O misto de historiador e sociólogo, Immanuel Wallerstein dispensa apresentações. Autor de trabalhos clássicos, como O Moderno Sistema Mundial, tem, a partir da prestigiosa Binghamton University, defendido uma perspectiva alternativa para as Ciências Humanas, cujas linhas gerais, em língua portuguesa, podem ser encontradas no livro Para Abrir as Ciências Sociais (Editora Cortez). Exerceu influência significativa na escola (parece que já se pode dizer assim) de ciência social propugnada por Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Pois bem, Wallerstein também tem levado a cabo atiladas abordagens sobre a universidade. O breve texto abaixo bem demonstra isto.
"Higher
Education Under Attack"
by Immanuel Wallerstein
For a very long time
there were only a few universities in the world. The total student body in
these institutions was very small. This small group of students was drawn
largely from the upper classes. Attending the university conferred great
prestige and reflected great privilege.
This picture began to change
radically after 1945. The number of universities began to expand considerably,
and the percentage of persons in the age range that attended universities began
to expand. Furthermore, this was not merely a question of expansion in those
countries that had already had universities of note. University education was
launched in a large number of countries that had few or no university
institutions before 1945. Higher education became worldwide.
The pressure for expansion came
from above and below. From above, governments felt an important need for more
university graduates to ensure their capacity to compete in the more complex
technologies that were required in the exploding expansion of the
world-economy. And from below, large numbers of the middle strata and even of
the lower strata of the world's populations were insistent that they have
access to higher education in order to improve considerably their economic and
social prospects.
The expansion of the universities,
which was remarkable in size, was made possible by the enormous upward
expansion of the world-economy after 1945, the biggest in the history of the
modern world-system. There was plenty of money available for the universities,
and they were happy to make use of it.
Of course, this changed the
university systems somewhat. Individual universities became much larger and
began to lose the quality of intimacy that smaller structures provided. The
class composition of the student body, and then of the professorate, evolved.
In many countries, expansion not only meant a reduction in the monopoly of
upper strata persons as students, professors, and administrators, but it often
meant that "minority" groups and women began to have wider access,
which had previously been totally or at least partially denied.
This rosy picture came into
difficulty after about 1970. For one thing, the world-economy entered its long
stagnation. And little by little, the amount of money that universities
received, largely from the states, began to diminish. At the same time, the
costs of university education continued to rise, and the pressures from below
for continued expansion grew even stronger. The story ever since has been that
of the two curves going in opposite directions - less money and increased
expenses.
By the time we arrived at the
twenty-first century, this situation became dire. How have universities coped?
One major way was what we have come to call “privatization.” Most universities
before 1945, and even before 1970, were state institutions. The one significant
exception was the United States, which had a large number of non-state
institutions, most of which had evolved from religiously-based institutions.
But even in these U.S. private institutions, the universities were run as non-profit
structures.
What privatization began to mean
throughout the world was several things: One, there began to be institutions of
higher education that were established as businesses for profit. Two, public
institutions began to seek and obtain money from corporate donors, which began
to intrude in the internal governance of the universities. And three,
universities began to seek patents for work that researchers at the university
had discovered or invented, and thereupon entered as operators in the economy,
that is, as businesses.
In a situation in which money was
scarce, or at least seemed scarce, universities began to transform themselves
into more business-like institutions. This could be seen in two major ways. The
top administrative positions of universities and their faculties, which had
traditionally been occupied by academics, now began to be occupied by persons
whose background was in business and not university life. They raised the
money, but they also began to set the criteria of allocation of the money.
There began to be evaluations of
whole universities and of departments within universities in terms of their
output for the money invested. This might be measured by how many students
wished to pursue particular studies, or how esteemed was the research output of
given universities or departments. Intellectual life was being judged by
pseudo-market criteria. Even student recruitment was being measured by how much
money was brought in via alternative methods of recruitment.
And, if this weren't enough, the
universities began to come under attack from a basically anti-intellectual far
right current that saw the universities as secular, anti-religious
institutions. The university as a critical institution - critical of dominant
groups and dominant ideologies - had always met with resistance and repression
by the states and the elites. But their powers of survival had always been
rooted in their relative financial autonomy based on the low real cost of
operation. This was the university of yesteryear, not of today - and tomorrow.
One can write this off as simply
one more aspect of the global chaos in which we are now living. Except that the
universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus (not of course
the only one) of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such
analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic
transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order. At the moment, the
turmoil within the universities seems no easier to resolve than the turmoil in
the world-economy. And even less attention is being paid to it.
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