A Space for Science, Simon Schwartzman, 1991, chapter 5

A Space for Science - The Development of the Scientific Community in Brazil

Simon Schwartzman

The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991

Chapter 5

THE 1930 REVOLUTION AND THE NEW UNIVERSITIES

"Educação Nova" and the Catholic Church

The Search for Alternatives

The Francisco Campos Reform

A Liberal Project: The Universidade do Distrito Federal

A Model to be followed: the Universidade do Brasil

A New Elite for a New Nation: The Universidade de São Paulo

Notes

"Educação Nova" and the Catholic Church

The 1889 Republic concluded the formal separation between church and state that was already taking shape in the last decades of the Empire. The new regime gave space to the regional oligarchies that had been kept aside by the Empire, but it did not incorporate in any way the new intellectuals who had begun to appear with the modernization of the cities and the beginnings of industrialization. In the new arrangement, there was no place for those who had fought against the Empire carrying the banners of abolitionism and for the more radical versions of republicanism. The Republic was in many ways less enlightened and less modernizing than the Empire precisely because it yielded so much power to the states and renounced political centralization, a landmark of the imperial times.

It is easy to see how education became a central concern for intellectuals who grew in numbers but were kept alienated by the republican regime. If the country would only recognize the importance of education, the intellectuals - and especially those working on education would come to the fore in national life. They would then have a chance to use what means they had to solve the problems of backwardness, poverty, ignorance, and lack of public - mindedness that prevailed in Brazil. A new concern for education would produce not only more schools but also more agencies, secretaries, and even a ministry for education and thus more power and employment for intellectuals.

The propagandists of education in the 1920s were likewise marginal in the republican regime and in their desire for more education, but otherwise they were deeply divided. On one side were those who later became identified as the "pioneers of new education," a group that included Anísio Teixeira, Fernando de Azevedo, Francisco Venâncio Filho, Heitor Lira, Almeida Júnior, Lourenço Filho and several others. For them it seemed evident that the country's problems would begin to go away when the educational system started to expand, modernize, and be more rational. Fernando de Azevedo describes the conflicts during those days as a struggle between the old and the new, the traditional and modern mentalities - almost a generational conflict. The expression "new education," brought by Anísio Teixeira from his years at Columbia University's Teachers College, had mostly a pedagogical meaning, namely the notion that education should be based on the principles of individual freedom, creativity, and originality of thought instead of on formal teaching and root learning, which prevailed in traditional education. Besides those principles, the 1932 Manifesto dos Pioneiros da Educação Nova (Manifest of the Pioneers of New Education) supported the notions of lay education, the creation of a national education system according to norms established by the federal government, and the attribution of a central role to the state in carrying on this task.⁽¹⁾ In other words, the project was to continue and expand the centralizing and state interventionist tradition that had been interrupted by the Republic but that could be revived by the new regime under Vargas. The Catholic church and its more active followers resisted.

Fernando de Azevedo, who had personally followed the road from the traditional seminar to the attempts to bring modernity to the schools, describes the Catholic church in Brazil during the first years of the Republic as going through a crisis of stagnation that was replaced by intense activism after World War I There was, he said, "a mutual indifference, almost a dissociation, between church and century, between religion and the living forces of society." Priestly vocations were extremely rare, and those who chose this road became isolated and did not share the life of other students.⁽²⁾ What is less clear is how what Azevedo himself described as "the most vigorous Catholic movement of our history, for the breath of its social activism, for a new interpretation of church and century, for the rebirth of religious and national spirit, and for a new fighting mood, not necessarily marked by an ecumenical spirit or by the openness of minds" developed from this state of isolation and lethargy.

This experience of Catholic revival has been the subject of extensive scholarship.⁽³⁾ One of the revival's main characteristics was the intense militancy of Rio de Janeiro's Cardinal Leme, who would promote dramatic events-such as the inauguration of the Statue of Christ the Redeemer or the consecration of Brazil to Our Lady of Aparecida, both in 1931 - gathering large crowds in the streets and pressing the new government to take the church into account in the period of nation-building about to begin.

To this militancy of the official church one should add a new element: the emergence of a small group of Catholic intellectuals gathered around an institute that, significantly enough, took the name Centro Dom Vital under the leadership of Alceu Amoroso Lima, who also used the pen name Tristão de Ataíde in his literary writings. The Catholic lay intellectuals shared with everybody else their dissatisfaction with the country's backwardness, ignorance, and lack of moral fiber and with the corruption and inefficiency of the civilian authorities. Like the others, they believed that the road to national redemption included reconstruction of people through education. Like the others, they also hoped to play an active role in this work of human education and national redemption, and they looked to France for sources of inspiration.

The main difference was that, while some took their inspiration from the French enlightenment and the republicanism of the dreyfusards, others found more inspiration in the conservative radicalism of the Action Française. For these, the central values were social order, hierarchy, religious authority, and education guided by religious principles and controlled by the church. The enemies were the ideals of liberalism, individualism, freedom of information and thought, and the power of the state, when not controlled by the church. The agenda had not changed much since the times of Dom Vital in the nineteenth century, and as in those years this too was a period in which the power and authority of the Roman hierarchy over the universal church were reinstated. The progressive"romanization" of the Catholic church brought Brazilian Catholics closer to Rome than ever before, leading to replenishment of Brazilian parishes with foreign priests and to a search for a much stronger and influential role for the church in social and political matters than the republican constitution had predicted.⁽⁴⁾

The 1930 revolution was received by Catholics with mistrust. The word "revolution" was enough to make shudders those for whom the social order - even the worse - was better than any other challenge to authority. Besides, Getúlio Vargas was a product of the positivist political oligarchy of Rio Grande do Sul, and his government would necessarily lead to an increase in political centralization and the strengthening of the state. Soon, however, a political agreement emerged. The state would grant the church privileges in the fields of education, morals, and social order; the church, in turn, would provide the government with social peace and ideological support.

The 1920s and 1930 therefore found Brazil faced not only with new ideas and ways of looking at the world but also with cultural, political, and social movements that were to have extensive consequences in the decades thereafter. In São Paulo the Modern Art Week of 1922 removed the nation's painting and literature from the clutches of archaic classicism, permitting closer contact with Brazilian reality and with Europe's more vibrant experiences in art. In Rio de Janeiro the Academia Brasileira de Ciências was established, and the Associação Brasileira de Educação initiated a movement to enlarge and modernize Brazilian education at all levels.

It would be a mistake to interpret these tendencies as leading to a continuous and uninterrupted trend of social and cultural modernization. In the 1930s, they would be affected by the centralizing tendencies of the Brazilian state; by its profound conservatism, in which a militant Catholic church would play a central role; and by the tensions and contradictions that existed among the central state, regional elites, and a new breed of independent intellectuals. In the following sections, we shall look at the movements toward modern science and expanded education that were taking shape in the 1920s and examine in some detail the experiences of academic institutionalization in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

The Search for Alternatives

Two institutions captured the mood for renovation in Brazilian science and education during the 1920s the Academia Brasileira de Ciências and the Associação Brasileira de Educação. The academy was established in 1922 as an outgrowth of the Sociedade Brasileira de Ciências, founded in 1916. At the time of its establishment, the Sociedade was linked to the Instituto Franco - Brasileira de Alta Cultura (the French - Brazilian Institute of High Culture), which had been created under the auspices of the French government, as similar institutes had been created in Buenos Aires and other capitals. Henrique Morize, director of the observatory and professor of experimental physics at the Politécnica, was the Sociedade's first director, holding that post until his death in 1930.⁽⁵⁾

The Sociedade initially held its meetings in the Politécnica's faculty room and was temporarily divided into two main areas: mathematical and physico-chemical sciences. Later came finer divisions: mathematical, physical, chemical, geological, and biological sciences. Publication of its journal, Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Ciências began in 1917 under the responsibility of Artur Moses.⁽⁶⁾ Besides publishing and publicizing scientific work, the academy fostered exchange with foreign scientists, especially French scientists. In 1922 Emile Borel was invited to Brazil to give a lecture entitled "The Theory of Relativity and the Curvature of the Universe." In 1923 there were visits by Emil Gley, Henri Abraham, and Henry Piéron; in 1925 a visit by Albert Einstein on his way to Buenos Aires; and in 1926 visits by Paul Janet, Emile Marchouy, and George Dumas.

The academy essentially played a cultural and intellectual role, acting to foster science more than perform it. It did not, for example, sponsor any research programs of its own. To a certain extent the academy stood as the Politécnica's "antifaculty," a reaction to the delayed penetration of more modern ideas within that school. Perhaps for this reason many of its members were fierce advocates of the new education, research, and teaching principles then being preached by the Associação Brasileira de Educação.

The year 1924 saw the creation of the Associação Brasileira de Educação in Rio. The names of its various departments give us an idea of its goals: primary and teachers' education, secondary education, higher education, professional and artistic education, physical and hygiene education, education in morals and civics, and family cooperation. The association sponsored a broad range of activities, including extension courses, research work, elaboration of draft laws, and - most important - a series of national educational conferences that were to mobilize the Brazilian intellectual and cultural environment after 1927.⁽⁷⁾

Othon Leonardos, a geologist who graduated from Rio's Politécnica and was an active member of the association, recalls that in its first years:

Every week there were meetings of the board of directors and of the various departments - higher education, secondary teaching, professional teaching. Each department would study a topic to be debated by all. One topic that was studied for many years - and about which the association even put out a publication with interviews with several outstanding professors - was the need for a Brazilian university; another was the need for a Ministry of Education. The association also helped create university extension courses. For example, I was in charge of these courses at the Escola Politécnica, which was more centrally located, in Rio's São Francisco Square. We gave between one hundred and two hundred lectures a year. In the afternoon, cars would pull up at São Francisco Square, most people coming by tramway or bus; things were not as hectic as they are today. Attendance was surprising the auditorium was usually near full, and curiously enough even sidewalk café waiters would attend these conferences, eager for new learning.⁽⁸⁾

Within the association, those most interested in the question of creating a Brazilian university came mainly from Rio's Escola Politécnica.⁽⁹⁾

The association's understanding of education and the Brazilian university is reflected in the many inquéritos, or opinion surveys, it had sponsored by the end of the 1920s. These surveys essentially consisted of a series of questions prepared by a panel of specialists and addressed to a wide range of well-known public figures and institutions: the answers were afterward published by the country's leading newspapers or as independent books. In 1927 there were surveys on secondary education and on the Brazilian university question,⁽¹⁰⁾ with the support of the newspapers O Jornal, Rio's Jornal do Comércio, and O Estado de São Paulo. Committee members visited São Paulo, Bahia, and Minas Gerais, and the section responsible for technical and higher education sought the opinion of various specialists and professionals on certain issues, such as what university model could best be adopted in Brazil, whether research institutions should be included within the universities, what teaching methods should be employed, whether state governments should offer the federal government financial assistance, and questions concerning the professional standing of university professors (e.g., salary levels and work hours). The results of this inquiry were published by O Estado de São Paulo in 1929.

Also in 1927 a series of national conferences on education were initiated. Amoroso Costa presented a paper on the relationship between the university and scientific research at the first such conference, held in the city of Curitiba, Paraná. During the second conference, held in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, in 1928, Tobias Moscoso presented a paper on the university question. In São Paulo the following year, the third conference, under the presidency of Teodoro Ramos, was dedicated to secondary education, but the problem of defining the university's role also emerged as a central issue.

The recently created Universidade de Minas Gerais decided to present a carefully prepared document in response to the "inquérito." This document affirmed that "Brazilian universities should be granted full economic, didactic, administrative, and disciplinary autonomy and [that] their feasibility should be guaranteed by independent funding." This concept of autonomy allowed for differences between universities: "To have only one standardized university for all Brazil would not be recommended. On the contrary, each should be freely organized according to its financial resources and regional, geographical, economic, and social peculiarities, while respecting the supreme national interests." The type of university envisioned would naturally train professionals ("engineers, physicians, jurists, pharmacists, business leaders, agronomists, artists, etc."), but it also would "serve as a center for ongoing scientific elaboration, contributing to the enrichment of collective knowledge, improving our physical well-being, and glorifying humanity's cultural heritage." At the same time, "these must be markedly national - and to a certain extent regional - institutions, reflecting the characteristics of the population that sustains them and lending aid to those special needs of its immediate surroundings."⁽¹¹⁾

Three notions stand out from these proposals: the separation of professional teaching and scientific activities, the idea of free research, and the concept of university autonomy. Tobias Moscoso, who presented the theme at the second national conference, expressed the dominant view on the separation of professional teaching and scientific activities clearly:

It is my belief that when we create universities, we must make a clear distinction between two orientations: ...the technical and the scientific. The first should result in the development of expertise in applying acquired scientific knowledge to practical, professional life, relying on knowledge of the optimizing economic precepts and processes in general terms as well as applied specifically to our nation. The second is aimed at promoting competence in scientific investigations and in contributions to the advancement of science, ...all of this directed specifically at Brazilian reality, whenever possible.⁽¹²⁾

These two distinct educational questions were to be clearly reflected at the organizational level: "We need a university equipped with departments of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and the biological sciences, with the full means to carry out scientific research in all branches of pure science; and with departments of philosophy, letters, and the social sciences as well, able to provide a rich cultural background."⁽¹³⁾

The idea that research should be subordinated to the nation's practical needs - or to the demands of professional training - was openly rejected. Alvaro Osório de Almeida put it emphatically:

The secular experience of peoples whose civilization have advanced or are advancing indicates that preserving the spirit of progress requires not only utilitarian-minded individuals but idealistic spirits as well - idealistic spirits able to satisfy their intellectual needs through the pure contemplation of natural phenomena, through knowledge or study of these, or in the cultivation of letters... These spirits do not require external excitement or excitement from other individuals in their work. Their work by itself gives the joy and inspiration we all need. They are the source, the origin, of society's intellectual production and progress. As is so well understood by all advanced thinkers, this is why we must maintain these individuals alongside the utilitarian spirits that draw their inspiration from the former, transferring the knowledge they have harvested for adaptation and application to life in human societies.⁽¹⁴⁾

Tobias Moscoso, meanwhile, argued for university autonomy:

This project would not necessarily be totally frustrated, but it would most certainly be seriously damaged by state intervention in the administration of these institutions, especially as far as didactic questions are concerned. Because of what I have learned from the lessons of other nations and from our own, I am decidedly in favor of total university autonomy and of full university independence from government and even from legislative branches.⁽¹⁵⁾

The Francisco Campos Reform

The first officially established Brazilian university was in the southern state of Paraná and did not last. Its birth in 1912 was made possible by short-lived liberal legislation that was replaced in 1915 by the so-called Maximiliano Reform.⁽¹⁶⁾ In 1920 the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro was created under the new legislation as a merger of the old engineering, medical, and law schools. Neither of these universities amounted to much more than a simple agglomeration of professional schools joined under one fragile rectorate with few attributes. In April 1931 Brazil enacted its first federal legislation⁽¹⁷⁾ outlining the characteristics a university should have. This would later become known as the Francisco Campos reform, in reference to the author of the legislation, then head of the newly created Ministry of Education and Public Health and formerly a contributor to Minas Gerais' educational reforms of basic education.⁽¹⁸⁾

Science and education were not among the main priorities of the Vargas administration, but Francisco Campos saw that they could not only help legitimize the new regime among the educated but also contribute to the modernization project that was in the minds of so many. His legislation was presented as the outcome of an extended debate and an effort to bring together the extremes. The final text, Campos stressed, was "carefully studied, closely examined, and hotly and broadly debated, with opinions gathered from all streams of thought, from the most radical to the most conservative." Campos continued: "This apparently eclectic spirit, broad-minded and pluralist, does not so much reflect reality as it reflects a desire for this reform to gain legitimacy in the eyes of many different streams of belief during a time of transition." But the stated reasons behind the new project leave no doubt that the intent is to achieve a single monolithic, coherent, and official understanding of a university, in tune with the new regime.⁽¹⁹⁾

In outlining these objectives, Francisco Campos makes clear his awareness of the ideals concerning university organization that were then popular in Brazil. As he saw it, this university would be

[an] administrative and teaching institution that unites all higher education under a single intellectual and technical leadership, whether such teaching be utilitarian and professional in nature or purely scientific and with no immediate application, with the double objective of providing the nation's professional elite with technical training while providing a climate propitious for speculative, unbiased talents to pursue that goal that is indispensable for the nation's cultural growth - investigation and pure science.

The project did not expect the double role of professional teaching and research to be carried on in isolation. On the contrary, the university was seen as "an active and militant social unit - that is, a center for contact, collaboration, and cooperation between different desires and aspirations, an intellectual and moral family whose activities are not exhausted within the narrow circle of its own immediate interests; on the contrary, as a living unit it tends to enlarge its area of resonance and influence within the social surroundings, taking on a broad, powerful, and authorized educational role." Thus came need for this university to be organized as an autonomous corporation, "with proposed models of organization appropriate for its internal social life, organizations that would encourage contacts and strengthen ties of solidarity, based on the economic and spiritual interests common to faculty and student body." As a tool for influencing the university's surroundings, extension courses were to be created to distribute "the benefits of the university climate among those not directly connected to university life." To achieve these goals, two conditions would have to be met: university autonomy and the creation of institutions dedicated chiefly to research rather than to professional teaching.

In laying the groundwork for these two conditions, it became clear just how distant the ideal Francisco Campos saw was from the real world. Concerning autonomy, for example, it would be "nonetheless inconvenient and even counterproductive for the teaching system if a sudden and complete break were made with the present by granting universities broad and full teaching and administrative autonomy. Autonomy requires practice, experience, and clear-cut guidelines." The nation's immature university environment presumably did not possess such characteristics. Jealous of its newly acquired power, the state intended to play the role of guardian and educator of the burgeoning university, so that such autonomy would one day become "a conquest of the university spirit - matured, experienced, and equipped with a steady and firm sense of direction and responsibility - rather than coming as a gratuitous and extemporaneous concession that would be more likely to de-educate than to instill universities with a sense of organization, command, and government."

There was thus no practical reality to the idea of autonomy. The first decree within the reform created a permanent body - the Conselho Nacional de Educação (National Educational Council) - to assist the minister. With its members appointed by the president, the council had a broad advisory role and final decision-making powers on many issues. For example, it could endorse "the general guidelines to be applied to primary, secondary, technical, and higher education, above all in response to the needs of the nation's civilization and culture."⁽²⁰⁾

The next step was enactment of a statute for the Brazilian universities (decree no.19851) that gave the minister of education and the Conselho Nacional de Educação authority to approve the internal regulations of any universities established in the country. In 116 articles, the statute defined such matters as the responsibilities of rectors; the organization and roles of university boards ("conselhos"), assemblies, and institutes; the organization of teaching, rights, duties, and promotion rules for professors; admission procedures; disciplinary rules; and even social activities, including the organization of student unions. The next decree established the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro with 328 articles that covered details ranging from a list of schools within the university to the syllabus for each course each year, ending with a table showing enrollment fees, attendance, certificates, diplomas. and so forth.

In no instance does the Francisco Campos reform acknowledge the possibility of universities organizing themselves in any different manner, eventually competing among themselves to offer the highest quality teaching. The detailed outline of all pedagogic and administrative activities and of all forms of operation, and the need for federal approval for any changes. gave Brazilian universities a rigidity that would be shaken on only a few exceptional occasions.

"Research" as an ideal met the same fate as "autonomy." Francisco Campos' declared empathy with science was an illusion. He placed scientific research with art - an indispensable decoration but certainly postponable. In the project a newly created Faculdade de Educação, Ciências e Letras, would lend the university its truly "university" character, "allowing university life to transcend the limits of purely professional interest, fully encompassing all those lofty and authentic cultural values that lend the university the character and peculiarities that define and distinguish it."⁽²¹⁾ In this apparent tribute to the ideal of science as culture, the social and economic benefits to be gained through research, in the short or long run, are ignored. The idea of linking teaching to research is also not recognized. Being a mere ornament, science could wait: "During Brazil's first attempt to establish an institution of higher learning, it cannot be forgotten that peoples such as ours, still undergoing a process of growth and maturation, should not try to organize advanced culture all at once, wholly and exclusively. In order for such an institution to flourish in our midst, it is absolutely indispensable that it yields immediate fruits." Therefore, the Faculdade de Educação, Ciências e Letras, "besides being an institution of advanced culture and pure and unbiased science, should be first an educational institute within which can be found whatever elements are vital to training our teachers, particularly those of primary and secondary levels."⁽²²⁾ In other words, it was to be a teacher's college.

The legislation proposed for law, engineering, and medical courses reflects the varying conceptions of different advisers. The proposed law course was to be strictly professional, beginning with an analysis of economic relations - which "constitute nearly the whole content of law" - and including the study of positive law. More conceptual or speculative subjects such as Roman law or philosophy were to be left for graduate work. The proposal for the engineering course highlighted the need to study theory, emphasizing mathematics, physics, and technological research. The proposed medical course stressed the "technological and scientific organization of medical schools, which makes scientific research original and is an indispensable complement to didactic processes."⁽²³⁾

In short, the Francisco Campos reform promised a great deal and was greeted by most as a landmark in the history of Brazilian higher education. But it appeared at a time when a strong new regime was coming to power, and it was clearly meant to preempt and paralyze the movement toward a university system based on autonomously organized scientific communities, an idea then being defended by active sectors of the Academia de Ciências and especially the liberal faction of the Associação Brasileira de Educação. Campos' secret dealings with the church, and his fascination with Mihail Maniolescu and European fascism,⁽²⁴⁾ go a long way in explaining his true intents.

Francisco Campos did not remain in the Ministry of Education for long and did not have time to launch his Faculdade de Educação, Ciências e Letras. In spite of its centralizing tendency, the Vargas regime depended very much on regional support; only after 1935 did it start along the road to authoritarian power, which culminated in 1937, when Campos resurfaced as the minister of justice of the Estado Novo. This is why the first two universities in the 1930s were created not by the federal government but by the city government of Rio de Janeiro and the state government of São Paulo. The relevance of the Campos legislation was that Campos' conception of a national university in a centralized system would be adopted again a few years later and lead to the demise of the Universidade do Distrito Federal, the creation of a national Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, and constant tension between the Universidade de São Paulo and the federal authorities. The Universidade de São Paulo survived and became Brazil's leading academic institution; for the rest of the country, Campos set the pattern.

A Liberal Project: The Universidade do Distrito Federal

One of the most significant spinoffs of the movement led by the Associação Brasileira de Educação was creation of the Universidade do Distrito Federal in Rio de Janeiro by a municipal decree.⁽²⁵⁾ Five schools were to make up the new university: sciences, education, economics and law, philosophy and letters, and arts. The first (and actually only) institution to be created was the Faculdade de Ciências. At its inaugural class, Anísio Teixeira, then secretary of education for the Federal District, summed up the new institution's goals:

The university has a singular and exclusive role. It must not only convey knowledge; books do as much. It must not only preserve human experience; books do as much. It must not only train tradesmen or professionals in the trades or arts; direct apprenticeship does as much, or at least as much is surely done at more specific schools than universities. . . . What the university must do is to maintain an atmosphere of knowledge to prepare the individual who serves and develops this university. It must preserve living not dead knowledge, in books or in the empiricism of non-intellectual practice. It must formulate human experience intellectually, doing so with inspiration, enriching and vitalizing knowledge from the past with the seduction, attraction, and impetus of the present... Knowledge is not an object that is passed down from past generations to ours. Knowledge is an attitude of spirit that slowly comes into being through contact with those who have knowledge.⁽²⁶⁾

The new university was marked from the beginning by the intense climate of ideological confrontation that existed among Brazilian intellectuals in those years. The revolutionaries of 1930 had split between the left, which included Rio de Janeiro's mayor Pedro Ernesto,⁽²⁷⁾ and the much more powerful conservative right, personified by the Catholic church, Francisco Campos, and the military leaders surrounding Getúlio Vargas, among others. At the end of 1935 the Communist party tried to seize power through a military uprising, leading to violent repression and a wave of Communist witch-hunting that included the deposition and arrest of Pedro Ernesto. In July of that year Anísio Teixeira had the inaugural speech for the Universidade do Distrito Federal, already anticipating the years to come.

Secretary of Education Teixeira, born in an aristocratic family from Bahia, was far from a Communist, but the influence of American pragmatism and ideological liberalism during his brief stay at Columbia University was enough to make him a target for Catholic conservatives. His speech began with a defense of freedom of teaching and concluded with images of struggle and death:

There were those who thought it would be possible to start our university tradition by denying the freedom of teaching which is one of the first conquests of human intelligence in modern times. They believed that there could be a university to enslave, rather than to liberate; to stop life, rather than make it go forward. We all know this reactionary language; it is as old as Methuselah: "The crisis of our time is a moral crisis." "Lack of discipline, ""of stability." "We are marching toward chaos." "Toward revolution." "Communism is coming!" They speak like that today, as they spoke five hundred years ago.

At the end, he dedicated the new university to culture, freedom, and the memory of those who had died fighting for the ideals of freethinking: "All those who have disappeared in this struggle, all those who continue to fight - they make up the large university community that we celebrate with the formal inauguration of our courses. Dedicated to culture and freedom, the Universidade do Distrito Federal is born under a sacred sign that will help it work and struggle for a Brazil of tomorrow that is faithful to the great liberal and humanistic traditions of yesterday's Brazil."⁽²⁸⁾

The municipal university was to be created anew, bringing in the best minds, but without the problems of the old professional schools. It was expected, said Anísio Teixeira, that the university would take over the task of molding the nation's intellectual class, a task previously left to "the most abandoned and precarious auto-didacticism," and would finally fulfill the long-standing need for an institution capable of training not only high school teachers but also researchers from various fields. Roberto Marinho de Azevedo, a member of both the Associação Brasileira de Educação and the Academia de Ciências, was made head of the Escola. He managed to bring together a group of teachers who not only were worthy scientists but who also identified fully "with the idea of fostering the unbiased study of the sciences in the hopes of producing researchers as well as good teachers in these fields."⁽²⁹⁾

Among those hired for teaching positions at the new Escola de Ciências were mathematicians Lélio Gama and Francisco de Oliveira Castro, physicist Bernard Gross, geologists Djalma Guimarães and Viktor Leinz, and biologists Lauro Travassos and Herman Lent. Others were to join the team later, including physicist Joaquim Costa Ribeiro, then a recent graduate of the Politécnica; chemist Otto Rothe of the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia; and botanist Karl Arens, formerly assistant to Felix Rawitscher at the Universidade de São Paulo's Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras. There were no full-time researchers or facilities for research. Everybody carried on research activities in other institutions, which had the effect of building a bridge between those institutions and the Escola de Ciências. This meant that students paid frequent visits to Lauro Travassos' laboratory at Manguinhos, Leinz' laboratory at the Departamento Nacional de Produção Mineral, and Gross' laboratory at the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia, where they could observe ongoing research and experiments firsthand.⁽³⁰⁾

In 1936 the school year opened with conferences offered by members of a French university mission, which included Emile Bréhier (philosophy), Eugène Albertini, Henri Hauser, and Henri Tronchon (history), Gaston Léduc (linguist), Pierre Deffontaines (geography), and Robert Garric (literature). Taking the graduation of the first class the following year as a Sign that his mission has been victoriously completed, Afonso Pena Jr. turned the rectorship over to biologist Baeta Viana, from Minas Gerais, while Roberto Marinho de Azevedo was to turn the Escola de Ciências over to mathematician Luis de Barros Freire, from Recife.⁽³¹⁾

The first year of the Universidade do Distrito Federal was nonetheless set against an unfavorable background. For one thing, resources for teaching aids, equipment, and work areas were poor. The rectory was installed in the building belonging to the Instituto de Educação (a public teacher's school for women), while classes were held both at the Escola Politécnica and at a school located on the Largo do Machado square. Laboratory classes had to be held at the old professional schools of the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro or at the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia.

More serious was that a frustrated communist uprising in October 1935 prompted the government to turn the country s political climate strongly to the right, and from then on the project was doomed. The Federal District was subject to direct government intervention, and Anísio Teixeira was removed from his office as secretary of education. With his dismissal, many professors left the university, having lost all faith in the project's future.⁽³²⁾

A Model to be followed: the Universidade do Brasil

The Universidade do Distrito Federal was closed because it collided, institutionally and ideologically, with the plans held by the new minister of education, Gustavo Capanema, to build a national university that would conform to the outlines put forward by Francisco Campos a few years earlier - and to fulfill the terms of understanding between the Vargas regime and the Catholic church, which Capanema saw as his responsibility to carry on.

Capanema took over the Ministry of Education in 1934, very likely through the influence of the church, and his personal archives show an extensive correspondence with Alceu Amoroso Lima, through which this leading Catholic intellectual established his influence. In one of these letters, Lima states his displeasure about the creation of the Universidade do Distrito Federal and asks for the dismissal of Anísio Teixeira.⁽³³⁾ In 1937, with Anísio Teixeira out of the way, Capanema placed Lima as the rector of the Universidade do Distrito Federal, apparently to prepare its demise. When the university was formally extinguished by a presidential decree in the first weeks of 1939, the project for a new national institution, the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia, was well under way, and not surprisingly Amoroso Lima had been invited to be its first director.

The Universidade do Brasil was officially established by law on 5 July 1937 along the lines devised by Francisco Campos four years earlier. It would replace the old Universidade do Rio de Janeiro and incorporate its professional schools, some of them dating from the early nineteenth century; and it would be unified by a new Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras.

This university was to be the culmination of the large educational empire that Capanema was trying to put together. His speech upon the enactment of the law stressed first that the new institution should "establish the model for higher education in the whole country" and second that it was to be a truly national institution, with students recruited from all over the country on the basis of strict criteria. This was to be an elite university in a completely new university city.⁽³⁴⁾

Already in 1935 the minister had formed a committee of fourteen people who were to establish the general plan for the schools, faculties, and other educational institutions and draw up a detailed description of each of those units. Two years later a large amount of work had accumulated and Capanema could announce that the new university, like Minerva from Jupiter's head, was being born complete and ready. A national plan for education was also being prepared and was expected to become law. Capanema hoped that reality would follow from its legal definition: "It is obvious that the establishment of legal norms is not enough. It will be necessary to make the texts come alive, to make them into the reality of the higher education courses in all fields. And this reality will have its standards in the Universidade do Brasil."

Therefore, the Universidade do Brasil was not expected to grow, develop, and find its own way. In fact, it was intended to stifle all attempts at innovation and experimentation in the country, starting, of course, with the Universidade do Distrito Federal. The new university was expected to be "a total, unanimous institution," which for Capanema meant that in its schools and institutes one should find all kinds of teaching prescribed by the laws, so that no higher education institution in Brazil would lack its corresponding model. Higher education would therefore come under strict, centralized control. The Universidade do Brasil was to be as competent as possible, and several innovations, including full-time teaching, were to be introduced. The students would be required to prove their "vocation, dedication, and discipline." There were also plans for libraries, laboratories, museums, and teaching hospitals.

For Capanema the organization of the new university and construction of a university city were almost the same thing, and the same commission was supposed to do both.⁽³⁵⁾ For the architectural project, Capanema retained the services of Marcello Piacentini, a central figure in Italian fascist architecture who had worked in the planning of Rome's university city. Piacentini's participation was contested by a group of Brazilian architects linked to Le Corbusier (including Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, who would become the architects of Brasília twenty years later), who was also invited to Brazil and made some preliminary projects on his own. In 1938 the models for the university city in Rio de Janeiro were presented publicly in Rome and then shipped to Brazil. But World War II was already too close, and the project was never carried out.⁽³⁶⁾

According to Francisco Campos' legislation, a new Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, was to be the central institution of the new university where scientific research would take place. In 1935 Capanema began work on the project, which would materialize in 1939. It was not to be the first: São Paulo's Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, had been already inaugurated in 1934, and the short-lived Faculdade de Ciências of the Universidade do Distrito Federal began a year later. The invitation to foreign scholars had been a key feature of both the São Paulo and the Rio de Janeiro projects, and Capanema followed the same path. One of his advisers was George Dumas, a French intellectual with a long list of contacts in Brazil. Dumas gave Capanema his thoughts about what Brazil needed in terms of higher education and helped to select French professors for the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia, as he had done years before for the São Paulo school.⁽³⁷⁾

In 1936 Capanema wrote to Luigi Fantappié and Gleb Wataghin, Italian professors of mathematics and physics at the Universidade de São Paulo, asking for names. Wataghin replied with a list of Italian professors that included Umberto Nobile from Naples, Giovanni Giorgi from Rome, Beniamino Segre from Bologna, and even E. Schrödinger. None of those would ever come. In 1939 President Getúlio Vargas finally approved the hiring of fifteen foreign professors, and from then on the contacts become official. In June 1939 the Italian ambassador to Brazil confirmed in a letter that the Brazilian government had asked for professors in Italian language and literature, mathematical analysis, rational mechanics, theoretical physics, physical chemistry, superior geometry, and experimental physics and had announced that seven professors had already been chosen and were supposed to arrive in Rio de Janeiro in the following months. Invitations to French professors also went through official channels, with the help of Georges Dumas and under strict ideological control.⁽³⁸⁾ The French embassy in Brazil helped in the negotiations, putting pressure on the minister to speed up decisions, and it did not shy away from reporting the ideological tendencies of French professors.⁽³⁹⁾

Following Dumas' recommendations, there was little emphasis on the natural sciences, the request of hard scientists to the Italian government notwithstanding. Capanema had also to accommodate requests from politicians and intellectuals from all sides, and partly because of this Amoroso Lima finally decided to decline the invitation to head the new institution.⁽⁴⁰⁾ At this time the Catholic church had already given up the project of bringing the public universities under its control and was beginning to plan for its own Catholic university. Another Catholic conservative, law scholar San Tiago Dantas, took Lima's place and held the post until 1945.

The way the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia was put together - with its formalism, the lack of intellectual leadership, its ideological prejudices, the reliance and dependency of bureaucratic procedures at each step - extracted its toll. In spite of a few outstanding names, it would never become a significant center for scientific research - or even a center of conservative thinking in the social sciences and humanities, for which it had been conceived.

A New Elite for a New Nation: The Universidade de São Paulo

The establishment of the Universidade de São Paulo in 1934, by contrast, is the most important event in Brazil's scientific and educational history. To understand how it was created, how it could develop so differently from the institution in the country's capital, and what role it was to play in the future, we should look at it in the light of São Paulo's defeat in the 1932 uprising against the Vargas regime. A central figure in the project was Júlio de Mesquita Filho, owner of O Estado de São Paulo (a traditional newspaper dating back to the nineteenth century) and a relative by marriage to Armando de Sales Oliveira, the state's leading politician in 1932, who returned from exile two years later to become the state's federal intervener under the provisional government of Getúlio Vargas. Another important name was Roberto Simonsen, business entrepreneur, author of the first modern economic history of Brazil, and leader of the state's Federação das Indústrias. Thus, the supporters of the idea of a state university were among the most powerful members of the local agricultural and industrial elite. This was in sharp contrast to Capanema's projects in Rio de Janeiro, which were marginal for the Vargas regime and never got much support or generated much interest outside the circles of educators and the church.⁽⁴¹⁾

The concerns of São Paulo's elites with technical knowledge and higher education did not begin in 1932. There were already a few fairly successful institutions in their state - the Instituto Butantã, the Instituto Biológico, the schools of engineering and medicine - but they wanted to make it more directly relevant to the management of the economy and for the nation as a whole. The concern with scientific management had already prompted the state's Associação Comercial to create the Instituto de Organização Racional do Trabalho (Institute for Rational Organization of Labor) through the initiative of Roberto Simonsen and with Armando de Sales Oliveira as its president.⁽⁴²⁾

The idea was expanded by the same people in 1933 with the creation of the Escola Livre de Sociologia (Free School of Sociology). The Escola was preceded by a proclamation published in all São Paulo newspapers and signed by the directors of all higher education institutions in São Paulo and a large list of well-known personalities.⁽⁴³⁾ It stated the intention of making the new institution "a center for political and social culture capable of fostering interest for the common good to establish the connections between people and their environment, to stimulate research on the living conditions and the vital problems of our populations, and to shape personalities able to participate efficiently and with self-awareness in the leadership of our social life." These personalities were to provide for what the proclamation called "the lack of an organized and large elite, trained through scientific methods, aware of the institutions and achievements of the civilized world, and able to understand first and act later on our social environment." The absence of this elite was directly related to the frustrations of the 1932 rebellion.

The Escola Paulista de Medicina was also created in 1933 and was expected to bring radical innovations to Brazil's higher education traditions. The new institution was to provide high-quality teaching, to promote biomedical research, and to open new opportunities for medical education in the state, which so far had been limited to the small number of students recruited each year by the Faculdade de Medicina de São Paulo. One important novelty was that the Escola Paulista was supposed to get both private and state support, which it did until its federalization in the postwar years.⁽⁴⁴⁾ The Escola Paulista de Medicina was a success in terms of its original intentions. It still ranks among the country's most prestigious medical schools. The Escola de Sociologia e Política, meanwhile, dwindled after some years of intense activities,⁽⁴⁵⁾ and it was never able to establish an academic tradition similar to the one developed at the Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras.

These two initiatives were followed by the creation of the university, which was meant to be the state's best response to its military defeat in 1932:

Defeated by the strength of arms, we knew perfectly well that only through science and continuous effort could we recuperate the hegemony we had enjoyed for several decades in the federation. Paulistas to the bones, we had inherited from our ancestors, the bandeirantes, the taste for ambitious projects and the patience needed for large undertakings. What larger monument than a university could we build for those who had accepted the supreme sacrifice to defend us against the vandalism that had just desecrated the work of our elders, from the bandeiras to independence, from the Regency to the Republic? ...We came out of the 1932 revolution with the feeling that destiny had placed São Paulo in the same spot as Germany after Jena, Japan after its bombardment by the American navy, or France after Sedan. The history of those countries pointed to the remedies to our evils. We had experienced the terrible adventures caused, on one hand, by the ignorance and incompetence of those who before 1930 had decided on the destiny of our state and our nation, and on the other hand, by the emptiness and pretentiousness of the [1930] October revolution. Four years of close contacts with leading figures of both factions convinced us that Brazil's problem was above all a question of culture. Hence the foundation of our university and later the Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras.⁽⁴⁶⁾

The new university would be public, lay, and free from religious influence; it was to be an integrated institution, not simply a gathering of isolated schools. Its core was to be the Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, made up of professors invited from abroad. There, research would be done by a full-time staff that would work on higher forms of science and leave the practical chores to the professional schools. The university was to be autonomous from both the administrative and academic points of view, and it was destined to produce a new elite that would take up the country's leadership, overcoming its backwardness and bringing São Paulo back to its deserved position as the country's leading state.

Beyond these general outlines, it was necessary to choose an organizational model to follow. The Francisco Campos legislation had already established the notion of a central Faculdade de Filosofia for scientific work and teacher education, drawn probably from the Italian experience, and this was maintained. The Paulistas like to think that this was their invention. One of the organizers, Paulo Duarte, recalls:

We selected two paradigms, so to speak, for the university. First, both Julinho [Mesquita Filho] and I have a French education, but we did not want to limit ourselves to our French education. We selected Sorbonne, of course, as a model for a scientifically organized university. We also selected the English model, through Cambridge. We sent for as much information as we could about these universities. But the French organization was better than the English, so we can say our organization followed 80 percent of the French model... Earlier the faculties of philosophy, sciences, and letters were the cellula mater of the French university. Later they were divided into the schools of philosophy and letters on the one hand and the schools of science on the other. We did not have the means to make two schools from the beginning, so we decided to do as the French did in the past. All other schools revolved around this one. I do not recall the English structure well, but I do recall that in England science was completely separate from philosophy. For the more advanced sciences, such as biology, they had independent institutes. France also had institutes outside the universities; they were only associated with them.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Besides the sketchy knowledge about the true characteristics of the academic systems supposedly taken as models, Duarte's statements suggest a prevailing concern with organizational forms, not with the academic and scientific quality and achievements of the institutions whose features they were about to borrow. In part this was because both Duarte and Mesquita were hommes de lettres in the French tradition - rather than scientists - and above all political activists. Duarte defined himself as "democratic socialist," and in that sense was politically marginal, while Mesquita was a liberal in the classic tradition and very much a member of the Paulista establishment.

These statements reveal also the restrictions under which the project was carried on. The general outline of the Francisco Campos legislation had to be followed, and that included a school of sciences and education. Also, the traditional higher education and research institutions in the state were to be incorporated in the project, and they could not be easily tampered with. The assumption was that these institutions would resist any form of integration that went beyond simple juxtaposition and autonomous coexistence or that attempted to go beyond the simple benefits of bureaucratic and material rationalization.

The bill establishing the university was signed by the state governor on 25 January 1934.⁽⁴⁸⁾ In contrast with the Francisco Campos legislation, this bill was brief and written in clear and direct language. It had only fifty-four articles, as opposed to the 328 items in the Francisco Campos legislation for the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro. The first goal of the new university was "to promote the progress of science through research"; the second goal was to transmit knowledge; the third was to form specialists and professionals; and the fourth goal was to promote the diffusion and popularization of the sciences, arts, and letters through short courses, conferences, radio broadcasts, scientific films, and so on.⁽⁴⁹⁾

The Paulistas talked about their university, but most of their efforts went into creating its new Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras. Given the background of the founders, it was natural to expect that they would emphasize the social sciences and the humanities. Only afterward, when Teodoro Ramos, Rocha Lima, and other scientists were invited to join the Faculdade de Filosofia's organizing commission, did the natural sciences receive more attention.⁽⁵⁰⁾

The project was to recruit the full faculty in Europe, with a special place for France. With European fascism on the rise, France was perceived as a liberal alternative and in tune with Brazil's tradition of French influence in the humanities:

We wanted to make use of the best not just from one advanced country but from all advanced countries. Thus, Italy was to provide professors of mathematics, geology, physics, paleontology, and statistics; Germany would provide those in zoology, chemistry, and botany; England could help in another branch of natural history and perhaps psychology; and for France would be reserved the chairs of pure thought: sociology, history, philosophy, ethnology, geography, and perhaps physics. It was not always possible to meet this plan.⁽⁵¹⁾

The presence of a large Italian colony in Sao Paulo and the Italian government's eagerness to help posed special problems. We could not let the chairs of the Faculdade de Filosofia fall into the hands of followers of the Italian creed, especially those chairs more likely to influence the moral education of our youth. The difficulty was compounded by the large number of children from the peninsula who lived in Sao Paulo, most of whom did not hide their tendencies to accept the orientation of fascist Rome. We had to be extremely careful because of the growing and impertinent pressures the Italian government and the Italian colony were placing on the Paulista government. They wanted to force the arrival of a large number of Italian professors to make up the new faculty. We solved the problem by offering the Italians some chairs in pure science (mathematical analysis, geometry, statistics, geology, mineralogy) and in Italian language and literature. We kept for France, leader of liberal democracy, those more directly related to the spiritual education of the future students: philosophy, sociology, political economy, politics, human geography, classical literature, and French language and literature. The rest - chemistry and natural history - were to be filled in by Germans being expelled from their country by Hitlerism. Thus, we could protect the liberal meaning of the Brazilian evolution... Future elites would not be victimized by the teaching, through the chairs, of those exotic theories that went against the nature and inborn tendencies of our people.⁽⁵²⁾

The Francisco Campos legislation intended the faculties of philosophy to be geared toward the education of high school teachers, putting scientific research in the distant future. In the Universidade de Sao Paulo, by contrast, the intention was to establish a rigid divide between the Faculdade de Filosofia and the Instituto de Educação, the teachers' college. The Faculdade de Filosofia would provide the students with substantive knowledge, and those interested in teaching would have to go to the Instituto de Educação for pedagogical studies and licensing. The teacher would be a by-product of the new institution.⁽⁵³⁾

The idea was thus to establish academic activities in two tiers. The lower tier was to be geared to applied work and professional education and would include the old professional schools of medicine and engineering; the higher tier would cover all scientific specialties needed for the former plus those fields deemed essential parts of human knowledge. The higher level was supposed to nourish those in the lower one and gradually raise their levels of proficiency. No foreign professors were hired for the old schools, which changed very little in the years to come. The beneficial influence that was supposed to reach them from the new Faculdade de Filosofia turned into a source of permanent conflict and resistance to change, which sometimes even threatened the survival of the Faculdade de Filosofia and the whole university project.⁽⁵⁴⁾ A source of conflict was the idea that basic disciplines, such as mathematics, chemistry, and biology, were to be organized in central chairs linked to the Faculdade de Filosofia, which would then provide the professional schools with the courses they needed on these subjects. This integration would require bringing together all institutions on the same campus, a long-term project that was not considered at the time. The authorities of the Faculdade de Direito stated, from the onset, that they would not accept a transfer to a university city if such a city was ever built. The Faculdade de Medicina refused to allow the construction of a new floor in their building to house some sections of the Faculdade de Filosofia. The Politécnica refused to have "philosophers" teaching their basic disciplines. When Luigi Fantappié agreed to go to the Politécnica to teach, he was charged with not being competent enough. The idea of unified departments and institutes was set aside and remained dormant for several decades.⁽⁵⁵⁾

The decision that the entire faculty of the new school should come from abroad was a radical one. At first, Teodoro Ramos was considered for the chair of mathematical analysis; André Dreyfus for general biology; and Fernando de Azevedo was considered for sociology, according to Azevedo himself; Ramos already held the chair of mathematical analysis at the Politécnica, and Dreyfus was considered the best and most broad-minded biologist in Brazil. They all decided, however, that they needed at least one or two years of study abroad before taking up such a task.

There is no single register of the persons invited, those who actually came, or the duration of their stay. The first group included, from France, Paul Arbusse Bastide (sociology), Emile Coornaert (history of civilization), Robert Garric (French literature), Pierre Deffontaines (geography), Etienne Borne (philosophy and psychology), and Michel Berveiller (Greco-Roman literature); from Italy, Francesco Picollo (Latin), Luigi Fantappié (mathematical analysis, integral and differential calculus), Ettore Onorato (mineralogy), and Gleb Wataghin (theoretical physics); from Germany, Ernest Breslau (zoology), Heinrich Rheinboldt (chemistry), Felix Rawitscher (botany); and from Portugal, Francisco Rebelo Gonçalves (Portuguese literature).

Besides those, the Faculdade's first yearbook, for 1934-35, lists Jean Mougé, Pierre Monbeig, Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edgar Otto Gothsch, and Pierre Hourcade, all from France, and also the first Brazilian names: Teodoro Ramos (who was also the school's first director), Luis Cintra do Prado, Antônio Soares Romeu, André Dreyfus, Paulo Sawaya, Afonso d'Escragnolle Taunay, and Plínio Airosa. Those listed as technical assistants were Omar Catunda, Ernesto Luis de Oliveira, Fernando Jorge Larrabure, Heinrich Hauptmann, Herbert Stettiner, Reinaldo Saldanha da Gama, Mauricio Rocha e Silva, and Gertrud Siegel. A second wave brought Ernst Marcus, Paul Vanorden Shaw, François Perroux, Luigi Galvani, Giacomo Albanese, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Georges Readers, and Ottorino de Fiori Cropani. Marcus was to replace Breslau, who died suddenly. Most professors came for a short period and returned after the first year. They were often replaced by others from the same country, such as Jean Gagé, Pierre Fromont, Roger Bastide, Alfred Bonzon, Karl Arens, and Atílio Venturi.

In the first years the sections of physics and mathematics were at the Politécnica, while the others were placed at the Faculdade de Medicina. Enrollments for the first courses were open in early 1935, but the new Faculdade meant little to the young Paulistas finishing high school and even less for the children of the city's leading families. They wanted a prestigious profession, but the Faculdade de Filosofia offered nothing of the kind. As a consequence, enrollment was minimal, and the solution was to look for students who were applying to the Instituto de Educação (which had Fernando de Azevedo as its director) and who were granted provisional enrollment in the new Faculdade. Classes started on 11 March 1935 with forty-six students in philosophy, twenty-nine in mathematics, ten in physics, twenty-nine in chemistry, fifteen in the natural sciences, sixteen in geography and history, eighteen in the social and political sciences, five in classical literature and Portuguese, and nine in other foreign languages.⁽⁵⁶⁾

Although the Paulista elite did not send their sons to the new Faculdade, they could attend the lectures, and the conferences of the best-known visitors attracted a large public, even sometimes intimidating the small number of regular students. It was not usual to see Armando de Sales de Oliveira, Julio de Mesquita or their relatives in the audience.

Claude Lévi-Strauss provided a rare outside view of these events. He had been a student of Georges Dumas and came to Brazil with his help (and not, as Paulo Duarte reconstructed so many years later, against his teacher's will). Brazil was Lévi-Strauss' introduction to ethnography and the tropics, and he preferred the authenticity of the Indians to the Paulistas' attempts to mimic European science and civilization. In his recollections he talks about American cities that go from barbarism to decadence without getting civilized and about the Brazilian ambassador in Paris who wanted to appear civilized and denied that there were any Indians left in Brazil. He saw the new university as a response to the need of the Brazilian oligarchy to form "a public opinion inspired by civilian and lay values, to compensate the traditional influence of the church, the army, and of personal power." To do so, it was necessary to provide culture to a larger public. For Lévi-Strauss, all the excitement around the foreign professors was viewed with suspicion: there were people trying to get jobs or fend off future competition, and rites of status and prestige in exhibitions of familiarity with the latest Parisian intellectual fashions and their representatives. Nobody was really concerned about the intrinsic value of ideas and concepts being tossed around. With diplomas granted by the university, these newcomers would have access to administrative jobs, thus forming a new elite to replace the feudal arrangements that existed until then. This was, for Lévi-Strauss, the most obvious product of the French cultural mission to Brazil, something that Georges Dumas, fascinated with his powerful friends in the Brazilian oligarchy, never realized.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Without really understanding or caring about all this, Lévi-Strauss joined as soon as possible what was for him the more authentic reality of the Caduveo, Bororo, and Nambikwara tribes in the Brazilian jungle. Only the "virile resolution of a small group of gifted children"⁽⁵⁸⁾ could explain how his students - in large part women - could become a significant community of social scientists fifteen or twenty years later.

The Universidade de Sao Paulo was in many ways a frustrated project. The expected integration among the professional schools did not happen; enrollment at the Faculdade de Filosofia was always difficult, and it remained in many ways a teacher's college; its students tended to be women, people from small towns outside the state capital, or children of recent immigrants. It was impossible, under these circumstances, to have the new institution playing the roles of elite formation and leadership, which Julio de Mesquita expected. If there was a hierarchy of prestige and recognition among the different institutions that were brought together at the Universidade de Sao Paulo, the Faculdade de Filosofia was not at the top. With the Estado Novo and the political ostracism of Armando de Sales Oliveira and his group after 1937, the Universidade de Sao Paulo came under pressure of all kinds, emanating both from the new state authorities and from the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro

In spite of all that, the new university - and more precisely its Faculdade de Filosofia - became the most important scientific institution ever established in Brazil after the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. This is partially explained by the economic conditions of the state, which could provide it with more resources than any other similar institution in the country could ever get. But it would be a mistake to try to explain everything by the power of money. More important was that even on a small scale the Faculdade de Filosofia did provide a space for science, to be carried on by a small group of foreign visitors and their Brazilian disciples; and the ambitious goals of Julio de Mesquita, even if largely frustrated, helped to preserve the respectability and recognition of the new institution throughout the years. Even the recruitment pattern of the Faculdade de Filosofia turned out to be a blessing. Scientists are rarely recruited at the top of the social hierarchy, where money and power are so much easier to get. For the women, the children of immigrants, and the country people who came to the new institution, often hoping for little more than a teaching job, science became suddenly a new window to the world. Many of them grasped it with enthusiasm.

An obvious weakness of the Sao Paulo project was its isolation from the English-speaking intellectual and scientific environment. Contacts with England and the United States became more intense during the war, and they dominated afterward.

The question of the university model adopted by the Universidade de Sao Paulo is an interesting one. France was the prevailing influence, and in the past Brazilians had tried to copy some of the grandes écoles, such as the Politechnique and the École de Mines. But there had been nothing similar to a faculty of philosophy in France since the French Revolution. Cambridge, although mentioned by Paulo Duarte, was never really considered as an alternative. Italy, which is not mentioned by the Paulistas, was the source of much of Francisco Campos' and Gustavo Capanema's educational ideas and had a similar organizational model.

What prevailed at the Universidade de Sao Paulo was not so much what its founders had put down on paper but what the foreign visitors drew from their experience. The Germans continued with their research in chemistry or biology as they had traditionally done in their country, but for the educators the Faculdade de Filosofia remained always a kind of école normale. Each institution brought into the university also kept its own organization and traditions. The Faculdade de Medicina was close to the North American pattern, thanks to the support it received from the Rockefeller Foundation; the Escola de Direito never changed its professorial style; the Escola Politécnica remained an institution geared to technology and resisted the incorporation of modern physics; and so on. This mixture of different academic models, traditions, and experiences within the same institution became in time one of the strong points of the Universidade de Sao Paulo, where centralization and bureaucratic domination was never fully to prevail.

Notes

1. The manifest's full text, a broad view of the movement and of one of its leading figures, Fernando de Azevedo. can found in Penna 1987.

2. F. de Azevedo 1963:270-71.

3. Todaro 1971; Bruneau 1974; Cava 1976; Alves 1979; Salem 1982.

4. Bastide 1951; Cava 1976:11-12.

5. The first board of directors also included J. C. da Costa Sena and Juliano Moreira (vice-presidents); Alfredo Löfgren (secretary general); Roquete Pinto (first secretary); Amoroso Costa (second secretary); and Alberto Betim Pais Leme (treasurer) - all notable men in the Brazilian scientific milieu (Paim 1992).

6. The title of this journal underwent several changes in the following years: Revista de Ciências in 1920; Revista da Academia Brasileira de Ciências in 1926: and Anais da Associação Brasileira de Ciências as of 1929.

7. The following is based in large part on Paim 1982.

8. Othon Leonardos interview.

9. "Then Lira - Heitor Lira da Silva, a graduate of the Escola de Engenharia gathered together his classmates, including Amoroso Costa; Backheuser; Lino Sá Pereira; Ferdinand Laboriau sometime later; the Osório brothers and sisters, especially Alvaro Osório and Branca Osório de Almeida Fialho; a sister to Admiral Alvaro Alberto, Amandina Alvaro Alberto, also a famous teacher, married to Siqueira Mendonça; Júlio Porto Carrero, who brought psychoanalysis to Brazil...; Laura Jacobina Lacombe; Carlos Gregório de Carvalho" (Leonardos interview). The scientists working at Manguinhos did not actually participate in this group, although they maintained closer ties with the Academia de Ciências A noteworthy member of the Academia was French descendant Henrique Beaurepaire Aragão. "We were all greatly influenced by him; he was a true leader" (Leonardos interview). Laboriau, with Paulo Castro Maia, Tobias Moscoso, and Amoroso Costa, all from the Escola Politécnica, died in the plane crash while going to pay homage to Santos Dumont, who was arriving by beat from Europe in 1928. Leonardos recalls that he had decided the night before to let Amoroso Costa go in his place, as the latter had never flown before.

10. Headed by Domingo Cunha, Roquete Pinto, Ferdinand Laboriau, Inácio de Azevedo, Levi Carneiro, Raul Leitão da Cunha, and Vicente Licínio Cardoso.

11. Campos 1954:80.

12. Quotes in Laboriau. Pinto & Cardoso (eds.) 1929:499.

13. Gilberto Amado, as quoted by Laboriau, Pinto & Cardoso, eds. 1929:354.

14. Laboriau, Pinto & Cardoso (eds.) 1929:354.

15. Laboriau. Pinto & Cardoso (eds.) 1929:168.

16. Cartaxo 1948; Almeida Jr. 1956; J. Furtado 1962; Tobias 1968; Lobo 1969.

17. The legal documents are three decrees issued by Vargas' provisional government: nos. 19850, 19851, and 19852 of 11 April 1931.

18. Francisco Campos, a legal scholar and politician from Minas Gerais, took an active part in the 1930 revolution and became Brazil's first minister of education in 1931. He would become famous for his sympathy with European fascism and for drafting the 1937 authoritarian constitution of the Estado Novo. He is less well known for his efforts to establish a pact of cooperation between the Vargas regime and the Catholic church. He managed to grant the church the privilege of teaching religion in public schools, among other privileges, and he expected that the church would in return provide the government with inspiration, discipline, and spiritual order. The political pact between church and state would take shape in the Constitutional Assembly of 1934, where the foundations of the new Brazilian society were supposed to be established. A new minister of education, Gustavo Capanema, a former protégée of Campos and an attentive listener to Amoroso Lima, took office that year and would be responsible for a profound reorganization of Brazil's educational institutions

19. "Although the overall structure is the result of deals and compromises between various tendencies, lines, and preferences, the project has its own individuality and unity; behind this structure lies a reasoning that follows broad, clear, and precise lines in a firm and positive manner, guaranteeing that the plans laid out in its principles of administrative and technical organization are adequately proportioned and balanced" (quoted from the decree's justification, transcribed in Lobo 1969: 156-61)

20. Decree nº 1959, in Lobo 1969:199.

21. Quoted in Lobo 1969:163.

22. Quoted by Lobo 1969:164.

23. Quoted by Lobo 1969:171.

24. Campos 1940; Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1994:61-66.

25. Decree nº 5513, 4 April 1935.

26. Quoted in Paim 1982:69-70.

27. On Pedro Ernesto and his role as a forerunner of populist politics in Brazil, see Conniff 1981.

28. "A instalação, ontem, dos cursos da Universidade do Distrito Federal," Correio da Manhã August 1st, 1935, quoted in Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1984:211.

29. Paim 1982:84.

30. The flavor of the new school can be gathered by the remembrances of one of its first professors, geologist Viktor Leinz. "The learning experiences shared by these students and young teachers - all about the same age - were as enjoyable as can, be. I myself soon introduced a system used in Germany: taking school trips with the students, familiarizing them with the geology of the Federal District up close. We would leave in the morning, go out to Copacabana - where there were still many quarries - or we'd go to the beach. I would explain about the influence of the sea, and we walked around. I also started using slides, which were then a real novelty. I had many slides of geological phenomena printed. We also imported many fossil samples from Germany, material that the students themselves could handle. We taught our students to recognize rocks and minerals using simple but modern methods. In 1937 I went on a long graduation trip with the students to Minas Gerais. Afonso Pena, our rector - and son of [Minas Gerais] President Pena - gave us a hand. We took this trip to see all Minas Gerais - manganese. iron,, the Itabira peak, the gold mine of Morro Velho. Most of these graduates had never been outside the Federal District... I really pushed practical work, direct handling of material. This is extremely important in, preventing learning from becoming 'bookish.' Since funds were adequate, the university allowed us to import whatever we wanted. And import we did, essentially from Germany - projectors, teaching aids, maps, minerals, slides, and microscopes. Books were provided by the university. Against this background we could rapidly establish a place to study geology and mineralogy, a place that offered very good conditions for that time" (Leinz interview).

31. Freire would never complete his move from Recife to Rio de Janeiro.

32. "In 1938 we were still working to build the university, but always fearing that it might be closed. At that time, the time of Capanema [then minister of education], the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia was being created and - I personally didn't know anything about politics - there was talk that our school would close, that everything would be shifted over to the Nacional. There were these rumors - it'll close; no it won't; it'll be shifted; no it won't... All 1938 was marked by restlessness, and at the beginning of 1939 it became clear the university would indeed close. But nobody was told. Those of us who had contracts naturally thought those contracts would be respected, but they weren't. One fine day, when I was going to pick up my pay, a young woman told me: There isn't any more for the university. In other words, it was never announced officially. Perhaps colleagues of mine who were in closer touch with the political side already knew it. But I only found out right then" (Leinz interview).

33. "The recent establishment of a municipal university, with schools directed by people who made no secret of their Communist leanings, finally forced the Catholic community to make their serous misgivings known. Where are we heading? Will the government allow a new generation to be poisoned by feelings that run against Brazil's best traditions and the ideals of a healthy society, admittedly without the government's willingness but in any case under its protection?" (from a letter transcribed in Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1984:297-301).

34. The following is based on Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1984: chap. 7; quotations are from documents in the Gustavo Capanema archive, Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação em História Contemporânea do Brasil da Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro, which have been reproduced or quoted in that book

35. This is how the minister of education assigned the commission's task: "First it should define what the university should be, then it should conceptualize it. then it should project its construction." He knew precisely what he meant by those terms: "Let us assume one determines that the university needs a dentistry school. This is not enough. One should establish also its sections - such-and~such divisions. such a structure. If we establish an institute of criminology. we need to know how many parts. offices, and laboratories it will need" (speech of 22 July 1935. quoted in Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1984:96-97). It was a small step from this to the architectural project.

36. Meanwhile, Lúcio Costa and his colleagues were asked to build the seat of the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro, which was inaugurated in 1945 and has since been heralded as a landmark of modern architecture and evidence of the progressivism and farsightedness of Gustavo Capanema as Brazil's first modern minister of education.

37. In a 1935 letter to Capanema, Dumas spelled out his views on, what Brazil needed in terms of education: "Your youngsters do not lack intelligence..., but the good fairy who presides at their birth has also placed in their cribs other gifts besides intelligence: the taste for imagination and dreaming, the abundance of emotional life. These natural dispositions are not to be fought, but it would be very useful if we could limit them to some fields where it is more convenient to have them. Brazil is endowed with admirable poets, certainly because poetry is inherent to your race and all Brazilians are in their own way poets of the soul and nature. But this gift becomes inconvenient when it manifests itself outside the works of poetry and imagination, and the university foundations vou are building should moderate and channel these tendencies toward products of reason, from where one should certainly not exclude them completely." He then goes on to say that Brazil is at a critical stage, in which it would be necessary to decide whether it will remain "a country full of charm where all is read and little is produced or whether it will have a place tomorrow among the countries that contribute to)the world's intellectual production." The proposed Faculdade de Filosofia should concentrate its efforts on the training of high school teachers and on research, with emphasis on the fields of philosophy, history, and literature (letter of 1 September 1935, transcribed in Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1984:326-29).

38. "For psychology and sociology," wrote the minister to Dumas in 1939, "I need professors used to research and well-oriented studies but related to the church. The Faculdade will be directed by Senhor Alceu Amoroso Lima, a Catholic and friend of Jacques Maritain. This is why I would not be pleased with names known for tendencies that are opposed to or divergent from those of the church" (letter of 17 July 1939, quoted in Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1984:216).

39. Of Professor Poirier, who was supposed to teach philosophy, the ambassador affirms, "II a dêjà indiqué que son orientation doctrinale répondait entièrement aux vues du directeur de la nouvelle faculté" ("He has already indicated that his position corresponds totally to the views of the director of the new faculty"). About Professor Ombredonne, for psychology, the embassy confirms that he "présente toutes les garanties souhaitables au point de vue des tendances" ("has all the desirable qualities with regard to inclination"); the person for sociology is Jacques Lambert, who had been in Brazil before and who is said to belong to the same generation of Catholic professors as Deffontaines and Garric (quoted in Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1984:216).

40. In April 1939 Amoroso Lima was still willing to do it, but only if the new school did not bring in the almost 100 faculty and 500 students left idle by the closing of the Universidade do Distrito Federal. Three months later he decided the new school would never be the way he wanted and wrote an angry letter to Capanema protesting the designation of professors "by others, not us," and more specifically the designation of an "unknown Italian" to teach physics in the place of Joaquim Costa Ribeiro. In January 1941 Lima formalized his decision, arguing that it would be impossible for him to dismiss many professors who, openly or not, are establishing a climate of "philosophical and ideological confusionism" (quoted in Schwartzman, Bomeny & Costa 1984:218).

41. "With Armando de Sales in power and Júlio de Mesquita Filho as the director of O Estado de São Paulo, we believed the moment had come to create the Universidade de São Paulo and the Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras. Júlio de Mesquita and I have been fighting for this since 1923. In that year, and in 1926, I wrote several articles on the subject for 0 Estado and in 1925 I initiated a large survey, which took several months, about public instruction in São Paulo, in which we dealt with and discussed the problems of higher education in our state... Given the crossroads in which we found the state's educational system, we believed we needed radical solutions, from the top down, including the creation of a university and its Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras" (F. de Azevedo 1971:119-20).

42. It was preceded by the Instituto de Organização Científica do Trabalho (Scientific Organization for Labor), directed by a Swiss specialist in industrial psychology, Leon Walter. a first experience that did not last long.

43. Berlink and Ferrari 1958.

44. Albernaz 1968; Vale 1977; Pena 1977.

45. L. L. Oliveira 1986.

46. Mesquita Filho 1969:164, 199. The text is from 1937.

47. Duarte interview.

48. Fernando de Azevedo, who helped draft the bill establishing the university, recalls the events: "Júlio de Mesquita Filho..., in his and Armando de Sales' behalf, asked me to draft the bill that would create the Universidade de Sao Paulo. The final version was completed in less than four days, including the introduction and the justification. It was December 1933, and I asked Mesquita to plead with Armando de Sales not to sign the bill immediately... Because the new university would include the already existing professional schools in law, engineering, medicine, and agriculture, it would not be prudent to sign the decree without hearing from them first. To break down the resistance, a fourteen-member commission was established - two from each school, two from the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas, two from the Instituto Biológico de Sao Paulo, and two from the Faculdade de Educação... The commission worked for fifteen days and approved my project with some minor restrictions" (F. de Azevedo 1971:120-21). Paulo Duarte, who participated in the group, discovered at the last minute that his name had been dropped from the commission's list, for reasons that remained unclear (Duarte 1976:71-73).

49. State Decree no.6283, 25 January 1934.

50. Paulo Duarte describes the establishment of this commission as a negotiation between himself and Júlio de Mesquita. "The commission was formed by Henrique de Rocha Lima and Fernando de Azevedo, my candidates, who were accepted by Julinho with reservations: the first because he was too German, the second because he was a former seminarian, which stripped him of all serenity. Teodoro Ramos had been an instrument of Sao Paulo's enemies but was extremely intelligent and one of the few among us who could teach higher mathematics in a university There were doubts about Raul Briquet, whom Julinho believed did not know what a university really meant. The same thing happened with Agesilau Bittencourt - suggested by Rocha Lima, who was not supposed to have enough general culture. There was no discussion about the others: Vicente Rao, Fonseca Teles, Andre Dreyfus, and Almeida Júnior" (Duarte 1976:68).

51. Duarte 1976:70.

52. Mesquita Filho 1969:192. It is not true that a significant part of the new school's faculty was made up of political refugees and there were almost no Jews.

53. We wanted "an institute where nothing else [but science] would he done, where the true vocations could find an endless area to expand their inborn tendencies, where the rule would he science for science's sake and the spirit of research could dominate all minds. In a word, we would fill the immense gap in the nation's culture by giving academic studies their rightful leading place in the intellectual hierarchy or a university organism" (Mesquita Filho 1969:189).

54. "We had lengthy discussions about the convenience of bringing into the new university such institutions as the Escola Politécnica. Faculdade de Direito: the pharmacy dentistry and veterinary schools; and the Luiz de Queiroz [agriculture] from Piracicaba - all of which are outdated, loaded with superiority and inferiority complexes, and without any understanding of what a university really is... Julinho pointed out the danger that the old schools would contaminate the new ones with their incurable vices. They were all resistant or even allergic to research. their pedagogy was obsolete. and the simpleminded vanity of their self-taught professors would resist all attempts to change them. Other members of the commission, primarily Rocha Lima and Dreyfus, reminded us that the opposite also could be true and that this would be the case if we kept the university under strict surveillance in its first ten years" (Duarte 1976:70).

55. Mesquita Filho 1969:172-73. A large campus was built for the university several decades later, but neither the medical school nor the law school ever joined it, and as late as 1988 the faculty of the medical school threatened, in a dispute about a change in the university statute, to quit the university and recover the autonomy it lost in 1934.

56. F. de Azevedo 1958:222; E. de S. Campos 1954:427.

57. Levi-Strauss 1955:114, 118.

58. Levi-Strauss 1955:117.