UNIVERSITY, UNION AND TEACHING WORK: discontinuities 1960-2024

Abstract

The article argues that Brazilian federal universities underwent three contexts of marked changes, characterized as discontinuities, between 1960 and 2024. The military-corporate coup, through the preventive counter-revolution, prevented the university reform movement that was gaining momentum between 1960 and 1964 and established the so-called conservative modernization model that altered the university profoundly. In the context of the structural crisis, in the second half of the 1970s, the creation of the Teachers’ Associations and, later, the National Association of Higher Education Teachers, succeeded in hindering the intended fragmentation of universities as centers of excellence and educational institutions, by winning national careers, university autonomy and free tuition at official establishments. Finally, the policies of austerity and budget restraint that have deepened since 2015 are contributing to the direct presence of capital in universities. The article concludes that the struggles cannot be restricted to the education sector, because without preventing the deepening of austerity and the shrinking of the nonmarket public, the scenario for the Federal Universities does not match the relevance of these institutions for overcoming the great problems of the peoples.