As contradições do Programa REUNI: o caso das Ciências Sociais na UFSCar

Abstract

The theme of this dissertation is the development of federal universities in Brazil, due to the implementation of the Support Program for Plans of Expansion and Restructuring of Federal Universities (REUNI), which is our subject of study. This program was settled in 2007, under the supervision of the Ministry of Education (MEC) and its related Department of Higher Education (SESU). The hypothesis developed along this work is that REUNI brings itself a range of implications concerning to the restructuration of federal universities, and those are intrinsically related to economic and politic context of the process known as globalization of capital, as well as to the consequent process of reorganization of brazilian state since the middle of the 1990 decade. REUNI would be, according to this hypothesis, the materialization and consolidation of these processes into brazilian higher education. Our research field is the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) and the Social Sciences graduation course, where we analyze the process of expansion and restructuration of both, university and course, after the implementation of REUNI. It was also analyzed vast documentation and literature (thesis, papers and texts in general) related to the program. Therefore, we attempted, to develop a theoretical path that allowed us to study the expansion and the restructuration of federal universities under different aspects, such as economical, political, educational and academic. It was approached as well the more generic implications and the more peculiar contradictions, considering the expansion of Social Sciences graduation course as a whole. We concluded that REUNI is evidently related to its economic context and that the government aims a specific societal project with this program: the possibility of complete insertion of Brazil into the scenario of globalization of capital.