Os intelectuais e a reforma da educação superior do governo Lula (2003-2006).

Abstract

The intellectuals and the Reform of Higher Education of the Lula Government (2003-2006) are the object of this thesis, whose objective is to analyze the positions taken by intellectuals linked to the Brazilian Association of Higher Education Maintainers (ABMES) and linked to GT11 - Policy of Higher Education of the National Association of Postgraduate Studies and Research in Education (ANPEd). It is intended, in specific terms: 1) to contextualize the constitution of the working groups that made up the political field during the process of elaborating the versions of the Academic Reform and to expose the main ideas that should guide Higher Education in Brazil; 2) to clarify the strategies of action and the ideas defended by the group linked to ABMES, notably its intervention in the National Forum of Free Initiative in Education and in the “Estudos” Magazine; 3) to indicate the positions taken by ANPEd WG 11 agents in relation to the MEC's proposition and the ideas defended by ABMES. This delineation is limited to the following problem: how did the process of the Higher Education Reform promoted under the leadership of the Ministry of Education (MEC) take place, as well as how did the intellectuals linked to the two institutional spaces take a position. This research expands the scope of existing studies, notably by approaching the disputes between the groups that defended a public higher education and those that sought the insertion of the private sector in the context of the Higher Education Reform, under the light of the theory of the fields from Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, this thesis underlined the political intervention of the intellectuals, that is, their positions in relation to the issue of Higher Education. Although the members of the two groups expressed themselves in the name of an expertise on the fundamental problems of Higher Education, they promoted actions from their institutional and ideological positions. On the one hand, the group linked to the private sector criticized MEC's actions in the name of what it said was the most up-to-date concept of higher education, however, it failed to mention its direct links to ABMES and indirect links to the National Confederation of Industry, that is, omitted their own subordination to outside forces (heteronomy). On the other hand, the group of GT11 criticized the actions of the MEC, as well as the intellectuals linked to private institutions of higher education, without ceasing to use the symbolic dimension of the academic world, to claim the right and prerogative to say what would be higher education (autonomy). Despite this, the composition of the changes in Higher Education, whether when looking at the different versions of the reform, or when looking at the provisional measures, indicates that economic and political forces, through the co-option of experts, overcame the power of critical intellectuals, whose result is an intense process of privatization of higher education that took shape during the first two decades of the 21st century.