BY HANK REICHMAN
Brazillian President Jair Bolsonaro
In April I posted to this blog an item, “‘Professor Watchlist’ Goes International,” which reported, among other things, that a member of parliament from right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s party had called on students to send her videos of instructors “indoctrinating” them into leftist ideologies and that Bolsonaro himself shared one such video via Twitter. Bolsonaro has been dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” but a forthcoming article on academic freedom in Brazil in the Fall issue of Academe by Brown University historian James Green argues that “he is ten times worse.” According to Green, Bolsonaro’s policies, among other outrages, “seek to slash environmental protections, undo efforts to slow down the deforestation of the Amazon, deny LGBT people basic civil rights, and dismantle social and labor protections for the working class and poor.”
Now the journal Nature reports in detail about how the Bolsonaro regime has increasingly attacked both scientists and science itself. (The article, by Jeff Tolleson, was also republished by Scientific American.) Here are some excerpts from that report:
When neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro presented a preview of a report on the dire state of research in Brazil at a meeting of a major scientific society on 23 July, several government soldiers entered the room and began filming. Some in the audience took the soldiers’ actions as a show of intimidation.
“Maybe these guys were just soldiers who want to learn about science,” says Ribeiro, a researcher at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal. He coordinated the analysis on behalf of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), which hosted the meeting and commissioned the report. But it didn’t look like they were there out of curiosity, Ribeiro says.
The incident is the latest example of the rising tensions between the country’s scientists and President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration. Since Bolsonaro took office in January, Brazil’s researchers have faced funding cuts and repeated attempts by the administration to roll back protections for the environment and Indigenous populations. Government officials blocked the release of a ministry report on drug use in Brazil. And they have questioned other work by government scientists, including most recently, deforestation reports by a national agency. The head of that agency has since been dismissed. . . .
A draft of the SBPC report details a decline in science funding that began with a major recession in 2014. It draws a direct line between the unprecedented crisis in science and the future of Brazil, arguing that the country’s social, economic and environmental prospects are under threat. Without policies that are “grounded in rationality, science and the public interest”, places such as the Amazon rainforest could soon pass the point of no return, according to the draft report.
The commission found that total spending by Brazil’s three main science-funding agencies fell by nearly 47%, to 7 billion reais (US$1.8 billion), last year, compared with 2014. The situation has deteriorated further since Bolsonaro took office: in March, his administration announced a freeze on 42% of the budget for the ministry of science and communications, leaving it with just 2.9 billion reais for the rest of the year. The latest estimates suggest that the ministry could run out of scholarship money for undergraduate- and graduate-students and post-doctoral researchers as early as September if the government doesn’t provide more cash. . . .
In early July, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which uses satellite observations of the Amazon to track the destruction of the rainforest, released data showing that deforestation rates from April through June had increased by 25% compared with the same period last year. The analysis also looked at an 11-month period from August 2018 through June, and found that nearly 4,600 square kilometres of rainforest had disappeared, a 15% increase compared with the same time period a year ago.
On 19 July, Bolsonaro accused INPE of lying about the numbers, then later suggested that his administration should have the right to approve the agency’s data before they are released to the public. . . .
Researchers in Brazil expected to see policy changes when Bolsonaro took office, but not so quickly or to such extremes, says Mercedes Bustamante, an ecologist at the University of Brasilia.
Green’s article will appear in the Fall issue of Academe magazine, which I am guest editing, that will be devoted to coverage of threats to academic freedom in countries as diverse as Canada, Britain, Hungary, Russia, China, and Brazil and to efforts by organizations like Scholars at Risk to address them.
This is a fascinatingly complex problem–for at least two reasons. One, the comparison of Brazilian and American executive leadership is largely inapplicable, except to the extent the US interferes in foreign elections, or installs de facto US assets friendly to US interests perhaps. One must unpack that dynamic before making a simple ideological comparison to these heads of state. Moreover, with due regard to false equivalence, what world “leader” is actually an environmental activist? Of course to invoke such ideological opportunism, a special interest public statement from a Brown professor is effectively de rigueur: Brown is among the most reliable Left indoctrination centers in the US (and produces generally rather lower quality graduate scholarship among its peer class).
Two, the indoctrination of university students by the Left is, in fact, a major problem. As an example, at the University of Chicago, History professor Kathleen Belew, penned an op-ed in this week’s NYTimes (where NYT editor David Brooks is on the Board of Trustees of the University. Anxiety of influence?), agitating hysterically against “White supremacy terror” in the most unprofessional manner (using her University byline). By unprofessional I mean in violation of the standards of rational empiricism in facts, data and sources in professional scholarship, and in breach of duty of care to students (including effective cognitive predation toward minors, in service of special interests). Should she be sanctioned? Yes, severely, including firing.
The modern university administration and academy however (a revolving door monopoly), are not motivated by self-regulation. But that largely and ultimately doesn’t matter because parents (the ones that pay the bills), alumnae and corporations (the ones that make donations) will intervene by a number of methods in the higher education marketplace. And it is a market. And as a Left agitator, professor Belew’s stock price just crashed in US households, corporate offices, and among a thinking public. Left bias, hysteria, and conflicts of interest, and the adulteration thereby of professional scholarship, is a major national crisis. Is Brazil handling it in the right way? Well, that has more than one answer.
One must otherwise separate the Brazilian president and his politics, from the US president and the current Left hysteria thereby, if one is going to rationally address university indoctrination. As for Brazil and US environmental policy, that is a separate matter and under separate jurisdictions. Both are indeed tragic, but they are far from alone. It is the height of illogic and academic breach of standards, to invoke that tragedy only when it suits political party motivations.