{"id":221363,"date":"2016-07-26T15:06:01","date_gmt":"2016-07-26T18:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/?p=221363"},"modified":"2016-07-28T12:00:58","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T15:00:58","slug":"a-diverse-university","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/a-diverse-university\/","title":{"rendered":"A diverse university"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Unesp_241-03\"<\/a>The 12th floor of the building that houses the administrative offices of the president of S\u00e3o Paulo State University (Unesp), in downtown S\u00e3o Paulo, is the site of a very busy place: a meeting room that overlooks 9 de Julho Avenue and that is equipped with video cameras and two large wall-mounted flat screen TVs, against the backdrop of a huge Unesp logo. Here, deans and office staff have to compete for time slots in which to hold videoconferences with participants scattered across the 24 cities that are home to Unesp institutes and academic units. The physical distance separating virtual meeting attendees can reach 805 kilometers \u2013 the case of both the Ilha Solteira campus, on the border with Mato Grosso do Sul, and the Guaratinguet\u00e1 campus, in the Para\u00edba Valley. \u201cThe videoconference system was expensive when it was set up some years ago, but it\u2019s had an impact at this university, which was born decentralized,\u201d remarks Marilza Vieira Cunha Rudge, vice-president of Unesp.<\/p>\n

Coordinators of graduate programs from a certain field appear on the TV sets one day while managers of academic units are seen discussing administrative matters the next. \u201cThe possibility of meeting at a distance not only cuts costs and breaks down barriers. It also allows us to share experiences and has helped in shaping Unesp\u2019s identity,\u201d says Rudge, professor at the School of Medicine on the Botucatu campus. She points out that it took time for Unesp \u2013 which turned 40 on January 30, 2016 \u2013 to build this identity. Until a few years ago, students and faculty did not yet see themselves as part of the university but would instead say they belonged to one of the isolated institutes or schools of arts and sciences distributed across cities like Jaboticabal, Araraquara, Franca, and Assis, each with its own academic history and culture. These units were brought together in 1976 thanks to a law sponsored by then governor Paulo Egydio Martins. \u201cToday, everybody says they\u2019re with Unesp,\u201d the vice-president reports.<\/p>\n

Formed from a consortium of regional institutions, Unesp blazed a unique trail to become one of Brazil\u2019s leading research universities. But it still held onto its position as rural S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s paradigm of knowledge production and public higher education, with 37,000 students enrolled in 134 undergraduate courses and a faculty of 3,880. \u201cIf we draw a circle with a radius of 100 kilometers around each of these 24 cities, we\u2019ll see that we cover almost the whole map of the state of S\u00e3o Paulo,\u201d says Julio Cezar Durigan, Unesp president. \u201cIf the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP) was created to be a great university and the University of Campinas (Unicamp), to be a modern university, Unesp had a different proposal: to be the university of the entire state of S\u00e3o Paulo. This raises several logistical issues, but our interaction with all of these regions adds a richness that knows no price.\u201d<\/p>\n

Accounting for 8% of Brazil\u2019s scientific production, Unesp published an average of 2,927 scientific papers per year from 2011 to 2015, according to Web of Science data. This level represents a tripling of scholarly publications compared to the 2001-2005 period (see infographics on pages 32 and 33<\/em>). From 2007 to 2014, the number of papers published in collaboration with foreign authors doubled. The institution also excels in researcher training. In 2014, its 141 graduate programs granted 1,970 master\u2019s degrees and 999 doctorates, a figure surpassed in Brazil only by USP. The quality of Unesp programs is on the rise. The latest triennial assessment by the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (Capes), released in 2014, assigned more than half of Unesp programs its highest scores \u2013 5, 6, and 7 \u2013 for the first time ever.<\/p>\n

\"In

Unesp public domain image<\/span>In October 1975, Governor Paulo Egydio Martins submitted the bill establishing Unesp to the S\u00e3o Paulo legislatureUnesp public domain image<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The dean of research at Unesp, Maria Jos\u00e9 Soares Mendes Giannini, emphasizes that some units are especially well known for their scientific production, but all have contributed to enhancing Unesp\u2019s academic performance. \u201cThe institutes of Chemistry, in Araraquara; Theoretical Physics, in S\u00e3o Paulo; and Biosciences, in both Botucatu and Rio Claro, stand among the units producing the most internationalized research,\u201d she says. The latest edition of the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities identified the most cited Brazilian scientists according to Google Scholar Citations (GSC), Google\u2019s academic indexer. A number of Unesp researchers figure at the top of the list, like S\u00e9rgio Novaes and Nathan Berkovits, of the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IFT); Jos\u00e9 Arana Varela, professor at the Araraquara Chemistry Institute and vice-director of the Functional Materials Development Center (CDMF), one of the FAPESP-supported Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDC); and C\u00e9lio Haddad and Mauro Galetti of the Rio Claro Biosciences Institute.<\/p>\n

Several of the 14 campuses that were conjoined in 1976 had already achieved renown in research and teaching \u2013 Araraquara, for example, in the areas of pharmacy, dentistry, and chemistry; Botucatu in medicine; and Jaboticabal in the agricultural sciences. Over the years, Unesp came to encompass another 10 cities by opening units in municipalities such as S\u00e3o Vicente and Tup\u00e3 and incorporating institutions like the University of Bauru (UB), which offers courses in the sciences, engineering, arts and communication, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics, located in the state capital of S\u00e3o Paulo, in the mid-1980s. \u201cThe IFT was an internationally respected research institution that began suffering from the lack of federal funding,\u201d recalls Jorge Nagle, Unesp president from 1984 to 1988. \u201cWith around 15 physicists, its scientific production surpassed that of all Unesp physicists. Incorporation was very important for both IFT and Unesp,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"On

Unesp public domain image<\/span>On January 30, 1976, he ratified the bill at an outdoor event in Ilha SolteiraUnesp public domain image<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Nagle says that while he was in office, it was possible to modify the structure of the young university for the first time. \u201cPower was concentrated in a university board that had few full professors, who are generally resistant to change,\u201d he remembers. \u201cEven though the institutes were under the umbrella of one university, they considered themselves separate.\u201d The support of then governor Andr\u00e9 Franco Montoro was important in giving the institution direction. \u201cWe managed to obtain funding to hire another 40 full professors, and we wrote new by-laws, allowing students and staff to participate. This helped revitalize the board and got more units involved in the decision-making process.\u201d Acquiring the funds to maintain the university was a taxing mission. \u201cUniversity presidents had to trudge from department to department to get funds for new projects and initiatives, and they had to negotiate the budget with the government every year,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The picture changed in 1989 with the advent of university autonomy under the government of Orestes Qu\u00e9rcia, which guaranteed S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s three state universities a fixed share of tax revenue. \u201cAutonomy engendered a new understanding of what a university is,\u201d says President Durigan. \u201cBefore autonomy, the president did nothing but rush about with projects to justify the next year\u2019s expenditures. Autonomy made it possible to plan the institution\u2019s future, and this changed Unesp\u2019s profile, through co-responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

The leap in scientific production and in the quality of graduate programs came in the 2000s. In 2001, Professor Marcos Macari, who had experience helping put together and coordinate the well-ranked graduate program in animal science at the Jaboticabal campus, was appointed dean of Research and Graduate Studies. He adopted a strategy to lend substance to the institution\u2019s 180-plus master\u2019s and doctoral programs. \u201cI was very familiar with how the rules worked at Capes, which was then assigning grades of A, B, and C to programs. I noticed that many Unesp programs were receiving poor evaluations because they weren\u2019t following these rules,\u201d he recalls. The first step was to gather data on each program and embark on a pilgrimage across campuses. \u201cThere were programs with solid groups that were publishing in good journals, but interspersed among them were professors whose scientific production was uneven or nonexistent and who dragged the evaluation down.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Unesp_241-02\"<\/a>Macari visited all of the programs and met with their professors. He took along slides illustrating the performance of each faculty member. \u201cI spoke very frankly: these professors need to leave the program because they\u2019re not producing scientific scholarship and are jeopardizing the evaluation. You can imagine the ruckus this caused,\u201d he says. \u201cSometimes a professor had put a huge effort into setting up a program, and along came the dean, saying he should be disqualified. I explained that my mission was to show how the system works,\u201d the professor observes. The results appeared after two years of work. \u201cMany folks who were not publishing left the programs. And many folks who were already producing knowledge started publishing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The embryos of some programs that are now firmly entrenched at Unesp can be traced back to that period, like the university\u2019s offer to supplement funds when researchers secured funding for their research projects. \u201cAt first it was 10%, but we had to change that when researchers began receiving sizeable amounts of funding, for thematic projects or from Finep, the Brazilian Innovation Agency,\u201d he explains. Unesp also offered to pay article publication fees and the cost of translating papers into English. \u201cFolks liked these funds and ended up taking advantage of them. And we fought so the authors wouldn\u2019t forget to state on their papers that they were with Unesp. Back then, researchers often said they were with their academic unit but not the university.\u201d<\/p>\n

Macari laments that he was unable to bring one of his ideas to fruition: the creation of virtual research groups. \u201cSince campuses are spread over a number of regions, Unesp has similar graduate programs in different places. There are three veterinary, three agronomy, and three biology programs. The idea was to bring the researchers from these programs together virtually, so they could develop large projects jointly. Nobody got on board, except for a master\u2019s and doctoral program that connected researchers from Presidente Prudente, Araraquara, and Bauru, at the initiative of Professor Jos\u00e9 Arana Varela,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Macari became president of Unesp and decided to split Research and Graduate Studies into two separate offices. He invited Jos\u00e9 Arana Varela, professor at the Chemistry Institute of the Araraquara campus, to head research. \u201cWe devised new incentives to get researchers to publish in high-impact journals, like Nature<\/em> and Science<\/em>,\u201d says Varela, now Chief Executive Officer of the FAPESP Executive Board. \u201cFor every paper published, the researcher received a certain sum, and he could spend it on any of his group\u2019s activities: sending a student abroad, taking a trip, or using it in the lab.\u201d Around that time, Varela helped establish a center for technological innovation to assist researchers in obtaining patents and crafting technology transfer agreements with businesses. \u201cIt was an arduous task and soon proved much harder than publishing papers,\u201d he remembers. The center was the embryo of the Unesp Innovation Agency, founded in 2010 and coordinated by Varela after he stepped down as dean of research. \u201cIn structural terms, we designed the agency to be lean and efficient, and it worked pro-actively. Its virtue was in forging a culture of innovation at the university.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Unesp_241-01\"<\/a>Likewise in 2010, a number of programs to incentivize scientific production and academic quality entered into Unesp\u2019s Institutional Development Plan (PDI), whose budget reached R$55 million; in 2016, it was set at R$35 million in response to an overall drop in state tax revenue. The goal of the PDI is to ensure that funds for strategic university programs are reserved and guaranteed in the budget. Some 20 initiatives have received support. One of these tried to encourage the mobility of graduate program faculty, which sparked some controversy. Programs that had earned grades of 5, 6, and 7 from Capes earned the right to send one of their faculty members abroad for a month to work on collaborative projects and they were also allowed to invite a foreign professor. An even bigger incentive was offered to programs that had been awarded lower grades: those that earned a 3 could send a faculty member abroad for up to six months. \u201cThey complained that we were protecting the weakest programs, but that\u2019s not how we saw it. For these programs, spending just a month abroad wasn\u2019t enough. More time was needed to make ties outside,\u201d says Rudge.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the university invested in renewal. In the second half of the 2000s alone, over 1,000 new professors were hired. Vacancies for professors were also opened up in departments associated with graduate-level excellence programs, with the idea of enhancing critical mass and stimulating growth. These investments in a skilled faculty paid off. In 2001, only 40% of Unesp teaching staff were involved in graduate programs. Today, the figure is around 80%. Funds were also directed toward fostering the university\u2019s internationalization, and agreements with foreign universities grew from 30 to 250 in 10 years. Support offices for researchers were also opened at all Unesp units to reduce work on project administration and free up faculty to conduct research.<\/p>\n

\"Unesp_DSC_0241\"Unesp public domain image<\/span>Since scientific production at Unesp is heavily concentrated in the life sciences, programs were established to fund research in the fields of engineering and the humanities. Investments were made as well in recouping faculty members who had gotten wrapped up in teaching and management and left scientific production aside. \u201cOne of our strategies was to offer them resources, including undergraduate research scholarships for their students, so they would engage in lines of research and in graduate programs,\u201d recalls Dean Giannini. In the field of research, four inter-unit centers were created, devoted to advanced studies on the ocean, bioenergy, biotechnology, and public policy, and a virtual network of multi-user laboratories is now being assembled. \u201cResearchers from different units can use these laboratories\u2019 facilities over the web,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n

The goal for the coming years is to expand the scope of PDI objectives and initiatives by devising similar plans at both the unit and department levels. \u201cThis will make it possible to extend the same incentives across all campuses,\u201d says President Durigan. Other challenges must also be faced. Unesp has worked to serve increasingly larger numbers of students from public schools; by 2018, a system will be in place that reserves 50% of new admissions for this category of enrollee. For Vice-President Rudge, highly talented young people must also be attracted in order to lend impetus and greater diversity to the academic environment. \u201cWe need to guarantee these young people space at the university,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

President Durigan foresees an agenda of challenges over the coming years. He says, for example, that the approach to teaching must be changed. \u201cStudent education should be aimed more at problem-solving,\u201d he explains, citing a pilot project in civil engineering currently underway abroad that shunned formal classes and engaged students in the search for solutions to practical problems, under a professor\u2019s guidance. Durigan also thinks research at Unesp needs to change. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make sense for one department to have more than 30 lines of research. Greater focus is needed; a maximum of five lines that have an impact on society should be defined and faculty mobilized to embrace them.\u201d And in the field of extension, less emphasis should be placed on providing services to the community and more on what he calls \u201cinnovative extension,\u201d defined as the transfer of knowledge to society and the private sector. If Unesp succeeds in meeting these challenges, says the president, it will be able to transform itself into Brazil\u2019s greatest university. \u201cSince we\u2019re young and we\u2019re spread over a number of cities, we still have a lot of time and room in which to grow,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

This is the first in a series of reports on the 40-year history of S\u00e3o Paulo State University \u2013 Unesp<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the age of 40, Unesp is gaining ground in research and graduate programs","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[226],"coauthors":[98],"class_list":["post-221363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policies-st-en","tag-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221363"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=221363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}