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

Simon Schwartzman

The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991


Chapter 8
POSTWAR MODERNIZATION

Scientists as Intelligentsia

Nuclear Energy and the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas

The New Elite Universities

Expansion of Higher Education

Notes

Changes in Brazilian society since World War II can he described as a frenzied and often awkward march toward a future - the year 2000 is often mentioned - when the country was expected to enter at last the ranks of the modern, civilized, and rich nations. As this magic landmark gets closer it becomes obvious that, if there is such an opportunity, signs of crisis also abound and this chance may be lost.

Events in science, technology, and education should be seen in that light, as well as in light of the transformations that swept Brazilian society in the last decades, concentrating a rapidly expanding population in large urban centers, raising the general level of education, and replacing agriculture with an extended industrial economy (Table 9).

TABLE 9. Structural Changes in Brazilian Society, 1950-1980
  Around 1950 Around 1980
Population in cities of more than 20,000 inhabitants 21.0% 46.0%
Employment in the primary sector 60.0% 30.0%
Technical, administrative, and similar occupations 10.0% 19.0%
Occupations in industries 13.0% 21.0%
Coffee as percentage of total exports 60.0% 13.0%
Industrialized products as percentage of total exports - 57.0%
Literate population (10 years and more) 43.0% 74.5%
Population with 8 or more years of education (19 years and more) 1.9% (1940) 22.8%
Enrollment in higher education institutions as % of age cohort 0.9% 10.0%
SOURCE: Faria 1986:78; Castro 1986b: 106; and Brazilian censuses.

This period can be divided into two very different parts by the year 1968, when new graduate programs were created, undergraduate enrollments began to expand at very high rates, and much more money was allocated to research. The 1980s mark the beginning of a third and different period, characterized by stagnation, crisis, and stock-taking regarding the achievements of the previous years.

In 1964 a politically conservative military government came to power, and its relationship to the scientific community and the universities tended to be highly conflictive, culminating in the early 1970s with the dismissal of hundreds of scientists and professors from their jobs and exile for many. The predictions that the new regime would be completely closed to new ideas on science and education, however, did not materialize. In 1968 higher education went through deep reorganization and entered a decade of rapid expansion. Also in the late 1960s new agencies were created, and funds for science and technology began to be organized, leading to an unprecedented expansion of graduate education and research institutions. The contradiction between these policies and the simultaneous repressive measures reflect, in good measure, the lack of any clear policy on scientific and educational matters coming from the central government, leading to decisions based on a division of spheres of influence within the state's bureaucracy. Political repression was at its highest when a military junta assumed full powers in late 1968 and for several years gave free rein to the so-called intelligence and repressive groups within the military; it became more limited during Ernesto Geisel's presidency after 1975, when an ambitious project of national growth was attempted, and the more repressive groups were curtailed in their action.

Brazil's military participation in World War II was not very extensive, but it provided an opportunity to attempt the first program of economic mobilization and planning in the country's history. Traditional patterns of trade were upset, but Brazil became an important supplier of some important strategic materials for the Western Allies-diamonds, manganese, nickel, tungsten, and more important, rubber. To ensure a supply of these products, American assistance was provided to equip laboratories and organize production. An important step in the country's industrialization was the creation of the steel mill of Volta Redonda, with technical and economic support from the United States, as part of the agreements that brought Brazil into the war.(1) The reduction of imports increased the demand for São Paulo's manufactured products and created a surplus of foreign currency. When the war ended, a constitutional government based on universal suffrage replaced the Vargas regime, and Brazil's economic surplus helped create a market for industrialized goods. Once the foreign reserves were depleted, Brazilian and foreign owned industries began to produce locally for this market in an expanding urban society.

Scientists as Intelligentsia

Optimism about the positive role science and technology could play in bringing the Latin American countries to higher socioeconomic levels was high in the first years after World War Il. The war had shown the power of science and technology for destruction and led to the hope that they could have an equally strong impact if properly oriented. The wave of technological changes in industry and agriculture only seemed to confirm this idea.

The view that science and the universities could have a positive role in socioeconomic change was part of the "developmentalist" ideology that emanated from the United Nations Commission for Latin America.(2) In a document published in 1970, Raul Prebisch emphasized the need to adapt and regroup international technological knowledge to meet Latin America's specific conditions. He believed in establishing priorities from an economic planning point of view and in organizing research programs to respond to those priorities. "All this has a close relationship with education. It will be necessary to promote educational programs that, besides the diffusion of technologies, should have as one of their main purposes stimulation of the creative capacity in this field."(3)

Postwar scientistic activism was different from that which prevailed during the organization of the Faculdade de Filosofia at the Universidade de São Paulo. Before the war the need for science was proclaimed in the name of culture, civilization, and leadership. Later, science began to be perceived as an important tool for economic development and planning, and scientists argued that they had a responsibility to avoid limiting themselves to the academic life. They wanted to participate in all relevant decisions in their societies, and they felt capable of doing so. The involvement of scientists in England, the United States, and the Soviet Union in the war effort had been followed closely, and the ideas put forward in previous years by J. D. Bernal and Frédéric Joliot-Curie were well known. The experiences with military research at the Faculdade de Filosofia during the war also helped.

The proponents of this new scientific role were highly qualified people, usually with work and study experience in Europe or the United States. They had encountered other cultures and mentalities and did not accept the prestige hierarchies of their societies; they were confident about their ability to change and lead a modernized educational and research system, given enough international and national support to try out their ideas. They believed that a scientific approach should be put to work not only for developing new technologies or controlling tropical diseases, but also for implementing social and political planning at the highest possible level. Political participation was generally perceived as a necessary channel for reaching the levels of influence and social responsibility the scientists thought they needed. Their political outlook tended to be rationalistic, nationalistic, and socialist.

Several lines of action followed from these premises: the scientific community should be organized and mobilized; the educational system should be changed; science and technology should be provided with strong, institutionalized planning agencies; and specific policies for science and technology should be put forward with all the political support that could be mustered.

The first step in the organization and mobilization of scientists was the establishment, in 1948, of the Sociedade Brasileira Para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC), the Brazilian counterpart of the associations for the advancement of science that existed in different countries. The main organizers were Jorge Americano, José Reis, Paulo Sawaya, Maurício Rocha e Silva, José Ribeiro do Vale, and Gastão Rosenfeld, all from São Paulo's biological research institutions. Its first, short-range purpose was organizing São Paulo's scientific community in defense against the populist politics of the governor of the state, Ademar de Barros. Later, it developed a series of activities aimed at strengthening its role as the national representative body of Brazilian scientists: promotion of annual meetings in different Brazilian cities; publication of a journal, Ciência e Cultura, for distribution among its associates; support for the creation of specialized scientific associations, which would usually hold their annual meetings jointly with the SBPC; and a pattern of close contacts and association with the international scientific community, on the one hand, and with Brazilian science policy and scientific authorities on the other. For a few years in the 1970s, the annual meetings of the SBPC were the only open forum for discussion of all kinds of questions in an otherwise closed and strongly censored political regime. Because of that, the association gained public notoriety, and its meetings attracted thousands of participants and substantial press coverage. Meanwhile, strictly scientific questions tended to move toward the specialized scientific associations, leaving the SBPC mostly to its broader representation and intermediation roles. In the 1980s the SBPC began publishing Ciência Hoje, a new and highly successful magazine based in Rio de Janeiro and aimed at the dissemination of science and the work of Brazilian scientists among the educated public.(4)

Another important event was the institutionalization of the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP, São Paulo Foundation for Research Support), an agency established by the state's constitution of 1946 but organized only in the early 1960s. Endowed with 0.5 percent of the state's tax revenues, forced by statute to spend most of its money on actual scientific research projects, and directly controlled by the state's scientific community, the FAPESP became Brazil's main financing alternative to the federal agencies established in the 1950s and 1960s with similar purposes.

Nuclear Energy and the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas

In 1949 a private research institution, the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, was established in Rio de Janeiro. Intended to start Brazil along the road of atomic research without the constraints typical of educational institutions or the civil service, it brought together several high-quality scientists-Cesare Lattes, who returned to Brazil especially for this purpose, José Leite Lopes, Jaime Tiomno, and Roberto Salmeron. In 1951 a governmental body under direct supervision of the president of the Republic was created to support science: the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas (CNPq, National Research Council). Both institutions were created by the personal efforts of Admiral Alvaro Alberto da Mota e Silva, a military man who looked at science and technology from a strategic point of view and a mathematician and physicist of some standing. A national commission on atomic energy, the Comissão de Energia Atômica, was supposed to be organized within the research council. The understanding was that the commission would set the policy guidelines and that the council would see that the research center had the resources it needed to carry out its assignments.

In 1953 the Instituto de Pesquisas Radioativas was organized in Minas Gerais, and from 1956 on it operated an experimental reactor of the Triga type using enriched uranium. In 1958 a group of physicists from this institute began work on a nuclear reactor based on thorium as fuel, but that project was discontinued when the government decided to acquire a Westinghouse plant based on enriched uranium. In Rio de Janeiro besides the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro started its first course on nuclear engineering in 1954, which graduated fewer than one hundred persons in its first ten years. In 1965 it began to operate its own 10 kilowatt experimental reactor. In 1956 a much larger Instituto de Energia Atômica was organized within the Universidade de São Paulo, with a 10 megawatt swimming pool reactor and about one thousand research workers and technicians. In 1971 a 22-megawatt particle accelerator was installed.

Despite these promising omens and the quality of its work in other fields, the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas never really began to work in the field of atomic energy, and after its first few years it fell victim to serious institutional problems. The original efforts of the research council in the field of atomic energy were supported only briefly during the second government of Vargas, which ended with his suicide in 1954. The United States did not support these efforts because it wanted to retain control over the enrichment process, and in 1954 the U.S. government stopped the delivery of three centrifuges for uranium enrichment that Brazil had purchased from the University of Göttingen in West Germany. Finally, the limited scale of the research effort begun by Brazil in those years raises doubts about whether it could have accomplished much of significance.

Once established, but deprived of its main objective, the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas became an agency that distributed its limited resources to individual scientists in the biological, physical, and other natural sciences. With that agency's backing, small-scale, independent research could develop in a few centers, even when the scientist's own university-usually more concerned with the problems of professional education or narrow, short-term technical investigations-offered little support. Besides supporting research, the agency provided, as it still does, travel grants and fellowships for postgraduate and advanced studies abroad in conjunction with the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), an agency of the Ministry of Education. Endowed with only a small staff, the CNPq based its decisions on advice from the scientific community, which assured competent use of its limited resources. In the late 1970s the CNPq changed its name to Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and came under the Ministry of Planning.(5)

The New Elite Universities

An important feature of the postwar period was the creation of a few elite teaching and research institutions, which affected only a small portion of the growing higher education system but served as models and inspiration for broader reforms that would be attempted later. Detailed examination of some of these experiences reveals common features. They all had well-defined personal leadership; their origins and inspiration can be traced to some of the most significant groups, traditions, or institutions of the 1930s; and they were able to protect themselves from the equalizing pressures emanating from the Ministry of Education. Finally, they were all created anew and did not have to contend with entrenched interests and institutional routines.

The first of these institutions was the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (the Aeronautical Technological Institute, ITA), which was part of a broader technological center created by the Brazilian air force. The Centro Tecnológico da Aeronáutica was conceived from the beginning as a military engineering institution, meant to provide technical and professional support to the Brazilian air force, which was created as an independent service in 1941. The project, approved by the Brazilian government in 1945, included an engineering school (the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica) and a research center (the Instituto de Pesquisas e Desenvolvimento). American institutions were used as models, and the center's official history cited as appropriate models such places as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the California Institute of Technology, and different research establishments belonging to the American air force, navy, and civil aeronautics establishment.(6)

The institute was organized in close cooperation with MIT, which sent one of its professors, Richard H. Smith, to coordinate the project. In the 1950s the institute became known as Brazil's best engineering school; it drew students from all over the country through very competitive entrance examinations. Because of its location - São José dos Campos, near São Paulo-the students had to live on campus, something that occurred at only a few agricultural schools. The institute was not organized as a military establishment and was open to civilians. Its location under the Ministry of Aeronautics freed it from the bureaucratic regulations of the Ministry of Education and provided it with many more resources than any other teaching institution in the country. The close cooperation with MIT assured a constant flow of personnel between the institute and several American institutions and made it easy for its best students to continue their courses in the United States.

The physics department of the new institute was headed by Paulus A. Pompéia, a former assistant to Wataghin. Pompéia recalls the names of the people involved in the project - Ernesto Luis de Oliveira Jr., who had worked with Luigi Fantappié; Air Force Colonel Casimiro Montenegro Filho, the entrepreneur behind the project; and Richard Smith, the first reactor. The novelties of the project enticed Pompéia to come to the institute: full-time teachers and students, prospects for long-term careers for professors, and resources for research. At first most of the professors came from the United States. After the first ten years the physics department had about fifty professors, and there was a strong emphasis on experimental research.

The core group - Walter Baltensberger of Swiss origin, Sérgio Porto, Luis Valente Boff, Mario Alves Guimarães, and José Israel Vargas - began a new tradition of solid-state physics that had existed previously in Brazil only through the work of Bernhard Gross. It was the beginning of a new generation, and the list of former students includes José Ellis Ripper, Rogério Cerqueira Leite, Heitor Gurgulino de Souza, Joao Bosco de Siqueira, Geraldo Aurélio Tupinambá, and Anísio dos Santos. For Sérgio Porto this was a radical and badly needed departure from the tradition of particle physics inaugurated by Wataghin.(7)

The new institution was not easily accepted, but its military support helped. Pompéia recalls:
The first problem we had was with the Ministry of Education, which did not understand that an engineering school could be outside its supervision. I was in charge of the negotiations with the ministry... A primary goal for the institute was to create an engineering school patterned on the American schools. That meant to mold practical engineers, not theoreticians. The Politécnica had a very strong French influence, and the Polytechnique in France was more a science school than an engineering school.
Since there was never an agreement, the diplomas provided by the institute were registered only by the Ministry of Aeronautics, which in the end did not cause any difficulties for its students.

Resistance came also from the military brass, which did not accept easily the idea that its school should produce civilian engineers. The original project was to have had a purely military establishment:
Richard Smith sent a memo to Brigadier Montenegro and [Aeronautics] Minister Trompowsky showing that this would be a waste of resources, that the Ministry of Aeronautics was responsible for the development of Brazil's industry; and that they needed civilians because they could not do it only with military officers. Since they were spending so much to build the school, they should have had 90% civilians and 10% military personnel among the students, with the advantage that these military men, who would hold key positions in the future, would get the chance to know the civilians with whom they studied.(8)
The prevalence of this conception helps explain the contrast between the ITA and its army counterpart, the Instituto Militar de Engenharia in Rio de Janeiro, which remained a purely military establishment. According to Pompéia, however, most air force authorities were against this conception of the school. As early as 1960 there was an attempt to organize the institute as an independent foundation, a project inspired in what was being proposed for the Universidade de Brasilia. The effort was barred by the military and led to Pompéia's decision to leave the institution.(9) The tendency toward militarization became irresistible after 1964 and led to the resignation of Pompéia, who moved to São Paulo's Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas.

From the beginning the engineering school was part of a larger technological center whose institute for research and development was headed by Brigadier Aldo Vieira da Rosa. In 1971 the Centro Tecnológico changed its name to Centro Técnico Aeroespacial (CTA), and technological research increased its importance. In the mid-1980s the center had about 5,400 employees, 1,100 with university degrees. Its research activities included rocketry and artificial satellites. Besides its own teaching and research activities, the CTA provided the conditions for the creation of EMBRAER, Brazil's state-owned airplane manufacturer. Several high technology institutions, public and private, were established in its surroundings, forming Brazil's closest approximation to a "Silicon Valley" phenomenon. The engineering school itself, after a severe crisis and the loss of many of its civilian staff, lost some of the luster it had in the 1950s and 1960s.

A second experience involved the Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto founded and led by Zeferino Vaz in a small city at the heart of São Paulo's coffee country,(10) which was to become one of Brazil's best medical schools. Demand for medical education was on the rise, and the traditional Faculdade de Medicina of the Universidade de São Paulo did not want to expand. Vaz was the director of the new institution until 1964, when he moved to the Universidade de Brasilia.

Vaz explains his success by what he calls "an open secret":
I know how to attract a scientist. I learned it early while working in Travassos' laboratory and at the Instituto Biológico under terrible conditions. Scientists are attracted when you offer them a new scientific ideal. What I offered them was a complete revolution in medical education. Why revolution? Because in those years the physicists had created very sophisticated instruments for analyzing biological phenomena... However, this revolution had not been incorporated into the teaching of medicine, which remained mostly morphological and static, based on a three-year anatomy course. There was the cult of the cadaver.
The new emphasis on biochemistry, physiology, and pharmacology; the organization of disciplines into academic departments; and active recruitment of talented people were the ingredients Vaz used in his project. New disciplines were introduced into the curriculum; others lost their relevance. Anatomy was reduced to one year, while pediatrics, gynecology, and obstetrics increased their load. Preventive medicine and medical psychology were introduced:
I also introduced biostatistics in the medical course. Why? Because this basic contribution of physics made it possible to quantify the biological phenomena... To study the variations of normality and disease under different conditions - this is what I call the Galilean era in biological sciences, through mathematicization. Thus, the biological sciences, which were mostly descriptive, are becoming like the exact sciences.(11)
To carry on his project, Zeferino Vaz had to confront the authorities at the Ministry of Education. "I took the new plan to Jurandir Lodi, who was the dictator of higher education. 'Oh, you cannot do that.' 'Why not?' 'Because you have to follow the model of the Faculdade Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.' 'Why do I have to follow a model that has been obsolete for fifty years?' 'Because it is written in the statutes that this is the model school for medical education in Brazil.' "(12) It was necessary to lobby the members of the Conselho Federal de Educação to have the projects approved. That the new school did not depend on federal support was decisive.

Thanks to his personal prestige, the working conditions offered, and the new professional and research perspectives opened, Vaz was able to attract a group of outstanding professors from Brazil and abroad.(13) Support came not only from the state budget but also from the Rockefeller Foundation and other sources. Well conceived, properly endowed, and limited in its ambitions, the Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirao Preto retained its quality and prestige after Zeferino Vaz departed and its endurance and stability make a positive counterpoint to the usually short productive cycle of Brazilian academic institutions.

The third experience involved the Universidade de Brasilia. This university was part of the whole project for the country's new capital, and its organization was entrusted to Darcy Ribeiro.(14) The first study group designated to organize the new university was formed by Ribeiro; his close friend and Juscelino Kubitschek's chief of staff, Ciro dos Anjos, a writer; and architect Oscar Niemeyer. Anísio Teixeira also participated in the project from the beginning.

Ambitions were extremely high, and for Darcy Ribeiro the past, in Brazil as elsewhere, was tabula rasa. He describes the new university as
the most ambitious project of the Brazilian intellectuals - a project to revise the culture of the world, knowledge, science, and scholarship and to discover what scholarship, knowledge, and science could give us. Brasilia was a radical attempt to rethink the university all over again, that old, archaic, millenary sacred cow. I only asked people who were dissatisfied to work on the project, those who wanted the university to be what it should be, not those who wanted to reproduce what it was, here or anywhere else in the world.(15)
This new university was to have different roles. First, it should provide cultural substance to Brasilia, a city built in the middle of nowhere; second, the university should become a "superadvisory agency to the government, without being subservient, without being a group of government employees, but retaining its autonomy as a cultural institution... It should be the big advisory agency." Third, it should provide Brasilia with its spirit, its creativity. Last,
This university should give Brazil its first opportunity to reach excellence in all fields of knowledge... All fields of knowledge had to be cultivated and cross-fertilized. If we could have good chemistry side by side with good mathematics and physics, it would be possible to produce people who could use the scientific way of thinking to deal with the country's problems, rather than an ancillary thinking typical of those second-rank assistants we used to prepare in the country.(16)
The treatment had to be radical:
An important science policy decision was to forbid the Ford Foundation to do what it used to do with Brazilian science. The foundation would give some money to each Brazilian scientist to hire some assistants... It would give him some money to buy equipment or to supplement his salary. He would become an appendix, because the scientist would be linked to a foreign professor, usually American (but he could also be English) who would come here occasionally... It is not that the foundation wanted to colonize Brazil this way; it believed this was the best way to help... In Brasilia, from the beginning, we forbade the Ford Foundation or any other organization to deal directly with the professors. Any financial support should be dealt with by the rector's office; we would not allow the entrepreneurial professor to look for his money here and there, which is something that deforms the institutions. But I had very important support from the Ford Foundation - more than $2 million to buy a basic sciences library of more than 150,000 volumes.(17)
The university was organized around a series of central institutes divided along disciplinary lines, each responsible for undergraduate and graduate teaching and research. The chair system was not to be adopted, and the institutes were to have a collegial organization. Formal power, however, was concentrated at the top. From a legal point of view, the university was established as an autonomous foundation and granted a large endowment of real estate and shares of publicly owned companies.

There was no chance to see how these ideas would work in practice. At first Brasilia attracted many young professors and scientists who were, as Ribeiro indicated, dissatisfied with the Brazilian academic institutions. For a while the entire group of physicists from the ITA considered transferring to the new university. Darcy Ribeiro himself left the Universidade de Brasilia in 1962 to join João Goulart's government as minister of education and later as the president's chief of staff. He was replaced by Anísio Teixeira, who remained until the military coup of 1964, when he was replaced by Zeferino Vaz.

In 1964 Zeferino Vaz had left Ribeirão Preto to become São Paulo's state secretary of health "in the preparatory stages of the 1964 revolution." His conservative outlook, combined with his academic credentials, made him a rare asset for the Brazilian military regime, and in April of that year President Castelo Branco asked Vaz to become rector of the Universidade de Brasilia. Vaz describes this experience as a war on two fronts: in defense of quality and against external intervention. He acknowledges that he dismissed "seventeen or eighteen elements" - most of them social scientists recruited by Darcy Ribeiro at the Universidade de Minas Gerais - not because they were Communists but "for mediocrity." He claims to have resisted external pressures against competent people and to have supported the work of such people as musician Cláudio Santoro, architect Oscar Niemeyer, Vice-Rector Almir de Castro, and mathematician Elon Lages de Lima. Newly invited professors included Roberto Salmeron in physics, Otto Gottlieb in chemistry, and Antônio Cordeiro in biology.

In 1965 Zeferino Vaz left Brasilia to work in the organization of the Universidade de Campinas, probably anticipating the storm that was to come. In spite of his intent to keep the Universidade de Brasilia free from ideological confrontations and external interference, a series of dismissals and resignations emptied the university of more than two hundred of its professors. More than that, the university lost its credibility among the Brazilian academic community. Although it remained among the best in the network of federal institutions - thanks to its physical installations, innovative organization, financial endowments, and the quality of some of the remaining staff-it would never regain its initial mystique and prestige.

Expansion of Higher Education

The idea that the new elite universities were forerunners of a deep transformation of higher education captured many minds. This proposal required, however, a dramatic change in most of the country's existing higher education institutions. It went against the gradually growing trend toward mass education, and it required breaking the power of old faculties, imposing demanding patterns of scholarship on students and teachers, placing more value on research work than on professional achievement, and discriminating within higher education between good and bad universities, departments, research groups, and courses. It also meant dividing the students into those who would be oriented toward research and those who would be limited to conventional education for the liberal professions.

Rapid urbanization, mass communications, and mass consumption, however, were leading the universities in a different direction. People wanted more education and privileges associated with it, but not necessarily more demanding courses. There was, of course, effective demand for more engineers, lawyers, doctors, and teachers. Less recognized but probably more important was the desire of the middle classes for social prestige and the benefits professional status brought. A university degree promised a certain level of social prestige and income regardless of the quality of education received. In time, legal privileges for diploma holders were established not only for the traditional professions - physicians, lawyers, and engineers - but also for new professions like economists, statisticians, administrators, journalists, librarians, and psychologists. To respond to the demands, the federal government built a network of federal universities that often absorbed old state and local institutions that could not sustain themselves and expand with their original resources. With some minor exceptions, only the state of São Paulo kept its own institutions of higher education. Private institutions also emerged - first the Catholic universities organized by the church, and afterward a large variety of religious, lay, community, municipal, and privately owned institutions, all under the nominal supervision of the Ministry of Education and its Conselho Federal de Educação. Universities were supposed to be autonomous, while isolated establishments were supposed to come under federal supervision. However, the universities were bound to curricula established by legislation for their professional degrees, and the federal establishments' budgets were strictly controlled by the Ministry of Education while their professors came under the civil service statutes. The chair system guaranteed that professors could not be fired and could teach freely without interference, and in each school a faculty council formed by chair holders had the final say on all matters not conflicting with federal rules and regulations. The faculty councils also drew up the list of names from which the government appointed the schools' directors, while university-wide councils drew up the list of names from which the government would appoint the rectors. In such a system, most of the power remained with the schools; the rectors had mostly a ceremonial role. (18)

This system of higher education enrolled in 1968 about 278,000 students, less than 5 percent of the nation's twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds. (The total Brazilian population for that year was estimated at 87 million.) Enrollment at the high school level was around 800,000, and at the primary level (until the eighth year) there were about 14 million students, mostly concentrated in the first four years of education. Fifty-five percent of the students were in public, tuition-free institutions, most of them belonging to a university; the remaining 45 percent were in private establishments, most of them isolated schools without university status. (The degrees provided by universities or isolated schools, however, are equivalent, and both are considered "university" degrees. The only differences are institutional: universities are supposed to be freer from ministerial supervision and can have larger bureaucracies.) In terms of subjects of study, about 25 percent were in "soft" fields, such as the humanities, literature, and the social sciences (mostly in the schools of philosophy, sciences, and letters); about 20 percent were in law; ten percent were in medicine; and another 10 percent in engineering. Admission for higher education came through public examinations given by each institution and open to high-school degree holders. There were 2.4 applications for each place in 1968, with much higher ratios for the established professions in public universities.

From this basis an ambitious project to eliminate stages and bring Brazil directly into the twenty-first century was attempted. In the last two chapters, we examine this "great leap forward" and its aftermath.

Notes

1. McCann 1973.

2. For a full discussion, see Schwartzman, 1984b and 1985.

3. Quoted in Graciarena 1964.

4. M. R. Silva 1960 and 1978; Botelho 1983.

5. Romani 1982; Albagli 1987.

6. Paim 1987:13-14.

7. "A society cannot have only poets. It needs people concerned with its national needs.... I trained only solid-state physicists, spectroscopy people.... It has been a long battle, but you can see that today solid-state physics, my physics. dominates the whole country" (Porto interview)

8. Pompéia interview.

9. Porto interview

10. Zeferino Vaz, born in 1908, had a medical degree from São Paulo's Faculdade de Medicina and studied parasitology with Lauro Travassos, general biology and genetics with André Dreyfus, and zoology with Hermann von Ihering. He worked as a researcher at the Instituto Biológico between 1929 and 1937 and was professor of parasitology at the Universidade de São Paulo after 1935.

11. Vaz interview.

12. Vaz interview.

13. Including J. Moura Gonçalves, Maurício Rocha e Silva, Lucien Lison, Miguel Covian, Fritz Köberle, J. L. Pedreira de Freitas, Mauro Pereira Barreto, and J. Oliveira Almeida.

14. Ribeiro was an anthropologist from Minas Gerais who studied at the Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo with Emílio Wilhems and Herbert Baldus. In the 1950s he became associated with Anísio Teixeira at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Educacionais (Brazilian Center for Research on Education) in Rio de Janeiro In the 1960s he was President João Goulart's chief of staff, and in the 1980s, after several years of political exile, he became vice-governor of Rio de Janeiro under I,eonel Brizola, as well as Brizola's candidate for the 1986 gubernatorial election in that state.

15. Ribeiro interview.

16. "Ancillary science" was a scourge to be avoided at all costs. In the old universities in Brazil, as well as in other underdeveloped countries, "you could have very good biochemistry, but it was linked to a given group in Germany or England. It was an appendage, a slave working here on problems decided outside. It was a crazy biochemistry" (Ribeiro interview).

17. Ribeiro interview.

18. For an expanded discussion, see Schwartzman 1988a. See Levy 1986 for a comparative view of higher education in Brazil and other Latin American countries.