HIGHER EDUCATION
POLICIES IN BRAZIL: 1970-90 Simon Schwartzman and
Lúcia Klein
Published in Higher Education 25, 1, January,
21-34, 1993
Summary
1. Higher education policies under the authoritarian regime:
1970-85 a. The expansion of the system:
the 1968 reform and the rapid increase of the private sector
b. The dual funding system: the beginnings of university
research
c. Improving public higher education
d. The private sector: from de-regulation to restrictive
accreditation policies
2. Redemocratization and higher education policies: the
focus on evaluation procedures and institutional differentiation
a) Shifting the policy-making arena to Congress
b) Structuring the debate: The National Commission and
the Executive Group for Higher Education
c) The general regulation of higher education
3. Conclusions: policy making in times of scarcity
References
Note
HIGHER EDUCATION
POLICIES IN BRAZIL: 1970-90
The analysis of higher education policies produced in Brazil in the last
twenty years in Brazil shows patterns of policy-making that are closely
related to the nature of the political regimes under which they occurred(1).
From 1964 to 1985, Brazil was ruled by military regimes, with different
degrees of authoritarianism. Throughout this period, a distinctive feature
was the development of autonomous bureaucracies that monopolized most of
the decision-making in almost every sector. The Congress was open most of
the time, but performed mainly a legitimizing role.
With redemocratization in 1985, rules establishing the functions and prerogatives
of both the Legislative and the Executive were redefined under a new Constitution,
approved in 1987. In principle, the Executive was replaced by the Legislative
as the main decision-making arena, thus enlarging the scope of the policy-making
process and bringing in new political actors. Important decisions now require
legislative approval, and major issues can only be settled after demand
aggregation and negotiation through the political parties. In practice,
the Executive tries to hold as much as it can to its decision powers, while
the Legislative has had difficulty in improving its ability to produce decisions
on major policy issues; hence, relations between the two powers are subject
to permanent negotiations of attribution and responsibility, with important
effects upon substantive, sectoral policies.
These features of the decision-making process in the authoritarian period
and in the new democratic phase have left their imprint on recent higher
education policies in Brazil. This paper will stress aspects such as the
displacement of the arena where policies were built up under both
regimes and the main consequences of this transition; important changes
in the scope of the decision-making process; and their effects
upon the nature of the policies produced.
1. Higher education policies under the authoritarian
regime: 1970-85
By the early seventies, Brazilian public administration had already been
modernized to a large extent, increasing its ability for policy-making in
specialized areas and building efficient tools to carry them. In this period,
higher education policies were discussed and generated within a few agencies
located in the Ministry of Education, involving mostly bureaucrats and experts
on the subject on one hand, and the heads of public and private institutions
of higher education on the other.
When "closed politics" is the rule, the bureaucracy becomes the main arena
where a few actors take part in the decision-making process. A closed political
system does not mean the absence of conflicts and differences of interest
and perspectives, just that these conflicts take place behind the curtains,
and the number of relevant actors is restricted. In the authoritarian years,
organized student movements and political parties where excluded; security
and intelligence agents were granted, for a while, a free hand in repressing,
harassing and expelling from the universities students and professors considered
too dangerous and politically subversive. At the same times, competent cadres
were co-opted by the more enlightened administrative agencies, and a new
strata of technobureaucrats played a variety of roles that ranged from the
selection of whom was going to take part in the decisions, to which were
the major topics in the agenda, and acted as "brokers" between different
sectors and the upper governmental echelons. Bureaucrats were also powerful
actors themselves, as they tried to set forth their views on higher education.
a. The expansion of the system: the 1968 reform and
the rapid increase of the private sector.
Policies in the seventies should be seen in the light of the discredit the
higher education institutions suffered in the sixties, and the growing demand
for education that increased geometrically in the first years of the decade.
The discredit was dramatized by the growing political mobilization of students
and intellectuals, that charged the universities of being elitist, out of
touch with the country's needs, and unable to create space and conditions
for research; and confirmed by conservative sectors, which saw in the universities
a breeding ground for radicals and misfits. In the late sixties a comprehensive
university reform was passed, replacing the traditional chair system with
academic departments, setting the grounds for graduate education and research,
and establishing the noble principle that, in Brazilian higher education
institutions, research, teaching and extension work should go together.
At this time, a large part of the Brazilian higher education institutions
were not universities proper, but teaching institutions granting degrees
in one or a few fields. The 1968 reform assumed that, on time, these institutions
would converge into the full university model.
What the Reform did not predict was the extraordinary increase in the demand
for higher education in the following years, which was absorbed mostly by
a private sector that grew in a way that was opposite to that the reformers
had sought (see graphics 1 and 2). In 1968 there were 272.295 students enroled
in 1.712 degree granting programs, 55% of the programs and students in public
institutions; in 1972 there were 688,382 students in 3,124 programs, 53%
of the programs and 60% of the students in the private sector. Although
from 1973 onwards the system grew at a slower pace, growth rates were still
significant until 1978.
Policies in the ensuing years followed two contradictory paths. In the best
part of the public system, professors were stimulated to work for higher
degrees, graduate programs were set in place, fellowships were granted for
studies in the country and abroad, and research money started to flow to
the best research institutes and departments. Full-time employment, which
did not exist before the 1968 reform, became the rule in most public universities,
despite their ability to do research and the quality of their programs.
At the same time, government requirements for the creation of new private
institutions were loosened, and they proliferated.
b. The dual funding system: the beginnings of university
research
Until the sixties, most of the existing scientific research in Brazil had
been developed in specialized institutions outside the university.
The Ministry of Education, which was responsible for the funding of public
higher education, had traditionally designated negligible sums for the setting
up of research groups in the federal universities. The only consistent effort
in that direction dated back to the early fifties, when CAPES, an agency
that granted scholarships for graduate studies in Brazil and abroad, was
created. The Ministry of Education was created in the early thirties in
a period of political centralization, and developed throughout the years
into a huge, internally fragmented, inefficient bureaucracy where appointments
for the key positions and the allocation of financial resources were mostly
based on political and electoral interests. In a context where patronage
prevailed, investment in research - which had scarcely any visibility -
necessarily little political appeal, and was not really in the agenda of
the higher education institutions, shaped along the Napoleonic model of
professional "faculties."
In the early seventies, however a dual funding system emerged that provided
for an increasing, steady flow of funds for research activities in the reformed
universities. The dual funding system relied on distinct functions played
by two different Ministries: wages were paid by the Ministry of Education
as part of the university budget allocated to the teaching staff, while
equipment costs, scholarship for students and supplements to the researcher's
salaries were funded by the Ministry of Planning, with resources from the
National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FNDCT).
This was a budgetary fund under the authority of the Ministry of Planning,
an agency that, in the sixties and seventies, brought under its wings Brazil's
main investment Bank, the National Bank of Economic Development (BNDE),
the country's main economics research outfit, the Institute of Research
and Applied Economics (IPEA), the National Census Bureau (IBGE) and the
National Research Council, among other units. In contrast with the Ministry
of Education, most of the agencies within the new ministry were flexible,
well staffed, and relied on specialized, professional expertise to allocate
research funds according to technical rather than political criteria.
During most of the seventies, the dual funding system worked under exceptionally
favourable condition. FNDCT expanded quickly and was managed by the Financing
Agency for Studies and Projects, FINEP, a light, flexible administration
that allowed for the allocation of funds to the best research groups, free
from political and bureaucratic constraints. In less than ten years, a significant
research capability was created both within and outside
the university, through the establishment of new research groups and the
reinforcement and consolidation of the previously existing ones. The principle
of "investing in the best" proved especially fruitful in expanding research
capacity in areas such as physics, engineering, agriculture, economics,
biological and the social sciences. It ultimately led to a strong concentration
of funds in a few institutions consuming around 70% of the total resources,
paralleled by an increasing fragmentation of the remaining 30% among a growing
number of institutions and research groups.
While the FNDCT kept on growing - as it did in the early seventies - or
at least stabilized at a relatively high level - as happened in the late
seventies - this strategy of resource allocation produced, as whole, very
positive results. The institutions that concentrated most of the funds consolidated
as "centres of excellence" in their specific areas and soon acted as "incubators"
from where new research and graduate programmes irradiated to other regions
of the country; whereas fragmented financial support dispensed to most of
the remaining institutions apparently satisfied their needs and proved sufficient
to start and maintain their research activities. Until 1977 the supply of
funds generally exceeded the demand for research grants in nearly 15% per
year. Besides the FNDCT - that provided support at the institutional level
- the National Research Council awarded individual scholarships to research
staff in institutions and university departments and to students registered
in graduate programmes (here overlapping with similar activities carried
on by CAPES).
c. Improving public higher education
Once the expansion of higher education had been launched and a large private
sector emerged, the policies carried out by the Ministry of Education differed
significantly according to which sector they focused.
Policies for the public sector consisted in a race between a rapidly expanding
body of full-time teachers into the universities and the efforts to increase
their qualifications through graduate education. Public higher education
did not expand as quickly as in private sphere, but each state and most
large cities demanded to have their own federal university, each staffed
with the administrative and academic personnel they had at hand. A previously
non-existing social group, the academic profession, emerged in a few years,
and became a strong pressure group demanding higher salaries, employment
privileges and full civil-service benefits. These benefits required, in
turn, a substantial growth in the budget of the federal universities, 80%
of which were spent in salaries.
While public higher education grew and academic research rapidly diffused
within the best universities, an important redefinition in the scope and
spheres of decision-making occurred: the Ministry of Education lost control
over the higher education budget to the Ministry of Planning, which became
the main arena where the allocation of funds to the federal universities
was negotiated. The Ministry of Planning thus controlled both the budget
for the federal universities and research, while the Ministry of Education
had its scope of decision confined to the certification of new institutions
and to substantive, specific policies of higher education.
From the end of 1976 onwards the Brazilian government faced increasing difficulties
to finance its own activities. Public investment declined significantly
and huge projects were slowed or interrupted. In a situation where resource
scarcity prevailed, hardly any sector was spared from the strict budgetary
policy carried out by the Ministry of Planning. Discretionary funds, like
those assigned to research, were severely affected, whereas the permanent
budget of the federal universities, salaries above all, though experiencing
some losses were, in general, preserved.
The effects of this rigid policy on the university budgets were softened
by the raising political power the teachers' associations gained in the
early eighties, which coincided with the gradual transfer of power from
the military to the civilian elites. A major issue was the establishment
of equal salaries for the teachers occupying the same positions in the federal
universities all over the country, irrespective of location and academic
productivity. Strikes by university teachers became a frequent instrument
of pressure for higher salaries. When salaries could not be raised, the
government compensated by job security and softening of the criteria for
promotion along the academic ranks. The result was that, in spite of the
increasing restriction of governmental funds for higher education, total
expenditures with the teaching faculty in the federal universities raised
slowly, but steadily, until 1982.
Decline in research funds, on the contrary, appeared as an almost irreversible
trend. By 1984 - when FNDCT was reduced to less than a third of its total
amount in 1975 - the negative effects of this long-lasting situation could
already be felt. The obsolescence of most of the existing research equipment
and the inability to retain research assistants and administrative staff
on "soft" money hindered further progress both in basic science and in the
technological areas such as physics, biology and engineering, and several
consolidated research groups broke down all over the country. A whole decade
of steady investment - which had evolved along reasonably consistent policy
lines - was seriously threatened.
Successive cuts in the research funds in the late seventies and early eighties
coincided with a period in which the funding agencies had largely expanded
their range of action. During the "years of affluence," close links had
developed between their technical cadres and the research groups and institutions
that had become permanent "clients" of FNDCT, and spoke out in their defense
when their budgets were threatened. Faced with a highly fragmented demand
from a vast array of institutions, the funding agencies chose to allocate
small sums to most of them, rather than to determine priority areas to invest
and let many research groups unattended.
The financing strategy adopted - which could be labelled as "the distribution
of misery" - somehow assured the survival of research groups, but hardly
allowed for any scientific progress at all. The sharp decline in research
funds combined with an increasingly fragmented pattern of allocation adopted
by the agencies led to an inflexibility which resulted in the virtual lack
of any policy by the research funding agencies until 1985.
d. The private sector: from de-regulation to restrictive
accreditation policies.
Most of the private institutions of higher education founded in the great
wave of expansion - from 1968 to 1972 - were self-sustained and received
no regular government support. In principle, an accreditation from the Ministry
of Education is needed to establish a university-level institution in Brazil,
a task under the responsibility of the Federal Council of Education, which
works as a normative and regulatory body in matters of education for the
Ministry of Education. In the years of expansion, procedures for accreditation
of new institutions of higher education obeyed two distinct patterns: a
liberal, de-regulated strategy that prevailed until 1976, and some attempts
are more restrictive policies, which occurred irregularly between 1976 and
1984.
Between 1968 and 1972 the Federal Council of Education based most of its
decisions on accreditation on very loose criteria regarding the qualification
of the teaching faculty, facilities, time devoted to teaching and supervising
activities and the curricular structure of new course programs. The aim
was to hasten expansion to allow for the rapid absorption of the rising
demand for higher education, which largely exceeded the existing supply
of vacancies. As one the main promoters of the expansion policy, the Federal
Council of Education "facilitated" rather than regulated the creation of
private institutions. Meanwhile, access to the public institutions was controlled
by a complex and, sometimes, highly competitive system of entrance examinations,
which excluded in practice those who could not afford a good (meaning private)
secondary school.
By the mid-seventies, most of the private higher education institutions
consisted of small "faculties," or schools, offering no more than two or
three undergraduate, low quality education and scarcely any facilities such
as libraries or laboratories. Most of these institutions centred their activities
on evening courses in the area of human and social sciences and operated
at a very low cost. Their usual clientele were youngsters and adults from
lower middle-class backgrounds, looking for upward mobility through a professional
career or for upgrading in their present jobs.
This policy was seen with increasing concern by representatives of the liberal
professions and some sectors in the Ministry of Education itself - mostly
connected with the Department of Higher Education - that started a reaction
against what they called the "indulgent" accreditation policy carried out
by the Federal Council of Education. A series of restrictive accreditation
policies were enforced since 1975. At first, there was an attempt to limit
accreditation to courses in specific, "priority" areas, which were never
defined; and was followed, two years later, by the total suspension of accreditations
while new, more selective criteria were under discussion. Accreditations
were resumed one year later, under a much closer scrutiny of the Ministry
of Education. Between 1978 and 1980 only 10% of the applications for new
institutions were granted. The process was again paralysed from 1981 to
1983 and submitted to major alterations: the Federal Council of Education
lost its power as the sole accreditation agency, and had to share it with
other agencies of the Ministry of Education and - in special cases such
as in Medicine, Law and Engineering - with professional associations committed
to the improvement of undergraduate courses and limitation of expansion
in those areas.
Summarizing, under the authoritarian regime, policy-making in higher education
was circumscribed to bureaucratic arenas, which usually coincided with the
specialized agencies responsible for policy implementation. This trend was
very clear in matters of funding. In the late seventies, as the financial
restrictions increased, negotiations regarding budgetary allocation gradually
moved from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Planning, where
all non-economic areas were placed in a situation of disadvantage. Agencies
specialized in research funding, in turn, were born within the formal jurisdiction
of the Ministry of Planning, where policies for the scientific and technological
areas were also sorted out. The informal division of tasks that operated
in the authoritarian period also differentiated clearly between the distinct
capabilities for policy-making that the two Ministries displayed. The Ministry
of Planning appeared as the modern, rational and more competent branch of
the government bureaucracy, handling a comprehensive development project
for the country and producing reasonably consistent sectoral policies. The
Ministry of Education, on the other hand, was heavily influenced by political
patronage, and gradually lost the initiative in the policy-making process.
Accreditation, however, remained as an attribute of the Ministry of Education.
This area unquestionably belonged to this jurisdiction and, besides, was
not under political dispute by any other ministry. Disputes over accreditation
were mainly internal and involved agencies within the Ministry
of Education, and responded to the demands and pressures of private educational
entrepreneurs and the liberal professional associations, many of them represented
in the Federal Council of Education.
2. Redemocratization and higher education policies:
the focus on evaluation procedures and institutional differentiation.
The civilian government established in 1985 found public higher education
system in a precarious situation: the economic crisis - followed by recession
- had led to a substantial decline in the resources both for the federal
universities and for research, and the university budgets were almost totally
spent on salaries for the teaching and administrative staffs. In addition,
retraction of the job market brought a significant fall in the demand for
vacancies in the private institutions of higher education.
The end of the authoritarian regime also coincided with intensive political
mobilization through which organized sectors of society pressed for a wider
share in the decision-making process. In this period, political parties
and pressure groups centred their action around specific issues and demands
that, in time, defined the agenda for discussion and elaboration of the
new Constitution.
a) Shifting the policy-making arena to Congress
The Constitution approved in 1987 led to important changes in policy-making.
The main policy initiatives and much of the decision-making shifted from
the Executive to the Legislative. Agencies within the Ministry of Education,
which had generated most of the higher education policies in the previous
period, lost much of their initiative. The scope of decision-making was
enlarged: new political actors were incorporated, and, because of the fragmentation
of Brazilian political parties, individual politicians, rather than their
parties, became the focus of pressures and the spokesmen of organized groups.
One consequence of this shift was the intense politicization of the issues
discussed and put forward in the Congressional debates and enactments. Issues
like the maintenance of the single university model established in the 1968
reform, restrictions of federal funding to private institutions, free tuition
in public institutions, homogeneous career patterns and salary levels in
all federal institutions, political autonomy to elect the university rectors
and other authorities, the civil servant status and implied immovability
of professors after a few years in the job, all these issues, while expressing
the interests of specific groups, were presented as ingredients of an ideologically
consistent model of university organization - public, science oriented,
free, democratic, participatory - and enshrined in the Constitution. At
the same time, the legislators recovered their power to influence budget
allocations in favour of their regional and institutional constituencies,
whether in the elaboration of the annual budget or through direct influence
in the decisions taken by the Ministry of Education.
For the Executive, from 1985 to 1991, the Ministry of Education became a
political bargaining chip and given to politicians of the Partido da Frente
Liberal, a conservative group that draws most of its strength from the local
elites in small, and specially the poor, Northeastern states. The succession
of "liberal" politicians that controlled the Ministry of Education had to
perform an extremely difficult juggling feat: to maintain the traditional,
pork-barrel practices of resource allocation; not to confront the organized,
ideologically minded interest groups with their strong presence in the Congress,
the press and on the campuses; to deal with the economic authorities in
their attempts to reduce the costs and obvious wastage of the whole system;
and, time and energy permitting, to try to look for ways of making the higher
education system more modern, less wasteful and more relevant for society.
b) Structuring the debate: The National Commission
and the Executive Group for Higher Education
The belief that a common ground could be found to unify these diversified
interests and perspectives presided the creation of the National Commission
for the Restructuring of Higher Education and by the Executive Group for
Higher Education in 1985. Its members - personally appointed by the President
of the Republic - were well-known professionals of several areas and specialists
on higher education. Its composition expressed the concern with the representation
of distinct trends of the civil society. The Commission's report focused
primarily on the academic, administrative and financial autonomy of public
universities and the need for systematic assessment of quality as an instrument
for resource allocation. Diversification of higher education also deserved
special emphasis. Different types of institutions should provide adequate
professional training in the areas where they could best accomplish their
particular vocation. Universities, however, were expected to perform a much
broader role, ranging from professional training to essentially academic
education. Mobility within the system should be assured, allowing for students
to move between different types of institutions.
These proposals were strongly opposed by the teacher's unions and most sectors
in the less qualified institutions, and did not get more than token support
from the government itself. In this period, Ministers of Education rarely
stayed on duty for more than a year, and none of them had a protacted conflict
against organized university groups in their list of priorities. The main
product of the Commission was the establishment of a task force within the
Ministry of Education - the Executive Group for Higher Education, GERES
- which was formally assigned the task of laying out the main policy lines
for the restructuring of the federal higher education system.
The idea, inherent to the Group's appointment, was to create a technically
competent group within the Ministry. This was perceived as an attempt to
reestablish the decision-making pattern prevailing in the authoritarian
period, and arose much criticism among the sectors linked to the university.
It was feared that the Group would rely on its "privileged" bureaucratic
insertion to ensure the enforcement of the policies it recommended, therefore
avoiding the pattern of public exposure that doomed the recommendations
put forward by the Commission.
At the end, the Group's proposals drew strong opposition from two very influential
sectors in the higher education area. As expected, the teacher's and employee's
unions felt threatened again with the institutionalization of evaluation
procedures that could lead unequal wages, career patterns and benefits according
to qualification and academic productivity. Simultaneously, the academic
community - an ally that always could be counted upon as far as the quality
assessment of institutions was concerned - strongly opposed the proposals
for institutional differentiation, perceived as a downgrading of the universities
through the dissociation between teaching and research. Given its higher
costs and scarcity of funds, the Group suggested that investment in research
should concentrate on those universities where research activities had better
chances to succeed and develop. The remaining ones should function as "teaching
universities," specializing in professional training.
In face of these criticisms, the government refrained from turning Executive
Group's recommendations into a law project to be voted by the Congress,
as it was originally intended, thus reinforcing the tendency for virtual
"non-policy" making in the higher education typical of the years immediately
following the end of the authoritarian regime.
Although the recommendations from the National Commission and the Executive
Group for Higher Education were not implemented, they had been, however,
extremely useful to expand the debate on higher education and to set the
main issues around which effective policy-making should proceed after that.
The issue of quality assessment of the institutions succeeded in displacing
from the foreground the traditional cleavage between public or private education
that, for about fifty years, had been the central issue of the debate on
higher education in Brazil. After sine time, the need to establish a nationwide
system of institutional and academic evaluation became was accepted in principle
by all sectors. Fuelled by the Ministry of Education, which renounced in
practice to any attempt at implementation, the discussion moved on to matters
of procedure, where old cleavages reappeared in new disguise. The debate
was now on matters of evaluation procedures, with the unions and less qualified
institutions favouring self-evaluation and "qualitative" procedures, and
academic sectors standing for external evaluations, peer review system and
measurable indicators; and on the agency or institution responsible for
carrying out evaluation.
c) The general regulation of higher education
While this discussion on evaluation procedures dragged on, the Congressional
debate on a comprehensive education law continued, through a special committee
in the Legislative specifically designed to work as its formal decision-making
arena.
Suggestions and proposals stemming from different sectors of the higher
education area were presented in this Committee by the representatives of
different teachers' associations and academic societies. The main cleavage
settled around the proposals fostered by the unions, on one hand, and by
the academic community on the other. The unions favoured an all-pervasive,
detailed regulation, with norms and rules carefully stating the sources
and minimal amount of budgetary resources to be channelled to public universities.
Part of the discussion evolved around the establishment of a collegiate
council planned to replace the current Federal Council of Education in matters
of higher education. The pressure from the unions was towards organizing
this council along strict corporatist lines, through representatives of
the wide range of teachers' associations and academic societies. Besides,
the new legislation was supposed to consolidate items that were already
incorporated in the Constitution and in the daily practice of the Ministry
of Education: similar career patterns and salaries for teachers in all the
federal universities - the so-called "isonomy," rigid career patterns limiting
differentiation according to academic merit and productivity, and political
- but not financial and decisional - autonomy for the universities.
Opposition to these ideas came from individual representatives of the academic
community and from some sectors in the bureaucracy, that never organized
themselves as a concerted pressure group. They opposed wage isonomy and
the system's rigidity. Most of their demands centred around the improvement
of the quality of the higher education system. Differentiation both at the
institutional and at the career levels were also central to their proposals.
Institutional differentiation was considered to make the system more democratic
in so far it opened a variety of "entrances" and "exits" to institutions
offering distinct types and levels of professional training. In addition,
it would assure intra-system mobility, meaning that students would be allowed
to move between those institutions and choose among alternatives leading
either to more demanding training or to short-term, vocational careers providing
an earlier access to the job market. Career differentiation - based on wage
differences and other kinds of rewards set by each individual university
- was considered essential to stimulate increasing academic qualification
and productivity. The right to hire and dismiss members of the teaching
and administrative staff was another demand that stemmed directly from the
autonomy of the universities. Yet, it collided with the stability in the
employment that prevails in the Brazilian civil service. Finally, mechanisms
of evaluation should follow the lines of the peer review system instead
of becoming a "bureaucratic task" to be assigned to a specific government
agency.
Without political parties effectively working as instruments for demand
aggregation and reconciliation, the writing of the law project for the regulation
of higher education had to be built up through a slow, complex process of
adjustment of individual demands. The Chairman of the Committee played a
crucial role in the negotiation with different interest-groups. The effort
to include the main demands of each and to "stitch them up" in the same
text, to guarantee its approval both by the Committee and by the Congress,
led to some unanticipated effects. The incorporation of disperse, fragmented
and often antagonistic, demands made the law project appear internally inconsistent
and disconnected, making its implementation hardly feasible; and the corporatist
pattern of interest-representation and adjustment resulted in an extensive,
detailed regulation of the participation of the distinct sectors and groups
involved with higher education. In the proposal, power of those groups is
"crystallized," leaving almost no room for changes in the structure of representation
of the agencies and collegiate bodies, and leading to total annihilation
of the decision making authority of the executive branch. The final proposal,
which deals with education at all levels, has been presented to the Congress
for nearly a year now. In early 1992, it has received, making it a nightmare
of fragmentation and internal incongruence - making its approval by the
Congress still more difficult.
3. Conclusions: policy making in times of scarcity.
The conflicts, shifts in decision arenas and decisional paralysis described
above suggest a basic lack of consensus in the understanding of the nature,
goals and possibilities of higher education institutions in a society. They
also reflect a disagreement about the resources available to the State for
distribution among political patrons, worthy undertakings and ambitious
projects. From the Second World War until the late seventies, except for
a few years, Brazil enjoyed one of the highest economic growth rates in
the world, combined with equally extreme levels of social and economic inequality.
The state bureaucracy also grew, and disputes in the policy arena, in this
period, evolved mostly around the questions of whom should have the control
and the benefits of public money. In the eighties, however, the economy
stagnated, public deficit run out of control and inflation took over, leading
to a painful period of readjustment that is far from being concluded. Some
sectors still see the current predicaments a short term crisis, due to wrong
economic policy decisions in the past, or the machinations of powerful,
private (and often multinational) groups in the present. For others, the
state is the culprit, and nothing less than its dismantling could make the
economy run again. As the harsh facts of the economy settle in, interest-group
activism, blunt ideologies and pork-barrel politicking lose their effectiveness,
and a gradual perception of the new realities emerge. The state will not
disappear, and will maintain its presence in higher education. But the universities
will have to justify their share against the demands of public health, basic
education, housing, environment protection, urban transportation and other
demands, which are bound to get stronger as the problems of economy competitiveness,
social inequality and urban decay come to the fore of the country's social
and political agenda.
This is the context in which major shift in education policy happened in
Brazil, with the designation of a scientist, and former rector of Brazil's
main university, as the Minister of Education. This nomination may signal
the transference of education from the sectors in government that are still
used routinely for political appointments and bargaining - like transportation,
or social welfare - to those that are supposed to be technical and more
protected against petty patronage, and expected to yield results - like
the finance and, more recently also health. With this designation, the Ministry
of Education could gain legitimacy in their dealings with the academic community,
and the quality of the state bureaucracy started to improve. At the same
time, the interminable discussions on the new education bill seem to have
come to a standstill, and no organized group is really pressing its approval,
with the realization that it will achieve very little.
In this situation, the space for policy initiative seems to have returned
to the Executive branch. More rational mechanisms of resource allocation
to public institutions are being devised, evaluation mechanisms are being
established, constitutional amendments and new legislation to allow for
administrative and financial autonomy for the universities is being drafted
for consideration by the Congress. The conditions of economic depression
that led to this shift in the policy arena are an obstacle, however, to
their implementation. The government has other, more important bills to
get through the Congress; money was never so scarce, research support from
the federal agencies has disappeared, and salaries lose their value in a
couple of months with high inflation, leading to demoralizing and repetitive
strikes of teachers and employees; and, as the government rapidly depletes
its capital of good will, its demoralization spills over all sectors, even
those with better intentions, of the public administration. The question
is whether, when and if the crisis is over, higher education will return
to the old pattern of political stalemate, of whether the lesson would have
been learned.
REFERENCES
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Note
1. This article deals only with the policies of the Brazilian
federal government, which, in 1990, was responsible for a network of 36
federal universities and 19 non-university institutions, and regulates the
private institutions (40 universities and 656 non-university institutions).
It does not deal with state universities (73, 16 of which universities),
which include the large and research-intensives Universidade de São Paulo,
Universidade de Campinas and the Universidade do Estado de São Paulo.
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