The political geoeconomics
of knowledge and the challenges facing the internationalisation of graduate studies
Geoeconomia
política do conhecimento e os desafios para a
internacionalização da pós-graduação
Roberto LEHER*
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5063-8753
Maria Rosimary Soares dos
SANTOS**
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5886-8003
Introduction
|
I |
n spaces designated for the development of knowledge,
xenophobia and chauvinist nationalism have no place. One of the first
historical experiments in the dissemination of geoeconomic and political knowledge,
the library and museum complex of Alexandria (C.3 BC), would not have been
possible without bringing together the most brilliant minds of the time,
regardless of their nationality; nor can that complex be separated from its
economic and political position: Alexandria was the granary for much of the world,
an economic force that arose from the territorial expansion under Alexander. Today,
the political geoeconomics of knowledge can be summarised as follows: that cultural,
scientific, and technological influence is related to the country’s position in
the global power system of capital-imperialism (Fontes, 2010).
The most ambitious and grandiose cultural project ever
forged, foresaw practices that have shaped the modern concept of the
university. The Museum of Alexandria “envisaged attracting the best scientists and
writers of the time to that lonely place on the edge of nowhere”. In the
imaginative words of Irene Vallejo (2022, p. 45), “The library opened itself up
to the vastness of the outside world. It included the most important works in
other languages, translated into Greek”. For this, it was necessary to assemble
a community of wise men, “Sages were recruited from each people who, in
addition to being masters of their own language, knew Greek perfectly” (Vallejo,
2022, p. 41). Knowledge from other peoples was organised and systematised, encompassing
works from different time periods, cuneiform texts were translated, translating
Babylonian traditions into Greek, and treatises on India were written.
In charge of organising the library, and based on the
contributions of Aristotle, Demetrius
of Phalerum created
the basis of the modern book classification system, dedicating his life to the
“[...] effort to unite scattered pieces of the universe and form a whole
endowed with meaning. A harmonious architecture in the face of chaos [...]. A
refuge where we protect everything we fear to forget. The memory of the world”
(Vallejo, 2022, p. 49). The creation of the library was an exercise of
hegemony following the impressive and violent Alexandrian military campaign,
which had allowed the expansion of Greece’s zone of influence into new regions
of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
None of this is foreign to the notions of globalisation,
imperialism, and soft power. With its military campaigns Alexandria emerged as a
symbolic nucleus of power, both for its pivotal economic influence and the
magnitude of its cultural politics. The Museum of Alexandria led by Ptolemy,
“[...] became one of the most ambitious institutions of Hellenism, a primitive
version of our research centres, universities and laboratories of ideas” (Vallejo,
2022, p. 56).
This in no way negates the importance of the forms of
institutional engagement of any given university, or national efforts in
science and technology. However, their effectiveness depends on confronting the
determinants of reflex modernisation (Ribeiro, 1969) and cultural heteronomy (Fernandes,
2008) that parameterise the so-called world-class universities. Global
asymmetries are perpetuated by rankings, metrics and profiles that feed into
heteronomy. As in Perrault’s Cinderella, only a foot of the right size can fit
the glass slipper. The predominant indicators are not consistent with the
characteristics and challenges of Latin American universities.
1 Political geoeconomics of knowledge
Twenty-five Centuries have passed since Alexandria’s apogee.
Since then, the centre of gravity of world power has shifted several times. European
universities were established, preserving similarities with the grandiose
Alexandrian project, such as in their efforts to bring together people devoted
to knowledge into a single community, and in their openness, in different ways,
to interactions with other peoples and institutions, through the mobility of
scientists, professors and students, in the setting up of libraries open to the
world, and through the translation of reference works.
Universities are numbered among those rare social
institutions that have survived for over a thousand years. They find their
strength in the production of knowledge and in processes of teaching and
learning that are often at odds with established powers. From the beginning of
the industrial revolution, institutions in countries with greater manufacturing
strength and with greater primitive accumulation of capital established close
links with the emerging bourgeois class. From the turn of the 19th century,
they became increasingly intertwined with the contingencies and specificities
of bourgeois revolutions. It is impossible to ignore the significance of the
creation of the Grandes Écoles and the Napoleonic reform of French universities
in facilitating the entry of, the then agrarian, France into the dynamics of
the industrial revolution. The vitality of the great American universities is related
to the shift of world power to the USA. Likewise, the recent Chinese scientific
and technological leap is inseparable from China’s geoeconomic and political position
within the global power system.
An examination of the precise strength of the
countries and universities leading the political geoeconomics of knowledge
corroborates the hypothesis that cultural, scientific, and technological
influence has strong links with the particularities of their bourgeois
revolutions and, in the case of the USSR and China, of their socialist revolutions.
The concept of the university autonomy of the Napoleonic institutions has
different characteristics than those conceived by Humboldt at the University of
Berlin; The, relatively late, American research
universities, although influenced by Berlin, soon took on different features
due to the growing influence of business and military investments. In the last
century, the USA received many highly important individuals forced to leave
Germany. By 1932, Germany had won 33 of the 100 Nobel Prizes in science. Among
those who had to leave the country, the physicists Albert Einstein, Erwin
Schrödinger and Max Born, and the biochemist Hans Krebs, stand out. But there
is another darker side: thousands of scientists and technicians who played important
roles under Nazism, particularly in the military industry complex, but also in
human experiments, also relocated to the US at the end of the war[1].
The political geoeconomics of knowledge determines
true centres of attraction, to which the bulk of scientific and technological
production then gravitates. The US is the greatest scientific and technological
power, the greatest centre for attracting ‘brains’ and raising funds through
student fees; China is the main emerging power, it has taken the lead in
sensitive technological areas and has implemented an aggressive policy of
training new scientists in the principal centres and laboratories across the
world to achieve even greater levels of technological sovereignty; Germany,
Great Britain and France continue to be scientific and technological powers in
several strategic industrial areas. Although polycentric, these new Alexandrias
are undergoing accelerated relocation. Latin America and Africa are not at the
dynamic centre of this movement.
1.1
USA, Science, technology,
and global power
One of the main indicators of a country’s power in the
processes of scientific, technological and innovation knowledge is the number
of relevant patents. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS), established in 1994 by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), embodies
the most comprehensive and restrictive regulation of intellectual property. Just
when the ideology of globalisation and the knowledge society were in
vogue, an agreement was signed that was extremely favourable for corporations
and countries holding strategic patents, which restricted access to knowledge essential
to humanity for long periods, even in areas considered public, such as the human
genetic code.
The USA is in the world leader in IP5 (Intellectual
Property) patents, which bring together patents registered in the European,
Japanese, Korean, The People’s Republic of China and the US Offices. The US
continues to expand its domain, increasing IP5 patents from 220,245 in 2015 to
269,418 in 2019, with an emphasis on big data, cyber security, life sciences,
digital health, and energy innovation. The same trend is seen in scientific
publications. 2011 saw 476,100 and 2019 saw 538,300, especially in the areas of
energy, artificial intelligence and robotics, nanotechnology, materials, electronics,
and optics. 40% of these publications had foreign co-authorship, a rate higher
than that of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with
34%. The US has 1.43 million active researchers. In 2017, 64% of new Doctorates
were in the areas of science and engineering and 34% were foreigners (Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura, 2021).
After the 2009 and 2012 crises, spending on Science
and Technology (S&T) and Research and Development (R&D) increased
significantly: from 2.68% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2012 to 3.08% in
2019, with an emphasis on the pharmaceutical industry, information technology,
electronics and optics, aerospace, and industrial services. Expenditure on S&T
in the USA grew (in purchasing power parity) from 450 billion US$ in 2010 to
more than 600 billion US$ in 2019. It is necessary to highlight a particularity
that distinguishes the USA. Regarding spending on R&D, most investments are
managed by the manufacturing sector (70%), 22% by the Federal government and
only 3.6% by universities (Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura,
2021). Despite the high percentage of exports of high technology products, this
lost ground to China, falling from 29% in 2008 to 19.1% in 2019. Regarding
Federal expenditures (2018), resources went predominantly to the Department of Defence
($52 billion) and Health ($36.9 billion). The National Science Foundation (NSF),
responsible for funding projects not directly military or related to the productive
sector, received significantly less, US$ 6.3 billion (Organização
das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura,
2021).
Indicators confirm US prominence in global science,
but not as open science. The scale of investments under the control of the manufacturing
sector and the enormous scale of military spending are not consistent with
horizontal and solidary international cooperation. The international agreements
and conventions with the US refer to the university system financed by the NSF,
in which the order of magnitude of resources is smaller and in which many
restrictions to the free circulation of knowledge persist.
1.2
China: changes in global power
Having achieved enormous participation in the world
economy (ranked 2nd for global GDP), China has altered its place in the
global power system, especially regarding higher value-added products. Recently,
the country has assumed spaces within university leadership. It has achieved a university
ranking with worldwide influence (that of Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai)
and boosted the coalition of universities in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa). Its universities stand out in international
studies on strategic technologies, including artificial intelligence, robotics,
biotechnology, energy, nanotechnology, materials, and optoelectronics. These
conquests would not have been possible without the country’s economic,
population, technological and military strength. The priority given to S&T
and R&D development in new energy matrices, to climate change, together
with its emphasis on multilateralism has projected Chinese universities into the
world.
China increased its spending on research from US$ 135
billion in 2008 to more than US$ 440 billion in 2018 (OECD, 2021). Alongside
the USA, it leads the world in scientific publications, increasing 150% in just
six years (644,600 in 2019, 24.5% of total publications) (Organização
das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura,
2021). The two countries are currently responsible for 45.6% of the world’s
scientific publications.
The worldwide distribution of IP5 patents in 2019 is
illustrative: China accounted for 29.3%, the US for 20%, Japan for 18.4%, the
European Union for 14.4%, Korea for 10.4% and the other G-20 countries,
including Brazil, a paltry 0.4%. (Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação,
a Ciência e a Cultura, 2021). China has 1.87 million
researchers, taking its place as a new centre of world scientific power owing
to its training of personnel at a global level, its patents, and the
complexification of its production chains. The force behind the internationalisation
of S&T in China is solidly based on national foundations, unlike countries
that passively follow the modernisation reflex.
1.3 Brazil: doing science against the grain
During the period of import substitution and,
especially, by the provision of the necessary infrastructure for monopoly
capitalism during the business-military dictatorship (1964-1985), Brazil
substantially expanded its technological development in areas such as the
aerospace industry, agronomy, energy, telecommunications, steel, heavy civil
engineering, in the auto parts sector of the automobile industry, segments that
underpinned the vertiginous expansion of postgraduate courses in public
universities. Between 1950 and 1980, Brazil promoted placements into
universities in the USA and Europe to undertake Doctorates in priority areas
for the economy and for the political geoeconomics of knowledge. These
individuals went on to become leaders of postgraduate programmes and the
R&D departments of state-owned enterprises. In the early 1960s, the country
had just under 50 Master’s and Doctoral programmes, by
1985 the total exceeded 1100. In this period, industrialisation also developed
in strategic areas, giving Brazil the industrial leadership of Latin America.
The fragility of the foundations of the country’s
scientific and technological autonomy under dependent capitalism became evident
during the debt crisis of 1982. The Structural Adjustment Programmes of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) paved the way for the
neoliberal system of accumulation. Since then, a process of de-complexification
of production chains and expansion of the commodities sector has been underway.
In 2016, the percentage of high technology products in exports of manufactured
goods was 14.3%, by 2018 it had fallen to 13% (Organização
das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura, 2021).
Currently, the bulk of the country’s exports are products with low or modest
technological content, and this is reflected in spending on research.
The downward trend in investment in R&D by
manufacturing industry is reflected in the drop in the number of service
companies connected with R&D: from 1,682 firms in 2014 to 1,394 firms in
2017. This has been accompanied by a sharp reduction in the number of researchers
and technical leaders involved in industrial R&D: from 105,400 in 2015 to
89,700 in 2017. This explains the low rate of IP5 patents, which remained stagnant
between 2015, with 1211, and 2018, with 1276. The number of academic researchers
continues to grow, but at a low level considering the population: in 2015: 61
thousand; in 2017, 66 thousand (Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura,
2021).
In the last five years, Brazil has experienced a
systemic shrinkage in the areas of S&T and R&D. Brazil reduced its
expenditure in this sector, from US$ 30 billion in 2013 to less than US$ 25
billion in 2018. Federal expenditures fell from US$ 4.23 billion in 2015 to US$
3.17 billion in 2018. Adding all expenditure, companies, higher education and
government, the drop was from US$ 41.3 billion in 2015 to US$ 34.9 in 2017 (Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura, 2021), the year in which the mother
of all austerity measures came into being in the form of Constitutional
Amendment - EC 95/2016. The Bolsonaro government’s culture war further
exacerbated the problem. The budget for the main support for research
infrastructure, the non-reimbursable National Fund for the Development of
Science and Technology (FNDCT), shrank from US$ 600 million in 2014 to a paltry
US$ 115 million in 2021.
Despite the budgetary hardships and the harshness of
the culture war waged by the Bolsonaro government (Leher, 2021), scientific
production in the form of published articles continued to grow: between 2011
and 2019, the total rose from 49,300 to 74,300. These publications have
significant rates of foreign co-authorship (34%), especially with the USA,
United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and France, although, in general, Brazilians
appear as the fourth or fifth contributor (Organização
das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura,
2021).
In the last two decades, progressive Latin American
governments have sought to expand technological integration and cooperation
strategies. There are associations of Latin American universities such as the
Association of Universities of the Montevideo Group, as well as sub-regional
bodies such as the Unesco International Institute for
Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Union of South
American Nations, and the Common Market of the South. They depend, however, on
the correlation of forces of the governments of the region. Many institutions
participate in the international movement in favour of open science, the Budapest
Declaration[2], which serves
as an agent for the strengthening of horizontal policies of international
cooperation. Furthermore, within academia, relevant interactions between
research groups and academic units are under way, some permitting joint
tutorship and double degrees. Regarding the application of knowledge in the
economy and in facing major national problems, cooperation is still embryonic
and, as we address below, the guidelines and metrics of internationalisation are
reproducing the asymmetries of the political geoeconomics of knowledge.
2 Reproduction of asymmetries: rankings
University
rankings establish a hierarchy in the institution’s sphere of influence
and world prestige. Those at the top attract more students with high purchasing
power and performance excellence, prestigious professors, and resources from
national and international public and private agencies. It is through ranking
agencies that the internationalisation of a university institution becomes
known. Among the most prominent are the Times Higher Education (THE), Quacquarelli
Symonds World University Rankings (QS), and the Academic Ranking of
World Universities (ARWU) by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s
Institute of Higher Education. In these, no Brazilian institution is among the
100 best in the world: the USA has 27 in the QS and 38 in THE; the UK has 17 in
the QS and 11 in the THE, China 6 in both rankings.
Only the University of São Paulo (USP) is among the 200 in the QS (115), but
not in the THE. Despite the excellence and relevance of Brazilian public universities,
they do not fully fit the criteria; they are, however, feverishly chasing a
better place in the front ranks. In this pursuit, relevance to national
problems, the history of the institutions, and national political and economic
fluctuations are devalued. One of the corollaries of the ranking’s methodology
is the incorporation of the belief that the place attained by each institution depends
exclusively on intramural efforts and entirely disregards the existence of
broader determinants.
Debates on the subject often ignore the criteria used
for rankings. An example is illustrative: examining the methodology[3] of the Shanghai Ranking
(ARWU) we observe that it considers all universities that have Nobel Prizes,
Fields Medals, Highly Cited Researchers, or articles published in Nature
or Science. More than 2,000 universities are ranked and the top 1,000
are published. The university’s ranking considers the number of students and
professors who received the Nobel and Fields prizes (30% of the final grade).
This means that countries without recent winners are playing for only 70% of
the points. Publication in two journals, Nature, and Science,
make up another 20% of the assessment. So, half of the evaluation consists of
Nobel Prizes, Fields, and citations of articles in two journals. As quality is
comparative, for each indicator the institution with the highest index is given
a score of 100 and the scores of other institutions are calculated as a
percentage of the maximum score. The concentration of Nobel Prizes creates a
strong asymmetry: Oxford (55), Harvard (50), Princeton (49), Johns Hopkins (29)
(to 2019). The calculation methodology exacerbates inequality, it is not enough
to be excellent; it is necessary to attain a high percentage of the indicators
of institutions that already occupy the leadership of the ranking. The
use of the same metric to assess the international influence of whole countries
based on the rankings erases these marked contrasts. The US has 400
Nobel laureates, the UK 138, Germany 111, France 71[4]. Brazil has no laureate and even the Brazilian
Arthur Ávila, who won a Fields medal, is currently a naturalised Frenchman.
Even when considering the criteria in which Brazil is
competitive, in international publications, the focus is on just two journals, Nature
and Science, and does not consider the presence of Brazilian research in,
for example, the agriculture sector, in the humanities, in the social sciences
and in the arts, themes not prioritised by these journals. Furthermore, in an
editorial, the journal Nature urged against using the impact factor as
an evaluation of the articles published in it. In 2004, for example, 89% of
citations referring to their articles were generated by only 25% of their
articles (Gingras, 2016).
As Gingras (2016) points out, bibliometrics are
crucial for the study of the dynamics of science. However, the excessive
measurement of citations has assumed worrying characteristics for science. In
fact, in the neoliberal context, especially in the late 1990s, the instrumental
misuse of bibliometrics ignores the immense diversity of publications across
areas. In the case of the humanities 75% of publications are in book form,
while in physics 80% are in journals; in biomedical and natural sciences the
average number of authors increased from 2 in 1960 to 6 in 2014; the percentage
of publications with more than one author, in 2014, was 95% in biomedicine, 92%
in natural sciences and engineering, 70% in social sciences and 12% in
humanities. Due to the political geoeconomics of knowledge, the network of
collaborations (especially between the first two authors) is basically
concentrated in the G7. The adoption of ranking metrics is a procedure
that is alien to university life.
Furthermore, the main citation measurement agencies
have taken an unequivocal commercial stance. The Institute for Scientific
Information (ISI) was founded in 1959. In 1963, the ISI started to develop
the Science Citation Index (SCI). SCI was acquired in 1993 by Thompson
Reuters achieving revenues of US$ 13 billion. In 2013, Thompson Reuters
acquired Avedas. In 2016, Clarivate Analytics acquired Thompson Reuters
and, in a clear monopoly process, purchased, in 2021, for US$ 5.3 billion,
ProQuest, until then a competitor of Web of Science (which had been acquired in
2017 by Clarivate). The bulk of scientific classification and records are under
unequivocal monopoly control.
3 Internationalisation of the Plano Nacional de Pós-Graduação and Student Mobility
The institutionalisation of graduate studies (Pós-Graduação
(PG)) in Brazil was one of the first acts of the business-military dictatorship,
by means of Parecer nº 977/65. It made no quibbles about its intentions: to
build a system in the image and likeness of the US system, which it considered
an exemplar. The 1st National Postgraduate Plan (Plano Nacional de Pós-Graduação (PNPG)) (Brasil,
1975), presented in July 1975, sought to operationalise the objectives set out
by the university reform of 1968, referenced in the reflex modernisation
referred to by Darcy Ribeiro (1969). The 2nd (1982-1985) and 3rd PNPGs
(1986-1989) advanced the institutionalisation of graduate studies in the
country. In the 2nd Plan, the word exchange appears only once stating
that “[...] original research is not the only mechanism for training and improvement
in teaching [...]” (Brasil, 1982, p. 179), but rather,
the “[...] permanent updating through monitoring of the most recent specialised
publications and participation in congresses, seminars, meetings and exchanges
[...]” (Brasil, 1982, p. 179) and by evaluation.
The global and national economic crisis of the 1980s imposed
a reordering of the production bases of dependent capitalist countries, with
repercussions for S&T producing institutions. Since then, PNPGs have
included proposals such as, the defence of the diversification of funding
sources and, greater flexibility in course structures. They advocate the “[...]
strengthening of international technical cooperation programmes intended to
facilitate the exchange of teachers and researchers with their peers from
institutions abroad [...]” (Brasil, 1986, p. 206).
In the 3rd PNPG, internationalisation was not related
to economic and social development projects, nor to policies that strengthened
the country’s scientific and technological sovereignty. In a peculiar way,
internationalisation came to be viewed as a key and definitive variable for the
prestige of the researcher, the group, the centre, or the institution, normally
measured by ‘private’ indicators as discussed in the previous section.
Internationalisation gained greater centrality and became
part of the solid core of the 2005-2010 and 2011-2020 PNPGs. The latter states
that, universities and their graduate programmes should be “[...] made
responsible for their international insertion or for their ability to offer
courses of international standard” (Brasil, 2010, p.
128). Along the same line, the classification of programmes at levels of
excellence 6 and 7 will have as their “[...] evaluation parameters, the
comparison with international programmes considered as reference” (Souza,
2018, p. 97). The examination of internationalisation and international
cooperation in chapter 11 of the Plan associates the consolidation of graduate
studies “[...] with the growth of Brazilian science, expressed above all by the
progress in scientific production, measured by the publication of articles in
journals with internationally indexed circulation” (Brasil,
2010, p. 223). The focus on publication indicators led CAPES (A Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento
de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Higher Education Personnel Improvement Coordination)) to advocate that, in terms of
average citations of scientific articles, Brazil is ahead of other BRICS
countries (Brasil, 2010) (which is true in specific
areas, such as studies of arboviruses, Zika, for example, and in certain areas
of agricultural), whilst ignoring the complexity of the political geoeconomics of
knowledge: while Brazil has become an exporter of raw commodities to
China, China exports high value-added products to Brazil.
As internationalisation in the PNPGs does not have
organic links with actions related to the political geoeconomics of knowledge.
The evaluation criteria focus on part of the problem but hide the most relevant
and pivotal issues. The student mobility agenda, for example, emphasises the
entry and exit flows, institutions, areas and countries, variables that shed
light on part of the problem, but in a decontextualised way vis-à-vis the political
geoeconomics. Due to the end of free studies (or at least the abrupt increase
in fees) and the student debt crisis, many American and British universities,
for example, have a professionalised policy for attracting foreign students, in
general accompanied by strong marketing. Without these students,
institutions could not even afford the payroll of their professors, technicians,
and administrators. In countries that guarantee free study, the commercial
variable of mobility is irrelevant. More important is the existence of measures
of horizontal reciprocity and connections between research groups and
undergraduate and post-graduate programmes; co-supervision, reciprocal
recognition of degrees and double degrees; and stimuli to steer students toward
strategic areas that need consolidating in the country sending the students,
such as China.
One of the main measures in favour of internationalisation
during the term of the 2011-2020 PNPG was Edital (Public Notice) No.
41/2017 that established the Institutional Internationalisation Programme – CAPES
PrInt, with the objective of selecting “Institutional Projects for the Internationalisation
of Higher-Level Institutions or Research Institutes”. Of the 82 institutions
that were approved by documentary evaluation and went through the analysis of
merit and ranking of proposals, only 36 obtained final approval, predominantly
federal universities in the Southeast and South, only four state universities (the
three in the state of São Paulo and the State University of Rio de Janeiro),
and the Pontifical Catholic Universities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro
received final approval. Most institutions are from the Southeast-South (Brasil, 2017), demonstrating the absence of national
objectives. Since the launch of CAPES-PrInt, it has been expressly recommended
that the programme aim at learning in more advanced centres, so countries in
Latin America, Africa, South Asia, or European countries such as Portugal and
Spain would not, therefore, be well evaluated. These guidelines disregard the
fact that internationalisation cannot ignore the centrality of national
problems and, of people’s problems at the global level, such as the challenges
of climate change, sovereignty, food security, new pandemics, overcoming racism
and other forms of discrimination, and global social inequality.
It is evident that the final conclusions and
recommendations of the 2011-2020 PNPG (BRASIL, 2010) were not implemented following
the passing of EC 95/2016. Under the Bolsonaro government, budget cuts for
universities and science were motivated by the cultural war, aiming to
extirpate the scientific field from Brazil (Leher, 2021).
According to Unesco (2022),
in 2019 more than 6 million students were enrolled in higher education outside
their country of citizenship. The USA, Australia, UK, Germany, Russia, Canada,
and France together hosted over 50% of all international students globally, with
a third of all international students studying in just three English-speaking
destinations: the USA, Australia and the UK United. Asian students accounted
for more than 50% of international students. The largest number of students
came from China, India, and South Korea. In 2019, Brazil received 21,803 higher
education students – but not as fee paying students, as most, from Africa and
Latin America, were enrolled in public institutions – and sent 81,719 abroad. For Brazil,
the net flow of international students in 2019 was -59,916 (Organização
das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura, 2022).
Conclusion –
Dialogical internationalisation to overcome cultural heteronomy
As most of
the research in Brazilian universities occurs through direct a connection with
postgraduate courses, it is inevitable that the theme of internationalisation
is centralised there. Not by chance, the PNPG has been giving increasing weight
to internationalisation and, currently, only programmes with expressed indicators
of internationalisation can attain Capes grades 6 and 7.
The main
problem with this increasing emphasis on internationalisation indicators is the
decontextualisation of the theme and its metrics. The disregard of political geoeconomics
of knowledge is at the root of the problem, as it ignores the robust evidence
that the ascendence of countries and their university and scientific
institutions worldwide depends on strategies that were either inscribed in
bourgeois revolutions – as in the classic cases of France, Germany, USA and
Korea –, or in the midst of socialist revolutions with their peculiarities, as
in the USSR and, more recently, China. Without self-impelled economic and
social development policies, these countries would not have moved within the
system of imperialist states and so would not have been able to leverage their
university institutions, projecting them onto the world stage.
The link
between knowledge centres and political geoeconomics has been recognised at
least since the heyday of the Alexandria library and museum, an experiment in which
the effort to develop knowledge institutions linked to geoeconomic and
political repositioning strategies stands out. Indeed, political geoeconomics
makes it possible to identify differences in the scale of the scientific and
technological base between countries that can only be overcome by transforming
productive forces and production relations by incorporating knowledge into
production chains. This requires large budgets for S&T, profound restructuring
of universities and, in the case of the manufacturing sector, strong state
inducements, including non-reimbursable resources for strategic areas (energy, and
the industrial complexes of health, agroecology, transportation, internet
security, etc.).
The main
thrust of this text is that the internationalisation of universities is
inseparable from bourgeois revolutions and any future projects undertaken by power
blocs. To ignore these mediations is to misunderstand the system of states that
forms current imperialism. There is no doubt that the ranking indicators
are congruent with the practices already established in the hegemonic core
countries, notably the USA, which comfortably leads the world university
hierarchy. The main criteria of the rankings are in accordance with the
centripetal forces that position the USA within the system of states.
This
hierarchy is being challenged by China, which has established technological innovation
in strategic areas as a national project. This constitutes a national policy
for the training of highly qualified personnel in public universities in a coordinated
way, by sending staff to universities around the world, developing reverse
engineering, promoting high technology industries, and capitalising on its
research centres and universities. Economic strength underpins the country,
which now leads important coalitions such as the BRICS universities and plays a
leading role in coalitions such as the International Panel on Climate Change.
Brazilian
experiments have virtuous ties with international academic relations, but these
are fragile due to the heteronomous bases of such interactions. Until the
1960s, the bulk of advanced research were sponsored by US foundations. Then, during
the dictatorship, it was driven by the imperatives of monopoly capitalism.
After the debt crisis of 1982, Brazil suffered a pronounced de-complexification
of its production chains. So, rather than associating postgraduate
internationalisation with these problematic rankings, a successful
internationalisation strategy should rather be anchored in national projects,
in the strengthening of the S&T system, and in the centrality of
universities and S&T institutions. It is those countries that guarantee
institutions a proper infrastructure, autonomy, real dedication, attractive careers,
and student assistance that can then serve as a platform for horizontal and
dialogic interaction with other countries, institutions, and areas of
knowledge. The model of islands of excellence anchored in fragile institutions
ignores that stagnation cannot be sustained for long.
The
fundamental assumption is a commitment to overcoming the problems and
challenges of humanity, highlighting the pertinence of international
collaboration as part of a nation’s effort - and State policies - in favour of
sovereignty and international solidarity in the face of a world system which reproduces
inequalities and asymmetries, corrodes the sovereignty of peoples, and feeds
back the foundations of dependent capitalism and cultural heteronomy.
It is
crucial that policies to encourage internationalisation have defined lines
capable of strengthening the particularities of S&T and R&D. The provision
of resources and the promotion of the production sectors (R&D) must be
included in industrial policies, and in dialogue with universities. State resources
and the means to promote science, technology, culture, and art cannot, however,
be consumed by the logic of R&D. Such movements are negative for universities
that may consequently be weakened in their research functions, their teaching
and learning processes, and their commitment to the challenges of peoples and
to the logical and epistemological problems of contemporary science whilst, at
the same time, being equally negative for the R&D that should be embedded
in the strategies for the production of commodities.
Commitment
to humanity’s dilemmas requires actions that permit the modification of the
correlation of forces in the political geoeconomics of knowledge. The sharing
of laboratories and the mobility of students, professors, technicians, and
administrators between countries willing to strengthen horizontal and
dialogical interaction is a political movement that has roots in the
experiences of peoples. Unesco made efforts to be a
space for plans for educational, cultural, and scientific cooperation, but the interaction
of forces prevented its effectiveness from the 1970s onwards. The New World
Economic Order movement also advocated the sharing of knowledge between
peoples, an initiative that was drastically interrupted with the TRIP-WTO
agreement.
The world
is faced with extraordinary opportunities. There is no longer any doubt that
without global efforts it will be impossible to confront pandemics, climate
change, hunger and the social inequality that nourishes the spectre of fascism
in the 21st century. Brazilian universities are prepared and eager for new
internationalisation practices that make real a new political geoeconomics of
knowledge based on the value that knowledge committed to wellbeing cannot be
imprisoned by the commodification and militarisation of science.
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____________________________________________________________________________________________
Roberto LEHER
Worked on the conception and design of the article.
Titular Professor at the Faculty of Education and of the
Graduate Programme in Education at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
(Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) on the theme of State, Work and Social
Movements. Doctorate in Education from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) (University
of São Paulo) (1998). Research developer in public policies in education. Works
in the Coletivo de Estudos em Marxismo e Educaçao (COLEMARX) (Collective of
Studies in Marxism and Education). Researcher for the Conselho Nacional
de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) (National
Council for Scientific and Technological Development), “Cientista de Nosso Estado” with the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) (Research Support Foundation of the State of Rio de Janeiro) and collaborator at the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (Florestan Fernandes
National School). Rector of the Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro (July 2015 to July 2019).
Maria Rosimary Soares dos SANTOS Worked on data analysis and interpretation.
Holds a degree in Social Sciences from the Universidade
Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) (Federal University of Minas Gerais) (1992), a Master’s
degree in Political Science from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
(1996), a Doctorate in Education from the Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de
Mesquita Filho (UNESP) (São Paulo State University) (2007) with a
postdoctoral degree at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM) (National
University of General San Martín) - Argentina and at the Universidade Federal
do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) (2010) and the
Universidade Federal de Pará (UFPA) (Federal University of Pará)
(2018-2019). Currently Associate Professor at the Federal University of Minas
Gerais. Coordinator of the theme of Public Policies in Education of the Graduate
Programme in Education - Knowledge and Social Inclusion (08/2019 to 08/2021).
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