Opinion – I am Science: Bolsonaro will close our universities

While the spotlight is all on the country’s elections, the policy of successive budget cuts adopted by President Jair Bolsonaro continues to wreak havoc on education. It is no longer a “crisis in education as a project”, as Darcy defined it, we are in a more advanced stage of destruction, which can be a terminal moment of this continued crisis, with the risk of extinction of the public higher education system, of and research in Brazil, should the current president be re-elected.

While the Bolsonarista campaign carried out mass shootings of lying messages on the eve of the election, Decree No. federal universities – known to be opponents of the current government. This amount represents 11.4% of the current allocation of discretionary expenses of the agency and its related units, destined to basic services of functioning of the institutions. In addition, to comply with the decree, after deliberation by the Governance Committee for Budgetary and Financial Management (CGGOF), a reversal of the movement and commitment limits of the MEC Budget Units was carried out, equivalent to 5.8% of the current allocation of expenses discretion of each institution. In other words, they removed funds from the universities’ accounts in order to comply with the decree – if this happened to a citizen’s account, we could call it theft.

Universities plan and execute contracts, works and services, based on the annual budget approved by Congress. This type of unilateral blocking action, without prior negotiation of terms and recomposition, up to the limit of withdrawal of funds into account, will lead universities to break contracts, stop essential works and services, increase debts, cancel activities and even close doors in several campuses. Although the same decree describes the prospect of releasing the limits arrested in December, the damage will have already been done and will affect university students from all regions of the country, in a dangerous and continuous process of terminal dismantling of higher education.

Budget management is not just technical, it is political and has become a war for the destruction of universities, researchers and scientists who have been defined as enemies of this denialist and obscurantist government from day one. There were 5 education ministers, surrounded by scandals and grotesque speeches, whose mission was always to attack the public system: in appointing leaders, in ideological attacks, in budget cuts, in threatening teachers, in halting expansion and even reducing vacancies (the federal system has lost 100,000 students since 2019) etc.

Added to last week’s cut is the Provisional Measure that limited more than 30% of the resources of the FNDCT (National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development) until 2027. This establishes a schedule for limiting movement and commitment of resources to the Ministry of Education (MEC) until November this year.

Federal universities and research institutes have already been suffering cuts, especially in the last 4 years. As the work of SoU_Ciência showed, there are already more than 50% of losses accumulated until 2021 in funding resources and 96% in investment resources. At this rate, 2022 will represent the near stop of universities and research. The graphs below demonstrate the drop in resources allocated to science and federal universities (SIOP, IPEADATA and Treasury Budget Units data, with values ​​corrected for January 2022 by the IPCA).

To understand in detail the disinvestment scenario that the country is going through in the areas of Higher Education, Science and Technology, SoU_Ciência, in partnership with the Serrapilheira Institute, makes available to society the Panel The Financing of Science and Technology in Brazil.

In another panel of SoU_Ciência, we showed extensively how public universities acted in Defense of Life. There we present more than a thousand actions from 40 federal universities during the pandemic and case studies of best practices. The decisive and articulated action of universities and their hospitals with SUS and governments (municipal and state) was able to minimize the size of the disaster of federal management in the pandemic.

What will become of our country without public universities, national production of science and technology? What are the consequences of destroying the public higher education and research system built by our society over a century? Production of knowledge, with autonomy, diversity and sovereignty; training of conscientious citizens and competent professionals; evidence-based public policies with monitoring of results; observatories that accompany the guarantee of rights; innovation agencies in strategic areas for development; business incubators and cooperatives; extension actions with communities, social movements and in vulnerable areas; development of new technologies and national patents; preservation of material and immaterial culture, with collections in all areas of knowledge – these are all actions of our public system of higher education and science. Without him, what will become of us?