TEIXEIRA, Anísio e RIBEIRO, Darcy. The University of Brasília. The Educational Forum. Wisconsin, v.26, n.3, Part 1, mar. 1962. p. 309-319.

The University of Brasilia

DARCY RIBEIRO AND ANÍSIO S. TEIXEIRA

I. THE BRAZILIAN UNIVERSITY TRADITION

WE DO NOT really have in Brazil a true university tradition. Our oldest university, the University of Brazil, dates only from 1931. It was formed by grouping three schools already in existence, a Faculty of Medicine, a Faculty of Law, and a Polytechnic School. In spite of being held together, however, these three schools remained much as they had been previously, stagnant and self-sufficient. The rectors and other central authorities of the university busied themselves with budgets and other administrative details, with formal convocations opening and closing the academic year, and with an occasional timid debate on the impracticability of the university’s structure and the need to reform it.

It would perhaps be more appropriate to say establish it rather than reform it, since there is very little of the university idea to change in our higher education. Our tradition is that of independent schools, who are fierce defenders of their autonomy. They are organized to receive secondary-school graduates who are segregated in strictly professional courses which are authorized by formalist and rigid legislation.

Students and professors in equivalent courses, duplicated in the same university, ignore one another completely. The teaching of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, or economics is repeated, school by school-multiplying equipment, rooms, and professors. To judge by the number of chair-holding professors (catedrático) each with independent equipment and assisting personnel maintained by our universities, these institutions show up well among the major universities of the world. However, lamentably, it is rare that these facilities are in condition to be operated. There are so many of them that in each there is always a missing person or piece of equipment to keep ir from functioning.

One of the causes of this situation is the chair or cátedra, as we conceive it. By this institution we divide knowledge into life-tenure allotments. We grant these allotments through certain procedures of selection which assure the professor the monopoly of a certain discipline in a particular corner of a given Faculty. After his appointment to a chair, the life-long proprietor of that chair is freed from the necessity of studying and keeping up-to-date. He orients his teaching in any direction he pleases according to his own understanding or misunderstanding. He can give lectures or not. He can even spend his time teaching another subject, provided it is not occupied by another catedrático.

The makers of the 1946 Constitution were justifiably zealous for freedom of teaching. They remembered the many professors who had been imprisoned and discharged during the preceding dictatorship. They tried to safeguard freedom of teaching by a constitutional requirement of competitive examinations for filling university chairs and assuring their holders of life tenure. This constitutional provision is entirely compatible with the concept of the cátedra as a university rank. Under that concept the professors may be chosen by public competition and guaranteed tenure and freedom of teaching, without giving them proprietorship in a given branch of knowledge. It is quite possible, moreover, to organize university teaching into the various ranks, assistant professor, associate professor, and professor in such a way as to guard appropriate tenure for each rank and to protect their freedom of teaching.

Another institutional obstacle in our higher education is the rigid legislation which establishes fixed requirements for graduation in each professional curriculum. These requirements specify the subjects which have to be taught each year, and each program of study must be complete. Nothing can be omitted. The professor has to perform miracles of improvisation to go through at least the motions of teaching every item mentioned in the program which is required by law. He cannot add anything new to the course, moreover, since he already has so many compulsory topics to teach that he has no room for innovations.

It is already evident to all that sciences and technology, in their present stage of development, cannot de confined within this compartmentalization. On the other hand, with industrialization, productive techniques become more complex day by day and are demanding a growing number of new kinds of specializations which must be picked up on the job by engineers, physicians, lawyers, and economists after graduation. Thus, after years of study and examinations to obtain a legal license to work in a certain field, many of our graduates have to acquire by experience or by special courses, in this country or abroad, the knowledge and techniques which prepare them for various new types of activities.

The present rigidity also has its results in condemning the young student to a definite and perhaps premature choice of career. If, two or there years after starting a medical, engineering, or teacher’s course, he finds he does not have an aptitude for that area, he must start all over again.

II. UNIVERSITY REFORM

The best professors in our universities are fully aware of this situation. Many try to do something about it in particular areas. They create complementary or extra-curricular institutions, especially in fields of higher technical pattern, such as engineering and medicine. But all these efforts in the principal universities and separate schools, as they turn in the direction of improving higher education, are confronted by a great mass of vested and the barriers of rigid legislation and a narrow educational bureaucracy.

There have been various attempts to depart with this obsolete structure. Among them was a proposal for a University of the Federal District. Another was the original plan of the Faculty of Philosophy,Sciences, and Letters which Armando Salles de Oliveira tried to institute as the integrating agency of the University of São Paulo. The former was destroyed in the ware of reaction which spread over the entire world in the years of Fascism’s ascendancy. The latter was not able to overcome the resistance of the traditional university faculties which insisted on remaining isolated and self-sufficient. The result was the firm establishment of the pattern of the Faculty of Philosophy which has among its tasks the training of teachers for the secondary schools and the preparation os scientific and intellectual

Professor Teixeira was the founder of the University of the Federal District. (Editor’s note). cadres so that it is compelled to be a miniature university with insufficient equipment, funds, and personnel.

Under the present conditions, therefore, only a new university, completely planned for new purposes, based on more flexible foundations, can lead the way to new vistas of higher education in Brazil.

The kind of university we have in mind is not an untried institution. Its essencial features have been tested in many of the more advanced countries. In Germany, England, the United States, and Russia, modern science and technology have been put into the universities by a road which we are today recommending to Brazil. Sometimes we feel that our country is the only one left in the world which still tries to educate scientists and technologists by the same traditional structure and methods which were employed in developing classical learning. This may have been sufficient in the days when higher education here was needed only for qualifying young people for upper classes socially, to train a handful of physicians with impeccable bedside manners, and to educate enough engineers to construct seignorial mansions and an occasional monumental public building. Today it is emphatically not enough.

The tasks of production in our country tended to fall entirely on the shoulders of the primary laborers in the past. They were the jobs of the worker who raised cotton or coffee, the "vaqueiro" who cared for the stock, the miner who dug gold or precious stones, and the planter who tapped rubber trees. The son of the rancher, the miner, or the planter went to a higher educational institution to become a doctor. Whether he was a doctor in medicine, law, or some other traditional subject, production was not considered to be his job. His job was to know, not to produce. This was the reason, in part, for our being surpassed in many branches of production whenever another country decided to enter into competition with us. When technicians were needed to build or operate a workshop or factory, to construct a highway, or to hunt for mineral deposits, they had to be imported along with the machinery and standards of production.

On entering the era of modern technology, science and engineering have become for us also fundamental ingredients for mastery of productive processes, an imperative for national autonomy. If We fail in this endeavor, just at the moment when we are becoming independent in so many ways, we shall see ourselves again dependent. We have already reached the point of not needing to import automobiles, refrigerators, and television sets, but we still have to import the techniques to produce and constantly improve them.

For many years we have been in the condition of the Xavante Indians who, on learning to use steel, were no longer able to do without them and saw themselves tied to those who furnished the axes. Now that we already produce steel, telephones, and penicillin and thereby increase our autonomy, we run a new risk of subordination in our dependence on technical standards and skills. We shall really be autonomous only when the renovation of the factories installed here will be made by our own technicians, according to procedures developed from a study of our own raw materials and for our own peculiar conditions of production and consumption. This is the road we must follow if we are to step up the rate of our production and reduce, and one day wipe out entirely, the distance between us and the technologically advanced countries. Those countries now pull away from us by the achievements of their scientists and technicians. They will continue to do so unless and until we develop a new kind of higher education to produce scientists and technicians of our own.

This reform of higher education in Brazil is one from which we cannot escape. When the seat of the Federal Government was removed from its old seaboard location in a great metropolitan area to a city especially constructed for it in the interior of the country, this necessity became a challenging opportunity. The new capital city had to have a cultural and scientific center. What more appropriate center could this be than a university?

III. WHY CREATE A UNIVERSITY IN BRASILIA?

When we consider the present difficulties confronting our universities throughout the country, the answer to this problem is clear. Our higher educational institutions have usually been built by consolidating a number of higher schools. They struggle to get adequate physical plants, equip their laboratories, acquire and catalouge books for their libraries, improve the qualifications of their teaching and research staffs, and make some of the reforms for which their professors and students have been clamoring for years.

In this new capital city in the center of the country, the same process will be repeated if proper steps are not taken. A series of independent faculties of various kinds which will be established will live a hand-to-mouth existence. Sooner or later they will be organized into a university which will have the same antiquated structure as the other universities of the country. The National Congress has already received bills to create two faculties, one in law and the other in economics, modeled on our tradition of improvised schools and improvised professors.

This, in brief, is the reasoning behind the proposal to establish in Brasilia a new university of the kind which will provide the teaching and research a modern country requires in its capital city.

The basic functions of the University of Brasilia would be:

1. To increase the number of higher educational opportunities available to the young people of Brazil.

2. To diversify scientific and technological education by establishing new technical-professional courses geared to an increase in production, to the expansion and improvement of services to the people, and to the development of their intellectual activities.

3. To contribute to Brasilia’s role in the country by bringing students from all parts of Brazil and a few from other countries, particulary those of Latin America, to work together on studies of great importance nationally and internationally.

4. To help the Federal governmental agencies with advice and special researches in all the fields of knowledge related to their problems.

5. To give the people of Brasilia a cultural perspective that will help them avoid becoming mediocre and provincial in this architecturally most modern urban center in the world.

None of these functions can be carried out well by a university of the traditional type. If such a university does not amount to much in the principal traditional cultural center of the country, it is very likely that in a new, artificial city, where it is thrown even more on its own resources, it would be condemned to an even greater mediocrity.

IV. STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BRASILIA

We propose to base the structure of the University on two kinds of agencies: the Central Institutes and the Faculties.

The Central Institutes will have the following tasks:

1. To give introductory courses to all the students of the University to prepare them intellectually and scientifically to follow the profissional courses of the faculties.

2. To give three one-year courses for the baccalaureate in any departmental discipline, for the students who desire to become secondary-school teachers.

3. To give two more years of scientific education after the baccalaureate, for students who show greater aptitude for original research.

4. To offer post-graduate work of two years to candidates for the doctorate.

The Institutes, therefore, will operate on four levels: the introductory (2 years), which may be extended for one more year to the baccalaureate (3 years), the specialized training (5 years), and the post-graduate (7years) to the doctoral level.

The Faculties will receive students already prepared in the two-year introductory courses of the Institutes and give them specialized training for practicing a profession. Graduation in these traditional careers will be possible after the minimum number of years of study required by law for each type of higher education.

At the beginning the University will have eight Central Institutes: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Earth Sciences, Human Sciences, Letters, and Arts. Each institute will be divided into departments. These departments will constitute the basic units of the University. The professors responsible for the teaching and research in each specialty will be gathered together in one department.

Thus the Institute of Human Sciences, for example, will be divided into Departments of Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Economics, Political Science, History, Philosophy, and Demography. In this Institute will be the students who propose to enter the Faculties of Law, Public Service, Diplomacy, Business Administration, and Economic Sciences, and those who will be graduated as secondary-school teachers of history, philosophy, psychology, or sociology.

In the Institute the students will take introductory courses of two or three years, the first year in general studies which complete their basic education, giving them university standing; the second and third years will follow with a tendency to specialization. After these two to three years, the student will be able to remain in the Institute as a major student in one of the departments with the object of becoming an anthropologist, psychologist, economic analyst, demographer, historian, or the like. The majority of the students, naturally, will go into one of the faculties where they will receive professional training for two or three more years of study.

The system will operate similary for the other fields. For example, the candidate for any of the specialized branches of engineering will take his basic studies in the Central Institutes of Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, with the possibility of remaining in one of them as a research worker, of going into the professional training he originally selected in engineering, or of becoming a secondary-school teacher of one of these subjects after taking complementary courses in the Faculty of Education.

The student of Medicine will receive his basic training in pre-medical subjects in the Central Institutes of Biology, Physics, and Chemistry, being able also to choose other careers after two or three years of introductory work. He can enter the Faculty of Medical Sciences and remain in one of its departments to specialize in a certain field, as pharmacology, microbiology, or physiology without becoming a physician.

The principal advantages of this double, integrated system will be:

1. The avoidance of unnecessary and burdensome multiplication of equipment and laboratory facilities.

2. The concentration of personnel resources.

3. Giving the student a chance to choose a profession when he is more mature and better informed than at the end of his secondary-school education.

4. Opportunity to develop new scientific and professional specializations.

5. Providing better selection of the future supplies of scientific and cultural leaders of the country.

6. Setting up a clearer distinction between the activities of scientific education and professional training.

7. Permiting a more complete integration of the University with the productive areas for which it must prepare technicians.

This structure, finally, will permit the development of a true university campus. The different Central Institutes, the Faculties and their auxiliary agencies, the students, and the professors will all be gathered together in one locality. The student of medicine and the student of engineering will receive their basic scientific training in the same Central Institutes, live in the same dormitories, and eat in the same dining halls with fellow students in other courses and faculties. They will engage in sports and frequent the same recreational and cultural centers as other students. The Museum, the Institute of Art, the Central Library, the University Radio, and the University Press will also be on the campus where all students, regardless of their specializations, will utilize and be influenced by them.

In summary, the structure of the University of Brasilia is presented graphically in Chart I below:

V. ADMINISTRATIVE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNIVERSITY

The university will be organized as a foundation under national charter so that can receive public and private grants and gifts.

The ruling body of the University of Brasilia Foundation will be the Conselho Diretor, hereafter called the Board, composed of six members, appointed by the President of the Republic for the first time and thereafter named by him from nominations of three names for each vacancy, submitted to the President by the Board. The Board will elect a president of the Foundation, who will be Rector of the University. It will also elect a Vice-Rector.

The teaching staff of the University will have complete instructional, technical, and scientific autonomy. To carry out that autonomy, the professors, associate professors, and assistant professors will meet in Departmental Boards, in Professional Councils, and as the University Assembly, supreme deliberative body of the University.

The Professional Councils will establish the curricula for each type of professional training and will provide an advisor for the student from his entrance into the University until his graduation. All the professors from the Institutes and the Faculties who take part in a particular type of professional education will be members of the corresponding professional council. Thus the professional council for mechanical engineering, e. g., will be composed of professors from the Central Institutes of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Human Sciences (Economics) in addition to professors of mechanical engineering others from the Faculty of Technology whose courses the prospective mechanical engineer needs to take.

The Professional Councils will elect for each type of education two deans, one for undergraduates, the other for post-graduates. All members of the Councils will have the obligation to act as tutors for students, under the supervision of their respective deans.

Each university unit (institute or faculty) will have an Administrative Board, composed of department heads and a director, elected by the professors of the unit.

The supreme coordinating body of the University will be the University Corporation composed of three Coordinating Councils. One of these councils will be made up of the directors of the Central Institutes, another of the directors of the Faculties, and a third of the directors of the Cultural Agencies. These councils will elect the three General Coordinators who will be the superior executives of the University next to the Rector and Vice-Rector.

Detailed proposals have also been made to finance the University with generous governmental grants, to have all professors and students on full time, and to house a majority of them on the campus.

The sponsors of the University hope to have about 10,000 to 15,000 students in this institution. This is not a large number, but in a country which had a total enrolment in higher education in 1959 of only 87,000 it will be a welcome addition to the number of places available for students.

The University’s greatest contribution, however, will be to act as a pilot project for Brazil’s future higher educational progress.

CHART I. STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BRASILIA

(Figures in parentheses after names of Institutes and Faculties indicate proposed enrolments in those units)

Central Institutes

Mathematics (1,000) Biology (1,000) Human Sciences (1,000)
Physics (1,000) Earth Sciences (500) Letters (1,000)
Chemistry (1,000) Arts (500)

Faculties

Public Service and Diplomacy Economic Sciences and Business Farm Sciences: Agronomy, Veterinary and Zoo-technical Sciences (400), Adm. (750), Law (250) Medical Sciences: Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing (1,500) Forestry Engineering (500) Education (1,000) Arts and Visual Communication: Architecture and City Technology: Civil Engineering, Library Sciences Mining, Metallurgy, Electricity and Planning, Visual Communi- Electronics, Industrial Chemistry , cation, Fine Arts (500) Hydraulics (2,100) Cultural Agencies Medical and Dental Social Museums: Brazilian Civilization, Educational Center: Elementary, Welfare Work Science Secondary Central Library University Press University Radio Recreational and Cultural Center Assembly Hall International House University Stadium Dormitories

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