Academic Freedom and Brazilian Public Universities: Upholding Science and Knowledge in the Face of Right-Wing Extremism.

By Sidney Chalhoub

The rise of authoritarian rulers and regimes has been a global phenomenon in the recent past. However diverse the leaders and their respective countries and political cultures, authoritarians share a vocabulary of intolerance and threats. They defend patriarchy, resisting the equality of women, reproductive rights, and the transgression of conventional heterosexual norms. They embrace racist mystifications, disrespecting the basic human rights of migrants and other minorities. They deploy the language of citizenship and illegal immigration to mask prejudice and discrimination against vulnerable social groups. They attack the professional media, universities, and other institutions of knowledge and learning, fostering climate-change skepticism, vaccination fearmongering, and historical revisionism. Authoritarian rulers share an antidemocratic repertoire, consisting of a rhetorical condemnation of traditional politics, the weakening of the public sphere for the benefit of personal allegiances, the attack on workers’ rights, the dismantling of public policies targeting social inequality or just to ameliorate the suffering resulting from abject poverty. Although some authoritarian rulers have reached power through democratic elections – however tarnished these elections may have been by foul play in social media, schemes to suppress some minorities’ voting rights, lawfare against progressive candidates, and other forms of corruption-- ours is also an age of constitutional coups and other forms of supposedly “legal” maneuvers to grab power and concentrate it in the hands of strongmen, thus compromising democratic checks and balances.

In this context, it is to be expected that universities and scholars in general have been suffering vicious attacks –in the US under Trump, in Erdogan’s Turkey, Orbán’s Hungary, Modi’s India, and, of course, in Brazil under the current government. A main strategy deployed by authoritarian ideologues and politicians is to muddle issues of freedom of speech and academic freedom. Freedom of speech is required for academic freedom to exist, but the two concepts are distinct. Academic freedom concerns the autonomy of an educational and research institution to produce and transmit knowledge unfettered by governmental and other external pressures. It is a democratic imperative and an ideal to be pursued. Academic freedom means rigorous interpretation, presented with the support of theoretical and empirical discourses of proof, constantly under critique by peer researchers, and always subject to revision. Freedom of speech is a more general concept, not equivalent to academic freedom in learning and research institutions. Thus, nobody is entitled to learn creationism in a biology class because there is no scientific evidence for such a claim. Students should not expect teachers to say that there is “scientific controversy” regarding global warming because no actual scientific controversy exists about the subject. The recently-deceased favorite astrologist of the current Brazilian government was not qualified to obtain a teaching position in one of the country’s philosophy departments because he lacked the credentials required by rigorous and well-established norms in place at public research universities. 

One of the main features of authoritarian ideologies is their attacks on historical knowledge while at the same time soliciting history to support their agenda. Recently-inaugurated, the current Brazilian administration assaulted historical knowledge in March 2019, on the occasion of the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the coup d’ État that brought the military to power in 1964. The right-wing extremist and recently elected president instructed government officials to celebrate the event, arguing that the coup had not been a coup, but just a necessary movement to prevent the country from falling into the hands of communists. As he praised torturers and other criminals associated with the regime, victims of the dictatorship and their families protested, inviting journalists and historians to retell the facts of the coup and the regime that followed. The president argued that history departments and Brazilian universities in general are controlled by “cultural Marxists,” and suggested that the government could mandate changes in the content of standard exams, school curricula, and textbooks, so as to ban references to the military dictatorship and other undesirable subjects, such as “gender ideology.”

Almost four years later, it is important to recognize that the current government failed to tame and control the country’s remarkable public university system. Although it is true that financial restrictions have been compromising several areas of research and have made it more difficult for poor and minority students to proceed with their studies, Brazilian universities held on. Professors and students took to the streets in the first months of the right-wing administration. Constitutional provisions protected the jobs of professors and staff and guaranteed autonomy in regard to research and teaching. In sum, academic freedom prevailed over the demagoguery associated with freedom of speech. Last but not least, affirmative action policies continue to allow for members of underprivileged sectors of Brazilian society to be admitted to public universities, rooting these institutions firmly as belonging to the people and ready to be expanded and further strengthened beginning in 2023.

Sidney Chalhoub is David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.