UNIVERSIDADE E DEMOCRACIA: PROPOSIÇÕES PARA UMA PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO CRÍTICA

Abstract

The University and, in particular, its graduate programs, has been submitted to approaches not rarely limited to treating aspects and questions related to its growth. This is well adjusted to the evaluation system that has been institutionalized, which is essentially devoted to measuring what s produced, being therefore little or not worried with inquiring about the meanings and purposes of such production. The diagnoses of the teaching and of the research done in graduate programs in Geography have also been kept on this same level, staying, consequently, very distant from being an accurate analysis of the possibilities and impossibilities that are posed for the knowledge of the world made possible by Geography. In this text the author examines the process of modernization of the brazilian universities articulated to the process of modernization of the brazilian society itself. This makes possible for him to clarify the existing contradictions between the bureaucratization (that invades, colonizes and corrodes the universities), the configuration of education (in particular of superior education) as a sector of entrepreneurial actuation and its successes and failures in meeting the requirements of professional formation demanded by the job markets, besides the obstacles that are posed, in this context, for the developing of science and technology. Rigorously these are contradictions that increasingly remove the University of its substance: to think the not yet thought. The author concludes that for the universities to place themselves at the level required by the demands of the democratic acting, of the democratic institution of society, it is inescapable that they reorient research in this sense, that is, having as purpose to mark the way for the concretization of the historical possibilities inscribed in the movement of society.