Experts defend the establishment of world-class universities

At the opening session of the FAPESP event held to discuss the directions of higher education, speakers say that Brazil needs a plan to support and encourage certain universities to achieve international excellence in research.

By Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP – Although excellence in education should be a goal for all Brazilian universities, quite a few of the country’s institutions are now ready to improve quality and become world-class scientific research institutions. To achieve this outcome, certain universities need to receive differentiated investments to develop ambitious institutional plans, said experts during the opening session of the Excellence in Higher Education symposium.

The event, held in January, was sponsored by FAPESP in partnership with the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and was designed to discuss what it is that determines excellence in higher education in Brazil and formulate recommendations that can inform public policy.

Differentiating the educational system by recognizing institutions with a vocation for developing international-level research has been the aim of the ABC for at least a decade since its publication of the report “Subsidies for Higher Education Reform”, noted Hernan Chaimovich, vice-president of the ABC and special advisor to the office of the scientific director of FAPESP.

“Differentiation does not mean that one part of the system is better or worse than the other. But a system in which all the parts are the same does not usually work. A system is characterized by the excellence of all of its parts, even though each may have a distinctive function,” explained Chaimovich.

For Helen Nader, president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), the weight of the science produced by each university is a relevant factor and, therefore, the investment cannot be the same for all institutions.

“For its science to be cutting-edge, Brazil needs to invest much more than it does now. Society needs to decide the fields in which to invest heavily as well as the institutions that are best qualified to follow the path of internationalization. Each one should be qualified and have a field of excellence. Only then will Brazil become capable of being a leader in international science and not just a follower,” she stated.

International-level courses

According to Jorge Guimarães, president of the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES), one possible criterion for selecting the institutions suited to achieve world-class status is the percentage of graduate courses that have earned a grade of 6 or 7 – considered excellent at the international level – in the Triennial Evaluation of Graduate Programs.

“We have USP [University of São Paulo] in front, with 89 courses [ranked 6 and 7], followed by a group consisting of UFRJ [Federal University of Rio de Janeiro], UFMG [Federal University of Minas Gerais], Unicamp [University of Campinas] and UFRGS [Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul], which have around 30. All of these have about 40% of their courses ranked 6 and 7. After that, the numbers go down. If we consider only those ranked 7, the situation is even more dramatic,” he said.

In commenting on the challenges institutions will face on the path to developing world-class research, Guimarães underscored the need for greater autonomy and efficient systems of governance, internationalization of education and research operations (which includes increasing the number of international collaborations implemented, greater mobility of students and researchers, increasing the number of regular courses offered in other languages, attracting foreign students and researchers and increasing the number of publications with international partners), a decrease in the number of hours students spend in the classroom, and investments in student housing on campus.

“The students in the Science Without Borders program are showing us the importance of spending fewer than 14 hours a week in the classroom, conducting numerous experiments, having time to study alone and spending time with colleagues from all over the world in campus housing,” stated the CAPES president.

In addressing the challenges involved in achieving excellence in research, FAPESP Scientific Director Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz commented that although Brazilian scientific production has increased significantly in recent years, the impact of articles published continues to be below the world average – behind countries such as Argentina, Spain, China and South Korea.

“What are we doing wrong? At some point, the system seems to have taken a detour and tried to duplicate quantity instead of quality,” Brito Cruz said.

According to Brito Cruz, the exception is the field of physics, where articles with involvement by Brazilian authors have an impact that is nearly 60% higher than the world average. “The field of physics has benefited from international cooperation on topics of global interest, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the Pierre Auger Project and other projects concerning elementary particles,” he said.

Brito Cruz points to four strategies that could reverse the downward trend observed in the Brazilian science impact curves. The first involves safeguarding researcher time away from bureaucratic activities such as project management, which universities should ensure by offering support offices analogous to the Grant Management Offices found in foreign universities.

He also emphasizes the need to develop more international cooperation, increase the visibility and impact of Brazilian scientific journals and encourage quality and merit in the processes of funding selection and promoting professors. “This means, for example, that when it comes time to evaluate the scientific production of a researcher, more value is given to the number of citations received by the article than to the impact factor of the journal in which the article is published,” he said.

Renato Pedrosa from the Center for Advanced Studies (CEAv) at the University of Campinas (Unicamp) defended the need for autonomy so that institutions could internally determine how to hire and promote faculty as well as organize academic careers.

To Pedrosa, institutions should not be tied to the public sector organization model but should instead be able to free themselves, when necessary, of educational and research activities to establish different academic career models according to the vocation of each institution.

“It’s possible to have a large system in which universities have different missions yet still continue to be universities. We just have one model, and the MEC [Ministry of Education] requires that everyone someday become an USP or UFMG or UFRJ. But that’s just not possible for every Brazilian university. Nowhere in the world does this happen,” Pedrosa stated.

Agreement between FAPESP and CAPES

During the symposium’s opening ceremony, FAPESP President Celso Lafer announced the signing of an agreement between the São Paulo foundation and CAPES for a program to award master’s and doctoral scholarships in traditional graduate programs and post-doctoral fellowships at public and non-profit private institutions of higher education in the state of São Paulo.

“The agreement represents a joining together of resources and vision regarding the training of highly qualified people to generate knowledge, without which there would be no excellence in higher education. I’m convinced that knowledge is a critical variable in the ability of Brazilian society to face its challenges, and excellence in higher education is an essential part of this process,” Lafer said.

Also during the opening session, Eduardo Moacyr Krieger, FAPESP vice-president, underscored the institution’s concern about excellence on the part of Brazilian universities. “Nearly 80% of research conducted in the state of São Paulo and in Brazil as a whole is performed at universities. Therefore, we are anxious to provide the proper environment for this. I hope that the outcome of this symposium adds to those voices that are calling for change in the structure of Brazilian universities,” he said.