Pandemic and higher education in Brazil

Abstract

The text discusses the impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic on Brazilian higher education. For the apprehension of the theme, the article is anchored in an exploratory investigation, which included bibliographic research, systematic surveys in the alternative press and documentary analysis of convergent problems necessary to understand the theme, but also in the consultation of already existing aggregated data, adopting, therefore, an analysis perspective that combines, at the same time, quantitative and qualitative aspects. It follows, in general lines, the following plan: firstly, it seeks to analyze the political and economic situation in which the country was, when the pandemic of Covid 19 arrived, considering that the economic and health impacts of the spread of the virus depended on pre-existing vulnerabilities. It analyzes the particularities of the pandemic in Brazil, with special emphasis on the negation of the sanitary and scientific precepts that have characterized bolsonarism. Then, it enters the universe of higher education, organizing the arguments based on the analysis of two axes, considered central to this discussion: the impacts of ultraneoliberalism and neo-conservatism on Brazilian higher education institutions. After these considerations, it presents what, in fact, changed with the arrival of the pandemic in the institutions and the horizons that unfold for them.