Regulamentação da precarização da educação superior no Brasil: produtivismo acadêmico e intensificação do trabalho docente

Abstract

This thesis seeks to analyze the precariousness of federal higher education, from the legal provisions of legal regulation, whose determinations impact the relationships and collective work processes of teaching staff at the university, causing a movement of intensification and reorganization of work that meet the interests capital, based on academic productivism. Such trends are thought from the neoliberal rationality, considering that the university is crossed by societal transformations, which are expressed through the creation of privatization mechanisms and establishment of links with the productive sector, as a way of obtaining resources, given the reduction of financial investments for education. For the development of this work, we used the dialectical materialist method, in which the perspective of totality is used, based on the understanding that theory and method are conceived as part of a whole, which are not disassociated. In the framework of the work methodology, theoretical-bibliographic research and documental research were adopted (through analysis of higher education legislation; reports from international organizations; and survey of social indicators). The time frame adopted was from 2007 to 2017, having as a milestone, the year of implementation of the Programa de Apoio a Planos de Reestruturação e Expansão das Universidades Federais (REUNI), which is crossed by disputes of antagonistic projects of classes, demarcating a contradictory process expansion, which allows access to segments of the working classes that previously did not enter federal higher education; and, moreover, it is marked by a decrease in funding, prescribing the university counter-reform, which conceives the university as a service provider, guided by flexibility and control, and makes science and research commodified. The work of the teaching staff is impacted by these factors of precariousness of higher education, generating a process of intensification, in which requisitions, demands and evaluations demand an increase in subjective efforts and in their capacities (physical, cognitive or emotional); yet, it is immaterial work, which suffers consequences with demands for productivity, competitiveness and increased control and evaluation of work. With regard to legal changes in higher education, these comply with the guidelines and protocols of international organizations; causing the professors to intensify their work, both in graduate programs evaluated by quantification, by criteria of research promotion agencies and market interests, by the requisition of entrepreneurship and management of research projects, and by the services provided; and by the expansion via REUNI, with the creation of new university campuses and courses aimed at small, light education and with classrooms with a high number of students. In this way, intensification and productivism express a double face of a heteronomic expansion of the university in Brazil, in relation to an undergraduate education that expands without ending a university standard; and a postgraduate course guided by academic productivism, greater rationality and demand, based on international rankings, which disregard the need for time for knowledge production, and go against the scientific and cultural autonomy of the university, and its capacity and responsibility in provide answers to societal contradictions.