In recent decades, the public university has been transforming managerially to, according to almost all voices, promote the growth of its impact on society, whether in teaching and research, or in direct action in society, which is commonly called extension. Or to be accountable. Management and accountability have become central issues for the university. Other transformations have become more visible: today the university is more inclusive and more plural. How will the emerging and unpredictable developments and challenges that inclusion and plurality will certainly demand from the university be managed?
How to describe a university? In this regard, I offer a discussion about changes in European universities, which shows interesting parallels with what we have witnessed here in Brazil. The loan is from an article by Norwegians Peter Maassen and Bjorn Stensaker, recently published[I]. In the 1970s, two concepts were established: the university would be an “organized anarchy” or a “loosely coupled system”. The authors who defended the idea of anarchy diagnosed that a (good) university presents tensions in the mix of its social, cultural and economic functions. Furthermore, it would be driven by “confusing technologies” regarding the generation and transmission of knowledge, and would also be subject to the fluctuating participation of its teachers in administration, which is somewhat unstable. At the time, there was already an attempt to rationalize this anarchy, but the idea of “loose coupling” also raised suspicions as to whether rationalization would actually explain what would happen in the organization (the university, in this case). Since then, we have witnessed renovations to “put the house in order”, so to speak.
The reforms witnessed in recent decades, according to Norwegian authors, aimed to modernize the organization and governance of universities, focusing on solving the “problems” of “anarchy”. In the article I reference, expressions that emerged in this reform process and that are also familiar to us appear, such as strategic planning, process optimization, accounting and evaluation of results, institutionalization and standardization of practices. With a series of interviews with professors and administrators from different universities, Maassen and Stensaker were able to verify that “having a strategy is not the same as implementing it and that the relationship between governance and implementation of strategic planning is definitely more complicated than it often is. imagined.” And they announce a possible paradox: perhaps “changes towards hierarchization, professionalization and specialization [of governance]” have, in fact, increased “organizational effectiveness as a whole”. Shortening this story a little, the reforms aimed – and still aim – at ending anarchy and tightening the system's couplings, but the outcomes differ in many parts from what was planned. The final sentence of the article alludes to “the importance of the institution’s ability to deal with unpredictable consequences of institutional rationalization”.
I identified with one of the interviewees in the article, which may be due to our having similar lengths of experience, even though at universities in completely different countries. Let's see what he or she said:
“What is a real change from the past is that 'in the old days' it was easier to achieve things. There was always someone who fixed things. Now it seems that they are better organized administratively, but it is more bureaucratic. You come across rules you've never heard of, which are there on the website and always seem very restrictive.”
Today I see the university as a place where you can do many things, as long as they are within the rules on the website, to be properly registered, accounted for and evaluated. What was it like in the “old days”? What was the college experience like in organized anarchy? Perhaps the recalled experiences will be of some use in dealing with unpredictable, probably intangible and elusive, consequences of institutional rationalization.
In the first year of my Physics degree, we knocked on laboratory doors, curious to see what was being done. If we were well received, we asked: could we work on something here? I was accepted into two of them, without any project or registration with any university body. We did not yet know the term “scientific initiation”. My first experience was at the Plasma Laboratory, under the guidance of Professor Shuko Aihara, who barely spoke Portuguese. I managed to build a power source for laboratory equipment. I ended up giving up, despite my fascination with plasma physics, when the professor gave me a bibliography in Japanese.
The second experiment was in the selective surfaces laboratory (for photothermal conversion into solar heating), which sought to reproduce, in Brazil, a very efficient surface invented by a Swedish group. It was a layer of nickel deposited on aluminum by an electrochemical process. My colleague and friend Edmilson Manganote (who later turned to particle physics, in which he works to this day) and I were guided by João Roberto Moro, then a doctoral candidate and now a professor at the Federal Institute of São Paulo (IFSP). We didn't sign anything, but Moro left the key to the laboratory with us so we could take samples of these surfaces late into the night. And he took us to other laboratories to analyze what we had done and check whether the surfaces were truly selective (that is, whether they absorbed better what needed to be absorbed from the sun and whether they emitted more of what was not important for the intended effect). And they were. He and his boss submitted a patent application, and the names of the freshmen without registration or formal design were there on the document. We never put that on our CV, in fact we still didn't really know what a CV was. And, for some reason, probably due to some conversations with the then vice-director of the Institute of Physics (IFGW), Curt Egon Hennies, in the third semester I enrolled in an elective course taught by him: Special Topics in Physics II.
The discipline consisted of developing a project. And now? With a partner, this time Geraldo Weber, now a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), I thought about those samples from Moro's laboratory. What was this layer like, how thick was it, how did its composition vary? A friend who was further along in the course was doing scientific initiation in a scanning electron microscopy laboratory – a much more sophisticated thing –, but we knocked on her door. The person in charge, professor Carlos Alberto Ribeiro, was friendly and helped us. He would take the measurements, including microscopy photos and chemical composition spectra using secondary electrons. It was an agreement between the professor responsible for the laboratory and two students who were friends of a student. But we had to “prepare the sample” for the measurements. Where? In another laboratory, where we went to ask for a favor, promptly granted by Professor Iris Torriani. We followed the work of the technician, whose name I no longer remember, step by step. The final report impressed Professor Curt, we ended up with ten and received an invitation for an “official” scientific initiation. But I only did this later, with a scholarship and such, with Cylon Gonçalves da Silva, a name that will appear again soon.
As I progressed through the course, I came across Methods of Experimental Physics III. The first part was delightful: reproduction of fundamental experiments in modern physics. The second part seemed more tedious, as it focused on nuclear physics and consisted of observing through a microscope the traces left by particles in emulsions, which were a type of special photographic film. I was part of a group of colleagues who asked the professor, Júlio Hadler Neto, to replace these pre-determined observations with a “project”. The professor agreed, and we conducted a new experiment, which checked the emission profile of radon atoms (which is radioactive) into the environment (being in cement, they can accumulate in closed environments, leading to radioactive contamination – in short, always open the windows ). I think it was a success, as Júlio proposed a similar methodology in the following semesters and presented the physical-didactic experience at the 1984 meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC) at the University of São Paulo (USP). I went along, but, of course, I didn't remember to put it on my resume either. I remembered this story already in this century, when active teaching methodologies were institutionalized. What we experienced 40 years ago was spontaneously motivated “project-based learning”, as must have happened in many other courses and places.
In the same semester as the project-based learning experience, we studied Electromagnetism II with Professor Jorge Ivan Cisneros, a very friendly Argentine physicist who came to Unicamp. A little tired of the exam-only evaluation scheme, I remember that we asked him to also have some different activity. This is how the three conceptual challenges of that semester arose. The professor was happy with our doubts, and we soon began consulting other professors at the institute to try to overcome the challenges. It ended up becoming a kind of academic contest. We learned and had a lot of fun.
I believe that a possible universalization of spontaneous practices requires managerialism in place of anarchy, but a space for spontaneity and informality needs to be preserved. The transition from organized anarchy to a “tightly coupled system” brought the classification, indexing, evaluation and accounting of activities that emerged or were already carried out. It seems to me that, nowadays, before proposing any new idea, one first asks how it will be classified, indexed, evaluated and accounted for.
This also reminds me of the master's and doctorate projects of the time, in my case under the direction of Professor Cylon, who I mentioned previously. My master's project proposed solving a given problem. I initially had no idea how to begin solving it. Then I discovered that my advisor didn't know how either. But I ended up solving the problem, and solving it well, I believe. I compare this experience with today's projects, which need to present an execution schedule, preferably including the month in which an article will be submitted for publication.[iii]. This would be practically impossible (and meaningless) in that organized anarchy, which is missed, not for its organization, but for its unpredictability, for a touch of informality and a certain amount of spontaneity.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
[I] From organized anarchy to de-coupled bureaucracy: The transformation of university organization. Higher Education Quarterly, 2019, vol. 73, 456-468
[ii] https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-anarchy-can-save-the-university/
[iii] Doses of anarchy were also necessary for great discoveries
