The modern university and its critical role in society: How do brazilian universities address the established ways of action of their economic environment?

We discuss the university’s role in contemporary Brazilian semi-peripheral capitalism, where economic groups aim to rationalize management and to competitively sustain their companies in the economic world-system. This strategy has been historically characterized by economic growth allied with concentration of wealth. The necessity for profits in the short and middle terms settles labour and natural resources exploitation in the horizon of these economic agents.

The university as a modern institution of science and technology production can offer critical perspectives towards established ways of action. Ideal-typically an overcome of this institution's theological vocation during the XIX^th century, the modern university has been characterized by the use of systematic method of exegetic inquiry to understand social and natural phenomena. Thus scientific knowledge has been able to open alternatives to the strategies of instrumental mastery of nature and society by rationally inquiring the established ways of action of its surroundings.

In Brazil we observe three trends towards the opposite direction: 1) the appropriation of science as a cultural sophistication of selected groups, that produce a scientific culture strongly compromised with formal processes rather than with results; 2) a bureaucratic selection of academic groups, which attaches them to traditional structures of political and economic power, compromising results to state-defined priorities; 3) the uncritical appreciation of popular culture, abstractly represented as an opposition to the “culture of elites”.

These observations result from the analysis of a Brazilian law and a decree of higher education (trends 1 and 2), a policy of biotechnology development and a Ministerial plan for innovation in companies (trend 2), and finally the institutional profile of a recently created public university (trend 3). We conclude that those trends reflect the obstacles for Brazilian universities to mediate changes in established strategies of contemporary economic environment.