World Class Worldwide: Transforming Research Universities in Asia and Latin America

7 Brazil’s Leading University: Original Ideals and Contemporary Goals

7 Brazil’s Leading University Original Ideals and Contemporary Goals Simon Schwartzman The creation of the Latin American nation-states in the early 19th century was accompanied by a commitment to establish institutions of higher learning , which could bring to each new country the values of modernity and rationality that were also shaping the construction of the modern nationstates in Europe, particularly in France. Some countries carried out this task more successfully than others. In some places the old colonial Catholic universities, established in the 16th and 17th centuries, were transformed and incorporated into the new academic and educational setting (Halperín Donghi 1962; Schwartzman 1991a, 1996; Serrano 1994). This period is the origin of the national “flagship universities” in the region—the Universidad de Chile, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Universidad de la República in Uruguay, and others. In the early 21st century, the prevailing concept of a flagship university is strongly associated with scientific research and technology. Latin American flagship universities, however, were slow to incorporate the research component, and today research still has to compete with other values and motivations in the debates over the priorities of the universities. This chapter examines the case of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), which is Brazil’s leading academic institution in research and graduate education. It was also the first university in the country, created in the 1930s—about 100 years after its sister institutions in other countries in the region. USP is not a national university, but an institution created by the political elite of the State of São Paulo, Brazil’s richest economic region— in clear competition with the federal government, which was working at the same time for the establishment of a national university in Rio de Janeiro, the Universidade do Brasil (Schwartzman, Bomeny, and Costa 2000). Today, Brazil has about 4 million students attending federal, state, private, and municipal universities and higher education institutions, 70 percent of which are private institutions.1 Many states have their own universities, financed with public money (the constitution forbids charging tuition at public institutions), but the São Paulo state system occupies a special place. Besides USP, the state of São Paulo has two other, newer, public universities, the Universidade de Campinas and the Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho.” Together, these institutions are responsible for about one-third of all doctoral degrees awarded annually in Brazil. No US institution awards as many PhDs as USP, except if the degrees at all the campuses of the University of California are combined (see table 7.1). Table 7.1 The Top 10 Doctorate-Granting Universities in Brazil and the United States, 2003 Institution Doctoral Degrees Universidade de São Paulo 2,180 University of California, Berkeley 767 Universidade de Campinas 747 Nova Southeastern University, Florida 675 University of Texas, Austin 674 Universidade do Estado de São Paulo 663 University of Wisconsin–Madison 643 Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro 653 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 618 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 565 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 614 Source: For US institutions, National Science Foundation, Survey of earned doctorates (2003, table 3); for Brazilian institutions, Universidade de São Paulo (2004). The USP’s impressive achievements are even more significant because of the high quality of most of its doctoral degrees, thanks to the strict system of peer-review assessment implemented by the Brazilian Ministry of Education (discussed below). Nevertheless, USP is relatively unknown internationally and is not well positioned in the several recently published international rankings of universities. This could be attributed, in part, to 144 Simon Schwartzman the general ignorance that exists internationally about Brazil. However, the lack of international standing is linked to the absence of an explicit effort by the institution and public authorities to prepare it to take on the role of a leading, world-class research university in the current sense. This chapter reveals some of the current predicaments facing Brazilian higher education as a whole. USP—BRAZIL’S FIRST UNIVERSITY In Latin America, Brazilian higher education is a special case, both because of its narrow coverage of the age cohort and the high quality of some of its best professional schools, graduate education, and research programs . It is also special because of the belated founding of its institutions. Other countries...