Mid-December is when we try not to leave pending tasks for the following year. At the same time, this month, as happens every four years, discussions about what the future will be like begin to take shape. These are the presentations of the pre-campaigns, who are competing for the next rectorship of our university. It is the time when many of the many challenges we face are simultaneously exposed, from different points of view for their solutions. The best collective future for the University is always announced, along with the best individual futures of those who demand something for the candidates. These are legitimate desires, but they are not always free from conflicts of priorities, or even interests. In this cauldron, urgent and important problems appear. Some are only urgent, others are only important and, therefore, pushed to a distant future. It is also possible that there are urgent and important issues that are invisible to the majority. As it is the end of the year, a time when I have become accustomed since childhood to waiting for retrospectives in newspapers, magazines and television, I thought about a retrospective of what I have thought and written about the University in recent years, my collection of questions, which I believe cannot be forgotten, even though they are often difficult to consider in our increasingly accelerated daily lives.
I'll start at the beginning, that is, the first text in this space, more than seven years ago now. I remembered one of the entrances to the campus[1], where a memorial is remembered for what we should never forget. It is a phrase by Florestan Fernandes in letters that fade, but whose meaning we must take care of so that it remains perennial: “The objective of education is to invent and reinvent civilization without barbarism”. Both of education and of the other missions of the university. We recently practiced this objective in a dark period, but it should be the first idea to come to mind in times of peace as well. However, the objective of inventing and reinventing civilization requires inventions and reinventions of the place where the objective needs to occur.
We may need to reinvent our missions, as teaching, research and extension are probably no longer enough. We can think about raising the professional status missions a fourth and a fifth category of activities. One of these activities, which should become a mission, is, in the words of Ernest Boyer, integration: for the research mission the question would be: “What should be known, what remains to be discovered?” For integration the question would be: “What do the discoveries mean?”[2]. The great American educator, shortly before his death, was quick to state a fifth mission, that of public engagement. Boyer had already realized in the 1990s that the academic intellectual was increasingly becoming the recipient of a position at the university, writing in a certain style aimed only at his peers, participating less and less in a broader public discourse. As a result, the university's contribution was moving away from the great issues of society. This has recently come to worry me again, as I have missed public academics and their texts.[3], although in other formats, such as video, demonstrations are more frequent. But the importance of this is fundamental, because, as stated in a manifesto, “through this involvement, we tell the stories of our disciplines and our institutions, as we want them to be told and not as people outside academia would tell them”. We cannot forget that, if the pandemic is over, the coup failed and the government changed, the parallel Brazil continues to move forward.
An essential reinvention is that of our time. It is not today that we are drowning in it[4]. A study among professors at the distant Boise State University (United States) is noteworthy, probably unknown here, but whose universal results seem to be insinuating. Anthropologist John Ziker found out how his peers spend their days and hours: 30% of their time on administrative activities unrelated to teaching or research and 17% of their business hours in meetings. That was back in 2014.[5]. Ten years later, things may have gotten worse with our remote tools, according to an editorial published in Nature, commenting on Cal Newport's recent book: communication between peers (scientists) has always been essential to science, but digital possibilities have begun to take up too much of a precious, undervalued time: the time to think. The book title is Slow productivity[6]. Yes, we need to reinvent ourselves to have more time to think. And to live together, relearning how to use spaces that need to come back.[7]. And how can we do this? We could, for example, reinvent, at least partially, the university as “organized anarchy”[8], after all, the transition from organized anarchy to a “tightly coupled system” of “new managerialism” brought about the classification, indexing, evaluation and accounting of activities that were emerging or already being 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. And this takes up a lot of our time to think about civilization. To invent and reinvent civilization we should also reinvent our autonomy, since much of our time has been used to meet the demands of profit from agents who care little about the real protagonism and relevance of the university. I will stop here. There would be more to “retrospect”, but this text is beginning to seem like a letter to Santa Claus. Merry Christmas to all.
The content of this text does not necessarily reflect the official position of Unicamp..
[1] https://unicamp.br/unicamp/ju/artigos/peter-schulz/ao-passar-por-um-acesso-ao-campus/
[2] https://unicamp.br/unicamp/ju/artigos/peter-schulz/quarta-e-quinta-missoes-da-universidade/
[3] https://jornal.unicamp.br/artigo/2024/08/12/peter-schulz/o-ocaso-do-academico-publico/
[4] https://unicamp.br/unicamp/ju/artigos/peter-schulz/o-tempo-do-homo-academicus/
[5] New address for the article cited in my column: https://www.boisestate.edu/bluereview/faculty-time-allocation/
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02381-x.pdf
[7] https://unicamp.br/unicamp/ju/artigos/peter-schulz/comunicacao-da-universidade-e-cantinas/
[8] https://jornal.unicamp.br/artigo/2024/05/22/peter-schulz/relembrando-a-anarquia-organizada/
