International Scholars Claim Cuts at Brazilian Universities Could Have “Devastating Effect”

By Harold Emert

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Nine thousand Academics from such esteemed universities as Harvard, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne, as well as from universities in Canada, Australia, Germany, Israel, Greece, and the Netherlands, are protesting against cuts of 30 percent of Brazil’s Federal University budgets announced last week by Brazil’s Ministry of Education.

In an open letter, written by two Harvard graduate students, they claim that Brazil’s plan to disinvest in philosophy and sociology at public universities could have “a devastating effect on Brazil’s democracy.”

Brazilian-born Sergio Tenenbaum, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, says: “Such attacks on universities are attacks on a society’s capacity for self-understanding and critical thinking, and thus their capacity for improving and maintaining its democratic institutions.”

The Harvard Crimson student newspaper reports that the total so far is 800 worldwide institutions which have signed the letter including 9000 students and scholars from 83 Harvard faculty and graduate departments.

“This policy is not only an attack on education but on Brazilian democracy in a nation which is the fourth largest democracy in the world. We are quickly walking toward Brazil becoming one of the largest authoritarian regimes,” says Derrick S. Baum, a Ph.D. student in Harvard’ s Sociology department who co-drafted the letter and was raised in Brazil.

Harvard Sociology Professor Jocelyn Viterna, who signed the letter, says: “This is something that we regularly see when politicians begin to show more dictatorial tendencies, what they do is crack down on intellectual thought.”