior ones thought that
they were still the best places to do research and that many universities
had some very good departments. But even senior people admitted that academic
administration - including academic self- government - was extremely cumbersome
and rigid, and that co-operation between departments was extremely inefficient.
I have no means to assess the significance of these statements. Rapid obsolescence
is to be expected where there is rapid development, and what is being perceived
as rigidity may be necessary, although perhaps sometimes clumsy attempts
at preserving some institutional continuity and stability in a situation
of staggering growth. But even discounting for all these possibilities there
is left a serious problem of succession. Scientific institutions in Brazil
seem to depend to a very large extent on the charisma of their founders.
One wonders what are the mechanisms of sharing and transferring responsibilities
and leadership, and of monitoring and revising administrative procedures
according to the changing needs and functions of institutions.
My - perhaps mistaken and certainly superficial - impression was that the
rise of institutions was due to the ability of certain leaders to acquire
power and influence in academic as well as governmental circles, and thus
to cut through red tape and disregard bureaucracy in their own institutions
and elsewhere. But they did not try to change bureaucracy, and to eliminate
- or at least diminish - the gap between leadership concerned with the solution
of problems and the carrying out of missions, and the inertia of bureaucratic
routine.
If this impression is correct, it can explain the difficulty of succession
in leadership, and institutional obsolescence. A new leader coming into
any existing institution will find there an inert bureaucracy, cumbersome
routines and complicated personal relations likely to thwart his efforts.
Therefore, people tend to abandon existing institutions in the second generation
- allowing them to stagnate and carry on their work on a low level - and
to establish new ones.
As it has been pointed out, these are speculations based on mere impressions.
But the problem of succession and continued institutional effectiveness
is a crucial one in Brazil (as elsewhere). Countries, such as Germany (in
the past), or more recently Britain and the United States, that have been
capable of maintaining scientific institutions of a high quality over long
periods of time, have all had an effectively working system of universities.
The long term advantage of universities for science - compared to the ostensibly
more efficient specialized research institutes - is, that they have structural
characteristics that can be used to counteract bureaucratic inertia. There
is a constant flow of young people through them, many of whom develop only
intellectual, but no administrative ties to the institution. There is movement
of graduates, and in many cases of teachers of a given institution to other
institutions; and competition for student resources, and recognition among
different departments within an institution, and among similar departments
of different institutions. All these foster an atmosphere of intellectual
openness and vitality, and may give rise to an informal scientific community
held together by the intellectual pursuits of its members. These are important
conditions for the maintenance and dispersion of the motivation to attain
competence and excellence in science, and to resist bureaucratic and other
rigidities. However, not all university system have been equally successful
in generating such results. Universities tightly regulated by governments,
and jealously safeguarding traditional privileges of students and teachers
may become entangled in a maze of customs and procedures, and paralyzed
by political currents originating outside or inside the university.
It is a most important question to discern what is the trend of development
in Brazil and what is the balance of forces impinging on Brazilian research.
The questions are in what field are there emerging scientific communities
capable of ensuring their own continuity, and what are the conditions of
such development. It is to be hoped that the research undertaken at the
present at FINEP under the leadership of Professor Simon Schwartzman will
make an important contribution to answering these questions.
Graduate and Undergraduate Education
There was unanimity among my informants that undergraduate education -
with the possible exception of some professional courses- was of inadequate
level. Some asserted that the rapid development of graduate education
has been one of the main causes of weakness of undergraduate teaching,
because the most competent teachers were busy with graduate education,
and had no time and interest for under-graduates.
The question Is to what extent is this weakness of undergraduate education
a temporary phenomenon likely to be corrected by the increasing supply
of graduates possessing higher degrees, and a slowdown of the expansion
of the universities. Some correction of this kind will undoubtedly take
place, but one can not rely entirely on this self-correction through market
forces, since academic work in Brasil does not take place In a free market.
At the present there is a great deal of disincentive for academic teachers
to invest time and effort in the education of undergraduates. Except In
highly selective faculties, such as engineering or medicine, students
are ill prepared and difficult to teach. In addition, the teachers have
to deal with students' representatives pressing for lax academic standards
(and, occasionally, for conformity with their political preferences),
they have to comply with unreasonable administrative procedures, and their
advancement may depend more on intra-departmental and intra-university
politics than on effective and high quality teaching.
Of course, these problems are common to all systems of higher education,
but the North American and European systems face this problem from the
background of a long-established tradition of full-time university research
and teaching that had attained high standards before graduate education
became a significant part of the academic enterprise. In Brasil, where
modern university education began only In the 1930's, there has been no
time and opportunity to establish such standards. The tradition of full
time research and teaching is being established only at the present, and
only in graduate education.
This may have undesirable results. The university system now turns out
more than 100,000 graduates a year, most of them very poorly educated,
with degrees mainly in the social sciences and humanities. They demand
employment more commensurate with their status image than with their lack
of competence, and concentrate in teaching and in public employment They
have a vested interest in the growth of bureaucracy, and rarely have the
competence to do satisfactory work in their field of study. Those of them
who become teachers, extinguish the motivation of their students to learn,
and those who become administrators make life more rather than less difficult
to the people whom they are expected to serve.
The people who lead Brazilian science today concentrate their efforts
on creating institutions capable of training research workers and doing
research on the highest level in the natural sciences and technology,
and on establishing links between research and Brazilian industry. They
have a vision that a strong self-sustaining scientific-industrial co-operation
will lift up the entire society.
These efforts are very impressive and have been in many cases successful.
They have created within a period of about ten years the foundations of
a self-sustaining research system and a scientific community in the country.
However, in spite of the rapid growth of Institutions, manpower, and resources,
what has been established so far is only a beginning, that in order to
bear fruits will have to be developed further at a reasonable rate for
many years.
But it has to be realized that while this advancement is taking place
in a small part of higher education and In some non-university research
institutes, the large bulk of the university system produces graduates
who are more likely to perpetuate rather than eliminate cumbersome inefficiency
and who may actually counteract the impulse for technological growth and
social advancement. Of course, the improvement of undergraduate education,
comprising more than a million students, is a staggering task compared
to the improvement of graduate programs, comprising probably not much
more than about 20,000 (12,351 in 1973). But perhaps a beginning could
be made in the improvement of undergraduate education, without hurting
the efforts to further developing graduate education and research, since
indefinite postponement of dealing with the undergraduate problem poses
a threat to the impressive advances made in advanced research.
Graduate Education Abroad and in Brazil
Until now Brazilians who wanted to obtain advanced training in science
and technology had to go abroad for training. Today there are some opportunities
to acquire such training at home, but for many years to come it will be
essential for the vitality of Brazilian science and technology (as for
all small and middle-sized scientific systems) that advanced students
or young research workers spend some time studying and working abroad.
Study abroad involves costs and risks, Those who return, have to re-adjust,
and some do not return (although this latter is not a problem in Brazil
today). These problems of re-adjustment of people trained abroad was raised
in practically all the meetings and seminars I had during my visit, and
I shall try to summarize the picture obtained from those discussions.
One type of problem is the result of unsuccessful training. Persons studying
abroad may not succeed. This, of course, can also happen at home, but
in the case of students abroad, failure can be more easily concealed.
Universities are usually more lenient towards foreign students than their
own nationals, and teachers are more reluctant to give their honest opinion
about a student to a faraway employer than to someone they know personally.
There is also some reluctance to recognize failure at home, especially
if the student was sent abroad on scholarship, since recognition of his
failure would reflect on the judgment of those who sent him. I do not
know what is the number of cases in which unsuccessful training abroad
led to unfortunate appointments at home, but it seems that more careful
selection of candidates, better knowledge of the circumstances of training
at foreign universities and more careful examination of foreign credentials,
could reduce these mistakes considerably.
Another problem with training abroad is the possibility of mistraining.
Students coming from a foreign country are difficult to absorb in university
departments. They usually have language and social difficulties, and their
educational background is also different from those of local students.
Under such circumstances they may not be able to develop the intellectual
independence needed for creative research. They will attach themselves
to a single teacher, and will be glad to be given a narrowly defined technical
problem that enables them to master a technique and to produce results
without having to get to grips with a substantive problem that requires
openness of mind and flexibility. In social sciences this may take the
form of the student being used as a resource person for collecting data
on his own country in a comparative research project directed by his teacher.
These cases are a more serious problem, since they often involve students
who, given proper training, could have become competent research workers.
It is difficult to see how such problems could be entirely avoided, but
adequate selection, preparation and counseling of students sent abroad
on scholarship, and careful selection of universities to which they are
sent, may prevent some mistakes. The growth of graduate education in Brazil
may also alleviate the problem, since it will be possible to send people
abroad after their doctoral work at home, by which time they will have
demonstrated some ability to do independent work.
The main problem, however, is the re-absorption of graduates. Apart from
technical difficulties that may be extremely frustrating in the experimental
fields, there are usually two problems. From a foreign graduate school
absorbed in research, the young Ph.D. is placed into a university department
at home in which no one is interested in research, and in which he may
be even the target of hostility for his "irrelevant" emphasis on research,
and his lack of appreciation of the minutiae of local academic politics
and teaching. In these cases the person either adjusts and ceases to engage
in research, or tries to leave the university or reduce his work there
to a minimum, and engage in research at a foundation or elsewhere.
The other problem is that even if the young graduate finds a place to
do research, he or she is suddenly cut off from most of his or her professional
contacts. The Brazilian (as all other small scientific) systems do not
have enough people in the majority of scientific specialties, to provide
sufficient contact and stimulation for a worker in those fields. This
is particularly serious in the case of young people who do not yet have
an established place in a scientific network; do not receive pre-prints;
are not invited to meetings; and are not asked to serve on the editorial
boards of important journals. As long as they worked in a large research
center abroad, they participated in such networks through their professors.
Upon returning home they are cut off from all this.
One of the results of this - not only in Brazil, but also in other countries
with similarly sized scientific communities - is to develop an increasing
interest in policies designed to represent and promote science in general.
This connects the young research worker with his colleagues at home who
work in other fields than his or her own, and with the local elite of
senior statesmen of science. But - I guess - that this reduces scientific
productivity considerably and turns quite a few young Ph.D.s away from
research altogether.
It seems that two measures could improve this process of re-absorption.
As far as possible, young Ph.D.'s should be placed either in adequate
environments, or in groups large enough to have an impact on an inadequate
environment. Furthermore, young people could be given opportunity and
encouragement to present papers at international meetings; to visit foreign
laboratories and work in them periodically; and to publish in international
journals. The point to be stressed is that only through maintaining foreign
contact can a Brazilian (or an Indian, Israeli, Czech, etc.) scientist
be part of a network essential for adequate scientific work.
Is there a Brazilian Way to the Development of Science
and Technology?
Another recurrent theme of the seminars and discussions was the specificity
of the problems facing Brazilian science development, and the need to
devise policies adopted to specific local problems. The issues raised
were usually abstract and general and my impression was that there was
a wide gap between the rhetorics of talk on these problems and the highly
pragmatic policies actually pursued. In the following, I shall try to
present and criticize some of these general arguments, and to show that
the rationale implicit in the existing practices has been much superior
to the way people talk and generalize about these matters.
The main arguments were that Brazilian science and technology were hampered
because of the dependence of Brazilian industry on foreign enterprise,
uninterested in using local technology, or addressing itself to local
needs; that science had to be developed as part of an overall plan of
technological development; that, in view of the pressing problems of Brazil,
it was not possible to build on available foreign experience, but one
had to innovate and find new ways to develop science and technology. Translated
into practice, these ideas would require overall technological planning;
the subjection of research and training to specific technological goals;
highly selective and restrictive adoption of foreign technologies; and
an a priori preference for locally devised innovations over
solutions found elsewhere.
Evidently technological development can be planned to some extent, since
reviews of economic trends and problems can be verified and these help
to define technologically critical areas. Knowledge of these areas and
of the state of relevant technologies can help to determine needs for
training, and for some kinds of usually rather simple research involved
in the transplantation of technologies, such as required in agriculture
by differences in the quality of soil or differences of climate. This
is an important part of science policy.
But limiting research and training to the requirements of such technologically
defined problems would be in the long run highly inefficient. The people
trained for such purposes would have great difficulty to learn new technologies,
and research of such limited kind would become obsolete in a short period
of time. New technological needs would require new plans for training
and research, and the maturation of the plans would usually lag far behind
the needs.
The only societies that can perhaps afford such close integration of advanced
scientific and technological training and research to their industrial
needs are the highly advanced, large and autarchic industrial countries.
They can predictably use every available technology, so that by training
people for all fields, they would be more or less assured to have provided
for all their needs in technological knowledge without training personnel
for non-existing needs. Even in their case it is doubtful whether this
would be the most effective way of planning research and teaching, but
it would probably work, as it does up to a point(and in conjunction with
a certain amount of pure research and study) in the Soviet Union.
Contrary to the myth that developing countries can not afford pure science,
and have to adjust their investments in research and training to precise
economic goals, this would be for them the most unreasonable thing to
do. Since they have very great uncertainties about the future course of
their economic-technological developments, by subjecting their scientific
efforts to narrow economic consideration, they are likely to misdirect
and waste them.
What such countries primarily need is the creation of a self-sustaining
tradition of science and technology, and this can be best achieved through
developing their system of higher education primarily according to intellectual
and educational criteria. Once there emerges a strong local tradition
in science and technology, it is relatively easy to find people working
on technologically relevant problems. Thus integration between scientific
and industrial development should be looser, rather than tighter in the
less developed countries than in the developed ones. This is how science
and industry originally developed in Europe, when those countries were
less developed, and the rationale of their development is still relevant
today. And this is in fact how the most active part of Brazilian scientific
enterprise, physics, has actually developed. It began without any precise
plans of application, reached intellectual maturity and critical mass
as a scientific discipline, and is now applied in several important fields,
such as the electronics, and energy industries.
The suspicion that dependence on the importation of technological know-how
competes and suppresses local innovativeness, or that it imposes on the
country less than optimal technologies, is also based on mistaken assumption.
I found no evidence of suppression of local innovativeness by foreign
technologies, but many instances in which there were not enough research
workers and/or research facilities to work on problems that different
industries were interested in.
The question of what is the optimal technology for a country is more complicated.
The example one always encounters is the industries based on fossil fuels,
and the absence of development of alternative sources of energy. This,
of course, has nothing to do with the importation of foreign technologies,
since the same problem exists in countries from which those technologies
have been imported. This is a problem related to economic changes that
raised the price of a basic raw material.
The point would not be worth discussing, if it had not potentially harmful
implications. The preference for "doing it yourself" type of technologies
may cause tremendous waste, and may only perpetuate technological dependence.
The road to independence leads through learning whatever can be learnt
from whatever source, and to begin innovating only in cases in which there
is no existing knowledge.
The need to find new ways because the urgency of developing the country
(or other developing countries) is based on the same fallacies as the
dependency argument. It is true that developing countries today cannot
be expected to spend two-three hundred years on modernizing themselves,
as did the countries of Europe, and, indeed, they do not have to. They
can cut down this time to a fraction of it through acquiring existing
knowledge. This has been done in Eastern Europe, Japan, and is being done
in Brazil itself. Those who recommend finding new ways, because the old
ones do not seem adequate to them, are in the reality opting for a repetition
of the two - three hundred year period of development.
Actually, as has been pointed out above, the ways adopted in linking scientific
research with industry in Brazil have been based on a different rationale
than that of the public rhetoric. Up until the 1940's support of scientific
institutions - such as the Osvaldo Cruz Institute, the Biological Institute
of São Paulo, or the engineering schools - was always related to some
specific need. But, it seems, that because of their limited objectives
the vitality and influence of these institutions have been limited. The
take-off towards the emergence of a scientific community seems to have
been connected with a change of policy begun with the establishment of
the university of São Paulo (especially its Department of Physics), continued
with increasing support of research and advanced training based on intellectual
and educational criteria in the late 1940's, and culminated in the building
up of graduate education during the last decade.
Since then - if I understood correctly - the policy has been to support
the development of research and graduate education without tying support
to specific technological purposes, and, at the same time, to stimulate
the technological application of research through helping industry and
other potential users to define their research needs, mediating between
them and the scientists, and providing funds and occasionally facilities
for research and development projects. This policy is reflected in the
Second Basic Plan of Scientific and Technological Development that
allocates 35.1 percent of the funds for the development of human resources
(advanced training of scientists and technologists) and non-directed research,
and the bulk of the rest to specific industrial and other projects developed
in cooperation with or upon demand from, the industries, and not forced
on them according to pre-conceived plans.
This policy is, as has been pointed out, the exact opposite of the rhetoric
against so called "dependence" and importation of knowledge and for "
"innovating" new kinds of technology specifically tailored to local needs
and resources. The scientific community on the one hand, and industry
on the other, are encouraged and helped to learn the existing state of
art, and to catch up with the rest of the world, and are encouraged to
innovate only to the extent that acquired knowledge requires adaptation
and modification.
In the pursuit of these pragmatic policies Brazil has created a very effective
type of organization. The communication of industrial problems to scientists
and the transfer of scientific knowledge to industries is a difficult
problem that has found in most countries only partial solutions. Transfer
is effective in some fields, but non-existent in others, and the effectiveness
of communication varies from time to time depending on changing circumstances.
Brazil seems to be the only country in which there are agencies ("foundations")
that systematically cover the entire interface between science and industry;
that have qualified personnel in all fields for doing effective surveys
of needs and facilitating communication between scientists and industrial
or other users of research; and have significant funds to actually support
projects. In these respects Brazilian foundations are probably the most
advanced in the world.
Of course, there is a limit to what such foundations can do. They operate
in a framework of inexperienced industry, a small and limited scientific
and technological community, a cumbersome framework of bureaucratic regulations
and practices, poor technical infrastructure and a maze of agencies with
overlapping functions. But the basic conception underlying the policies
and practices of the development of science and technology are sound,
and - given the limitations - the results are very impressive.
Conclusion
In conclusion I should like to emphasize again the tentative and preliminary nature
of these comments. They are to be seen as a memorandum on meetings on to people
who were kind enough to teach me about their experience and discuss with me problems
of common interest. By summarizing my understanding (and perhaps, misunderstanding)
of those discussions, I do not intend to put forward any conclusions but only
to provide an opportunity for further exchange of views and information between
us.
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