Mass Higher Education, Literate Culture, and Institutional Decline: A Comparative Reading of Three Major Federal Universities in North-Eastern Brazil

Abstract

This essay examines the recent transformation of the Brazilian public university on the basis of a central hypothesis: the democratisation of access to higher education, although socially necessary, took place within an institutional and cultural context that partially weakened the centrality of research, analytical writing, and intensive intellectual formation as organising principles of university life. The argument is developed through a comparative reading of three federal universities in North-Eastern Brazil — the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), and the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) — themselves situated within a national system strongly hierarchised by the concentration of scientific capital in universities such as USP, Unicamp, and UFRJ. The text brings together the sociology of science, the history of Brazilian intellectual culture, public policies for university expansion, reforms to access mechanisms, the unequal quality of basic education, and cognitive transformations linked to digital orality. It argues that the Brazilian university is currently experiencing a structural tension between social inclusion, the expansion of its functions, and the preservation of the institutional conditions necessary for the production of high-level knowledge.