O REUNI e a expansão precarizada da universidade brasileira no contexto da crise estrutural do capital

Abstract

In this dissertation we do a critical analysis of REUNI (decree number 6.096, of April 24, 2007), which proposes the restructuring and the expansion of the federal universities. We situate our object as part of the process of neoliberal reform of the higher education, which, on its turn, responds to the imperatives of the capital's structural crisis. Initially, we analyzed the phenomenon of structural crisis in order to grasp the material foundation of the great changes that the world has passed in the last four decades and which were reflected heavily in education. The structural crisis of capital, marking the closure of the historic rise of this system, brings destructive consequences, when one looks from the human-generic standpoint, for all social complex. In this context neoliberalism rises as a response from the capital to its structural crisis. We see that through a program markedly regressive, neoliberalism imposes a series of reforms. The education is submitted to a process of commodification and impoverishment. In Brazil, this neoliberal adjustment is implemented since the 1990s. After the FHC government have consolidated neoliberalism and initiated the reform in education, the PT government continues as both the neoliberal adjustment and its expression in the educational field. Thus, in the new phase of the renovation project of higher education, the Lula government deepens the attack on the federal universities through the REUNI. In this sense, the REUNI, contrary to the official propaganda is a measure, which, as such the ongoing reform deepens the process of commodification and impoverishment imposed on higher education in Brazil.