Democracy in the Education Sector
The Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988 enshrined as a principle the “didactic, scientific, administrative, financial and property management autonomy” of universities. This landmark provision recognizes universities as spaces for the exercise of academic freedom without governmental intrusion into a given university’s facilities, budget, and administrative organization.
​
In federal universities, the university president (reitor) is selected by an electoral board, formed within the highest university administrative body, from a list of three candidates (lista tríplice). Despite the constitutional provision securing university autonomy, the appointment of rector or president in effect is still nominally made by the President of the Republic—an uncontested legacy of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985). In order to deepen the democratic governance of federal universities, administrative boards have designed elaborate consultation systems within the university community so that the candidate list best represents community aspirations. Some of these consultations, for example, are organized according to a parity model, in which votes of each of the three segments (faculty, students and technical-administrative staff) carry one-third of the weight in the elections. This mechanism is also an attempt to overcome the bias towards faculty within administrative and electoral boards, where legally the majority of the members (at least 70%) are professors. The parity model is one of several.
​
Recent guidelines from Bolsonaro’s federal transition team have now made illegal any consultation by the university community prior to the election board’s nomination. This is already a breach of the principle of university autonomy. Added to this are recent insinuations that the Bolsonaro government may not respect the choice of the first names on the candidate lists.
​
The effects of these new guidelines are already being felt, as in the case of UNIRIO, one of the the federal universities in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where the electoral board formed a list in which the first candidate has not been submitted to the university community for review. And at the National Institute of Deaf Education (INES), another federal institution in Rio, Bolsonaro’s administration appointed the second name on the candidate list as director, ignoring the decision of the community.
​
We defend the principle of university autonomy as a precondition for academic freedom, especially as concerns the autonomous appointment of university administrators. University governance must be carried out through autonomous processes be they direct elections, parity voting, or other strategies selected by a given university’s community.