Laying the Groundwork: 1969–1974

Educational issues would become a key part of student mobilization as student movements reconstituted themselves throughout the 1970s, but at the beginning of the decade there was much groundwork to be done. Certain issues had played a role in the mobilizations of the 1960s, but the crackdown on student movements on campuses, combined with the implementation of the 1968 Reforma, meant that students needed to rebuild student organizations that had suffered repression, even as the educational context on campuses was shifting.Footnote ⁹ This crackdown forced leftist students to find new ways to mobilize in the new repressive climate. They would consciously turn to educational issues in an effort to establish and strengthen student organizations on campuses and to recruit new student members to the various leftist movements, including the Soviet-oriented Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB), the Partido Comunista do Brasil (PC do B), Ação Popular (AP; soon to be Ação Popular Marxista-Leninista, or APML), and the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN).

However, the results of these efforts to recruit were mixed. By the end of the decade, the student movement had reconstituted itself, most visible in UNE's return to prominence in 1979. This effort was due in no small part to growing mobilization around the educational issues that resulted from the Reforma Universitária, and to the efforts of leftist leaders to mobilize students around education. While these groups would dominate executive positions in the newly reconstituted UNE, the masses—both among UNE representatives and among the university population nationwide—often avoided direct affiliation with these political groups. While some students joined radical groups, many more joined the organizations that were mobilizing around student issues, mainly because they represented student interests, and not because of any particular ideological affinity. If it was leftist students in the 1970s who laid the foundation for student mobilization, it was the everyday educational issues around which a broader mass of students would mobilize.

Despite the tiny proportion of leftist students on campuses, they played a vital role in reconstituting student organizations in the repressive period between 1969 and 1974. Many 1960s leaders had joined clandestine armed movements, but others disagreed with the armed struggle and worked instead on maintaining activism on campuses in an effort to build on the seeming promise of the 1968 mobilizations.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, as one student leader of the late 1960s and early 1970s commented, “Sometimes one or two years separate one generation from another.”Footnote ¹¹ Such was the case for the generation of leftist leaders on campus in the wake of AI-5 and the February 1969 institution of Decree 477, which prohibited political activity on campuses and provided the setting for police to occupy classrooms to monitor students.Footnote ¹² Whereas leaders of student movements in 1968, both at the national and state levels and on individual campuses, had been at the forefront of demonstrations featuring tens of thousands of students, leaders in 1969 and the early 1970s led meetings of dozens. Adriano Diogo, a geology student at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) who in his own words was “influenced” by the then underground ALN and who was a key figure in the new post-AI-5 context, recalled a UNE meeting in Botucatu in 1969 with just 30 students present, a far cry from 1,000 plus who had attended and were arrested at UNE's National Congress in Ibiúna in 1968. Diogo reflected with irony that, with such reduced numbers, “We claimed, ‘UNE is us,’ and it really was.”Footnote ¹³

Some students entered 1969 expecting a new year of successes in challenging the military dictatorship.Footnote ¹⁴ However, it quickly became clear that the effort to reorganize in the aftermath of AI-5 faced new repressive obstacles, including the presence of plainclothes police on campuses. On many campuses, government-appointed university officials, or even the police themselves, shut down college-level Centros Acadêmicos or Diretórios Acadêmicos, university-level Diretorios Centrais dos Estudantes, units of the União Estadual de Estudantes, and UNE. In response, some students attempted to create alternative institutions that could appear to be independent of the proscribed or heavily monitored Centros Acadêmicos or Diretorios Centrais dos Estudantes. By 1970, students at the Universidade Estadual de Guanabara, later renamed Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, had already created a Conselho de Representantes, and by 1972, students at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro had followed suit.Footnote ¹⁵ These conselhos were formed by people from leftist parties like the Partido Comunista Brasileiro, Ação Popular, and the Partido Comunista do Brasil, all of which were attempting to reconstitute a student movement that could recruit new members to the various clandestine lefts more easily.Footnote ¹⁶ Such processes replicated themselves in São Paulo and elsewhere, illustrating the ways in which leftist leaders continued their efforts to mobilize on campuses through new organizations that would draw students into their orbit and challenge military rule.Footnote ¹⁷

Another tactic these leaders relied on was the use of cultural events. With Decree 477 proscribing traditional political organization on campuses, the cultural arena and other less politicized campus events became new venues for spreading anti-dictatorship messages and creating a sense of community across the broader student body. Throughout the decade, these nascent organizations, and other kinds of student groups like cinema clubs and participation in campus athletic events, provided new institutional mechanisms to bring students together and rebuild student organization from the ground up.Footnote ¹⁸ A law school in Rio de Janeiro hosted a week of juridical debates, planned by students from PCB, whose real goal was to bring students together to discuss the legal setting of post-AI-5 Brazil, while UFRJ's medical school hosted a week of scientific debates that engaged the social impact of scientific questions in 1972.Footnote ¹⁹ Term opening week events that welcomed new students served as another opportunity to allow community building, quotidian enough to fly under the radar of the military's repressive apparatus, yet still effective in bringing attention to the ongoing activities on campus.Footnote ²⁰ And in 1973, students succeeded in hosting a show by musician Gilberto Gil that brought over a thousand students together, not only to enjoy the show but to raise awareness of the plight of the dozens of USP students who had been arrested. One of those, Alexandre Vannucchi Leme, died under torture.Footnote ²¹

These students also published newspapers, with articles by anonymous writers, that avoided overt political ideology but still informed students college- and university-wide of the issues they faced. One student newspaper at UFRJ informed incoming students in 1972 of the struggles their forebears had undertaken in 1971 and offered dicas (advice) on what to expect as students. These dicas focused especially on educational issues, ranging from which professors to be aware of to which courses lacked basic materials for laboratories and research.Footnote ²² Leftist students on campus at USP followed a similar tactic.Footnote ²³ Such anonymous publications drew on the one arena still available to student leaders—education—to criticize the government in a way that could draw more students in. By highlighting the failures of higher education and the university reform, these efforts began laying a discursive foundation for student struggles on campuses for the remainder of the decade.

Despite their importance in reestablishing institutional organizations on individual campuses after 1968, many leftist students encountered real limitations in their ability to recruit students to their various political positions. While non-affiliated students sometimes supported such activities, they feared in the repressive climate that representatives on the conselhos would be arrested and that even students with lesser connections to the conselhos would face arrest and torture, even if they were not themselves members of leftist political movements.Footnote ²⁴

Further complicating matters were the left's own divisions. Ideological debates between the clandestine lefts also excluded or turned off incoming students. Surveying the climate in the early 1970s, former UNE vice president Nilton Santos lamented the fact that, since 1968, leftist organizations had transformed the DCEs, DCE-Livres (Free-DCEs, alternative and unofficial DCEs that students established), and the conselhos as well, “into ‘apparatuses,’ into channels of transmission for these political groups,” rendering them “an instrument of the political group, and not an instrument of the combined movement.” Santos also noted that “the student movement today resent[ed] this” apparent political takeover.Footnote ²⁵ Additionally, while groups like the PCB, PC do B, and AP could agree on the need for incorporating educational issues, questions of how that would happen, and along what lines, continued to divide these groups tactically.Footnote ²⁶ Finally, many student leaders spent more time out of class reorganizing than in class building a rapport with the broader student population.Footnote ²⁷ The result was that “many students participated in these [student] movements” but remained “independent and were tied to no [political] group.”Footnote ²⁸

As the 1970s progressed, the focus on “criticizing failures of education” became the issue around which students mobilized.Footnote ²⁹ Regardless of students' political ideologies, educational matters affected one and all. Indeed, if the left had chosen educational issues to recruit students to leftist organizations, it ended up selecting issues that led to widespread support of a movement representing students overall, even if fewer students openly joined the ideological leftist groups. As student expectations of higher education encountered the reality of educational policy and reform under military rule, student organizers emphasized the politics of everyday experience and the quotidian existence on campus to again challenge the military regime in increasing numbers. If it was in the period of the mid to late 1970s that “the student movement became the Student Movement,” it was the educational issues that led more students to mobilize and rally to that reconstituted “Student Movement.”Footnote ³⁰

Transferring the Costs of Higher Education

From the initial expansion of Brazil's higher education system in the 1930s through the 1960s, the state had borne the burden of funding higher education.Footnote ³¹ In stark contrast with Spanish America, where many countries had centuries-old universities, Brazil's university system was comparatively young. The first university was established only in 1920, in preparation for the visit of the Belgian royal family, and the federal university system began to develop only in the 1940s.Footnote ³² By the 1960s, however, the system had expanded to nearly 20 federal universities. With the exception of a handful of Catholic and state-level universities, the federal government remained the primary source of funding for a public higher educational system that was free to those who gained admission. This was admittedly a microscopic total—out of a population of over 70 million people, only 124,214 Brazilians attended university in 1963.Footnote ³³ Higher education was overwhelmingly the purview of those middle- and upper-class students whose families could afford the private secondary schools and extracurricular courses to prepare students to pass the entrance exams to public university. The result was a system that reinforced middle-class privileges and social hierarchies within the educational system and excluded nearly all working-class and poor Brazilians—a majority of the population—from higher education. Nonetheless, upon gaining admission, university students expected a free public education, as universities had operated in this fashion since their creation and expansion from the 1930s through the 1950s.

By the 1970s, one of the biggest quotidian issues that students raised in their critique of higher education under military policy was “the question of increasing anuidades [annual fees],” framed as “ensino pago [paid education].”Footnote ³⁴ The issue had first come to attention in the late 1950s as a threat, but given the turmoil before and after the military coup of 1964, it did not garner much political attention, and the threat remained abstract for much of the 1960s.Footnote ³⁵ Anuidades reappeared as an issue around which students mobilized in 1967, when President Artur Costa e Silva's ministry of planning declared that universities could charge students an “annual quota” that “represent[ed] the total value of the expenses and installments of the investments of the schools.”Footnote ³⁶ While Costa e Silva did implement a fee, it remained symbolic, nominal, and affordable for most of the middle-class sectors who had access to public universities in the 1960s.

The question of “paid education” came again to the fore in student politics and organization only during the 1970s, as the fees were introduced along with the new Reforma Universitária and the state began to shift the cost of education to students. Perhaps more important, private universities dramatically increased in both number of institutions and total enrollment as the state turned to private education to defray the federal government's responsibility for funding public education. Already by 1973, the percentages of students enrolled in public and private universities showed a massive transformation: whereas over 80 percent of all university students attended free public universities in the early 1960s, only 42 percent of Brazil's university students in 1973 were in free public education, with the remaining 58 percent attending private institutions. That number would continue to rise in the 1970s.Footnote ³⁷

In this context, students at both public and private universities found themselves suddenly bearing the burden of the cost of education, and the renascent organizations led by leftist students pounced on the issue. In 1972, student leaders at USP managed to hold a university-wide referendum on the question of fees. Over 90 percent of the entire student body voted against the establishment of fees, marking a rare early success in mobilizing a large number of students and also revealing the capacity of all students—not just those on the left—to mobilize around education.Footnote ³⁸ Over time, the issue of fees would mobilize students on other campuses. At UFRJ, a pamphlet reported that while the “symbolic” fee of Cr$28 had remained steady from its establishment in 1967 until 1972, it had increased from Cr$28 to Cr$435 between 1972 and 1976—an inflationary rate of over 1500 percent in four years, far greater than real inflation in that period.Footnote ³⁹ Another student pamphlet, published at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, expressed outrage over the fact that the annual fees there had gone up by 200 percent, “aggravated by the establishment of more than thirty fees, which range from 7.5 to 1200 cruzeiros.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Not only did the rates go up, but there was also an increase in the “number of fees paid for the use of services (beyond the matriculation fee, growing each year),” including fees for study materials, classroom hand-outs, and student IDs, among other items.Footnote ⁴¹ Whereas public education had once been free for those who could enter the university system, students now found that the privileges public education had provided them were eroding as the Brazilian dictatorship reallocated funds away from education, placing the onus on students. Students at UFRJ even called these rates “illegal” for going beyond the ceiling the ministry of education and culture had set for annual fees.Footnote ⁴² Suddenly finding themselves having to pay their own money for goods that universities had previously offered free of charge, students mobilized against the post-Reforma's shifting of the cost of education from the state and to students, reacting to a violation of their expectations that the state would reward their admission to public universities with a free education. Even as UNE returned in 1979, fees continued to be a backbone of student protest, with the now revived organization building on students' efforts on individual campuses.Footnote ⁴³

The increase in anuidades hit students at private universities even harder. The government had created an educational credit program (Crédito Educativo) designed to help students defray these costs, but the program functioned primarily to make student loans, meaning students would still eventually have to pay for their education. Students and others were quick to condemn the program, both on campuses and in the alternative press. A cartoon in O Pasquim, an underground publication that was a fixture on campuses and was part news and part Mad Magazine, showed a student considering accepting a loan from Crédito Educativo, with an angel and a devil hovering over each shoulder, both shouting “No!” and encouraging him to reject the offer.Footnote ⁴⁴ Students at the Faculdade de Engenharia Industrial e Civil of Itatiba, in São Paulo, claimed that the educational credit system that the government had launched to help students attend university only “masked the high rates of fees” and did nothing to ameliorate the cost of education for students.Footnote ⁴⁵

As the decade progressed, students portrayed the fees as symptomatic of the broader undemocratic conditions in Brazil, implicitly criticizing the nondemocratic rule of the military regime through the centralized university system in which the military appointed rectors and police increasingly were present on campus. At an April 1979 rally of over 300 people protesting the merger of the independent federal schools in Rio de Janeiro into the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, “various speakers criticized the adoption of paid education,” maintaining that the unilateral increases in the fees were symbolic of the government's imposition of paid education on campuses without listening to students' perspectives.Footnote ⁴⁶ This rally and others like it were not necessarily fiercely politicized, nor were they ideological critiques of the regime from the left. Although students from the left were involved, the issue of anuidades exemplified the quotidian ways in which the regime's undemocratic practices filtered onto campuses, affecting students of all ideological stripes financially and institutionally. Simply put, the state had failed to ensure its historical role of facilitating free access to higher education for students of primarily middle-class backgrounds, fomenting unrest on campuses in the 1970s.

Whereas students in the 1960s marched in the streets beneath banners that shouted “Abaixo a ditadura” (Down with the dictatorship) and “Contra os Acordos MEC-USAID” (Against Ministry of Education and Culture-USAID Agreements), students on campuses in the 1970s met under banners that proclaimed “Abaixo a sobre taxa” (Down with surcharges) and “Contra o ensino pago” (Against paid education).Footnote ⁴⁷ Repression may have made more public displays in city streets and political organizing on campuses more difficult, but it did not eradicate student mobilization around the issues that mattered to them on campuses.

Nor were fees the only fiscal issue that caused outrage among students, as the state also diverted its spending away from higher education. While the total amount the regime spent on education did rise, the percentage of the federal budget devoted to education dropped, leading to a decline in educational quality and infrastructure on campuses throughout Brazil.Footnote ⁴⁸ Already in 1969, some leftist student leaders were pushing for organizations on campuses to shift their attention from fees to funding.Footnote ⁴⁹ By the 1970s, students demanded that the regime allocate more funds for education, especially higher education, in the hope that it would simultaneously improve conditions on campus (as the Reforma Universitária claimed to be doing), even while reducing the fees students had to pay. In 1975, engineering students at UFRJ complained not only about the anuidades, but also “the terrible conditions of education, due principally to the lack of funding that dominates not just UFRJ, but Brazilian education in general.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In São Paulo, amid a limited political opening and the worsening economy of the late 1970s, students and professors from USP took to the streets, not only demonstrating in favor of amnesty and human rights, but also raising the banner of more funding for higher education.Footnote ⁵¹

Nor were these complaints limited to the major university centers in Rio and São Paulo, the traditional hotbeds of student activism.Footnote ⁵² In 1976, students at both the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo pointed to data that showed that funding for education had dropped from 11 percent of the total federal budget in 1965 to just 4.7 percent for 1976. In the process, they ushered in a new demand that would have a long-term impact on student politics: that 12 percent of the federal budget be devoted to education. This issue would continue to serve as a major axis for student politics in the 1980s and beyond, even into the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁵³ And leftist leaders who helped reconstitute UNE in the latter half of the 1970s pointed to the importance of funding, alongside fees and the importance of free public education, as backbones of UNE's efforts to appeal to students nationwide.Footnote ⁵⁴

If the military regime hoped that 1968's Reforma Universitária would transform and modernize Brazil's university system by expanding Brazilians' access to higher education, the implementation of fees and the shifting of costs to the students shut that door for many. Access to higher education in Brazil had long been privileged and unequal.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet while the Reforma Universitária set out to expand the university system and improve access to higher education, the results, as assessed in the mid 1970s, were mixed at best. The mounting fees ensured that only those who had an adequate income and time—in other words, those from privileged middle- and upper-class backgrounds—could attend university. The diversion of budgeting to areas other than education led to declining conditions on campuses, contradicting the goal of modernization laid out in the Reforma Universitária and subsequent educational policies of the military government. These complaints and demonstrations against the regime's policies were not merely symbolic; they could and did lead to the reduction of fees at some schools. Such successes especially resonated in the repressive years of the early 1970s, even as they also allowed students to connect their own struggles with those of the 1960s in a broader trajectory of student politics. When universities reduced fees in the face of student demands, the renascent student organizations on campuses pointed to these successes as the students' first “important victory” since 1969.Footnote ⁵⁶

While the traditional national student organizations and movements had suffered gravely in the face of repression, students continued to mobilize locally around quotidian issues. In the absence of UNE or other national organizations, these local struggles on individual campuses laid the groundwork for successful student resistance and challenges to the military dictatorship, and kept student organization and mobilization alive, if reduced. As one leader in the early 1970s, recalled, “at this time there were no demonstrations unless there were internal demonstrations on campus.”Footnote ⁵⁷ When the national movements like UNE returned in 1979, they were successful in no small part because of these early successes of micro-level mobilizations on individual campuses. While the students affiliated with the clandestine lefts had used such issues to appeal to students, the fact remained that many more students chose to mobilize around these issues without necessarily affiliating with leftist groups. According to students, by shifting the costs of education from the state to the students themselves, the government hypocritically revealed its intent to divest itself of its responsibility to provide education, leading to a decline in the quality of education in Brazil and thereby demonstrating broader failings on the part of the government in helping Brazil to develop. Politicians from the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, one of the two legal political parties under military rule, also began to circulate this message as the decade progressed.Footnote ⁵⁸

The result was that the policies that the state had established, in part in the hope of ending student activism, had created the very conditions and discursive resources for a new generation of leftist leaders to use against it. The left was able to tap into policies promoted by the regime to appeal to students and reconstitute student organizations, first on campuses and, as time passed, at the national level.

“Retiring” Activist Students

Fiscal issues were but one area around which students mobilized in the aftermath of the repressive measures of 1968 and 1969. A major target in the 1970s was the military government's new program of jubilação, or “retirement.” Established in 1972, in the Ministry of Education and Culture's own words, jubilação was “intended to impede the permanency of the ‘professional student’” who remained in college for several years and continued working in the student movement (often UNE). It was these students, the military felt, who were responsible for much of the student activism of the 1960s.Footnote ⁵⁹ Jubilação would theoretically get rid of these “professional students” by limiting the time students could remain in university: those who did not complete their courses in the more regimented timeline faced expulsion. Ultimately, jubilação was yet another strategy to minimize political dissent on campus and reduce “subversion” by shepherding students through the university more quickly. Students would now enter university as a cohort, all taking a certain number of hours each semester so that they might graduate in a more timely fashion. The upside of this policy for the regime was that it could prevent student activists from remaining on campuses long enough to bridge generations in the ways they had done in the 1960s, and at the same time it would more rapidly produce university graduates whose white-collar jobs would help further the regime's vision of national development.

Yet jubilação revealed the limits of the military's efforts to reform the operations of the university system, and provided students with yet another mechanism to criticize and oppose the military regime's everyday forms of authoritarianism. By the mid 1970s, with the UNE still “extinct” and repression, censorship, and other limitations on national political activism on campuses continuing unabated, groups of students at individual campuses nationwide protested the excessive use of jubilação. They argued that rectors had been given broad discretion to apply the policy and were deploying jubilação far too liberally or for their own political purposes. For example, students at UFF argued that “more than 50 percent” of the student body had been unable to complete their degree requirements quickly, due to the courses they needed being unavailable. Yet when these students fell behind the regime's targeted progression to graduation, the rector began using jubilação to expel students who were not finishing their degrees quickly.

These students blamed the university's “deficient character of education,” declaring that students who were expelled should not “shoulder the onus” for the lack of course offerings and poor curricula and instruction.Footnote ⁶⁰ While the state's use of torture and state-sponsored assassinations targeted only a tiny minority, jubilação potentially threatened all students and offered them a new arena in which to criticize the regime's authoritarian practices and its violation of student liberties in the anos de chumbo (the military regime's most repressive period).Footnote ⁶¹ In regulating when students had to take classes and how quickly they were to finish their degrees, the regime had set out to do nothing less than regulate the very time and plans of students' everyday lives, unintentionally creating a space in which students could politicize the mundane.

The issue of jubilação also revealed the internal divisions within the regime's own ranks over the implementation of its educational policies. In doing so, it illuminated the reality that higher education was not a monolith and exposed divisions within the university system that students could exploit. When the rector of the Universidade Federal da Bahia expelled 900 students under the policy of jubilação in 1976, he prompted a strike of the university's 14,000 students that garnered national attention among university student bodies who were familiar with and confronted the everyday threat of jubilação on their own campuses.Footnote ⁶² Even the minister of education and culture, Ney Braga, asked the rector of the Bahia institution for a report justifying the high index of jubilação, and went on to organize meetings with the rectors of all public and private universities in the country to discuss the application of jubilação, among other topics.Footnote ⁶³

Once again, the Ministry of Education and Culture and the rector of a particular university seemed at odds, revealing the internal fractures that hid behind the “masks of the state.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Braga sent an inquiry to the Bahia university regarding “the criteria [it had adopted] … for the jubilação of students,” implying that the university had failed to follow the letter of the law. Additionally, the ministry requested data on the percentage of jubilados who had not met their degree requirements and asked for further information on the rates of failure and suspension at the school.Footnote ⁶⁵ The ministry was also concerned that such a high number of jubilações could send the signal of that “perfectionism” was expected of students in their courses. Finally, the ministry was dissatisfied with the Universidade Federal da Bahia's practice of expelling students via jubilação and then allowing them to re-enter the program in the following year, as it undermined the ministry's efforts to expand new student enrollment after the 1968 Reforma Universitária. Holding back so many students for a year would negatively impact the total number of openings available the following year.

Braga's meeting seemed to have little effect. When students at the Universidade de Brasília went on strike in 1977 after the university's rector failed 1,500 of their colleagues under the jubilação policy, the rector called for the military police to occupy the campus, claiming students' demands were political rather than educational. Even as he violated campus autonomy, the rector seemed to neglect the reality that the political and the educational were not mutually exclusive—in students' direct challenge to the military's educational policies, their everyday educational demands had become political issues.Footnote ⁶⁶ When the rector declared that students' complaints were not about academic questions, students pointed to their opposition to the rector's initiation of more than 1,500 processes of jubilação to argue that their concerns were indeed “academic.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Student antagonism to jubilação was not limited to federal university students. The case of UFBA in 1976 had captured the attention and opposition of students who protested at the private Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.Footnote ⁶⁸ A year later, students at the Faculdade de Engenharia Industrial e Civil de Itatiba (São Paulo) criticized jubilação for its inherent classism, a line students at UFBA took as well. These students condemned the system's failure to deal with broader teaching deficiencies, saying that jubilação was just another mechanism to keep poor students out of universities, one that did nothing to address broader structural deficiencies in the university system.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet the particular complaints they raised—of the poor education and the expulsion of those middle-class students already enrolled—revealed the contradiction of these demands. Students insisted that the regime's educational policies prevented working classes from being able to attend university by limiting, rather than increasing, the number of students who could enroll. Yet jubilação more immediately affected those middle-class students already enrolled.

This contradictory vision illustrated the paradox at the heart of these demands: while students theoretically wanted higher education to expand for all, they mobilized over those issues that were most immediately affecting their own expectations on campuses. Of particular concern was the fact that many students were increasingly working days and taking classes at night, while the courses they needed were offered only during the day, making it difficult to finish in the time span jubilação mandated.Footnote ⁷⁰ With jubilação serving as a very real threat to students who could not finish courses on a timeline imposed from above, and with even the Ministry of Education and Culture wavering on the application of the federal policy, students took advantage of the strategic value jubilação offered for challenging the dictatorship. The fact that more students now had to work while studying indicated the ways that higher education had expanded to include the lower middle classes, especially in the growing number of private universities—even as it revealed the literal costs of the regime's policies for many students. Jubilação imposed a timeline on students that contradicted their expectations to finish courses on their own schedule without the threat of having to repeat courses (and pay duplicate fees). Where once a smaller number of students could count on access to free education on their own time, the regime's expansion of higher education and emphasis on private education and public fees now ran up against students' historically rooted expectation of access to free, public education on their own schedule, rather than on an authoritarian-imposed calendar.

Feeding Resistance: The Politics of Food

Of the seemingly apolitical issues that could serve as fuel for student challenges to the military regime, nothing matched the question of food. It was a literal bread-and-butter issue around which students mobilized. Complaints about the prices and quality of food at university restaurants were nothing new, dating back at least to the early dictatorship period. By the early 1970s, food was already a cause around which to mobilize students in the face of repression.Footnote ⁷¹ During the 1970s, it became an increasingly potent topic for highlighting the everyday failures of higher education in Brazil in the post AI-5 context. The repressive atmosphere of the 1970s may have reduced overt political organization on campuses, but everyday issues like food provided the means for students to continue to challenge the dictatorship and the quotidian lived experiences of its policies.

In April 1969, before it was fully understood that 1968 had been a high-water mark rather than the initiation of a new and even stronger phase of student mobilization, thousands of students at UFRJ gathered to protest the rising prices of food at the university's restaurant, demonstrating on campus in clear defiance of AI-5 and Decree-Law 477.Footnote ⁷² At USP, leftist students led a larger movement that took over the campus restaurant after a price hike, running the restaurant, cleaning it, and maintaining the previous costs.Footnote ⁷³ Such demonstrations even extended to the equally decimated secondary student movement, with leftist students in at least one high school mobilizing around the poor quality of the school cafeteria.Footnote ⁷⁴

Food brought together leftist students and broader campus communities throughout the decade. Seeking new avenues for recruiting students to rebuild student organizations, leftist leaders recognized campus restaurants and food as important to all students and thus as “a great focus of student agitation and a great source of demands for the improvement of student aid policies.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The student newspaper at UFRJ's engineering school was memorably sarcastic in dealing with the question of food quality on campus. In a mock interview, a fundãonista (a student at UFRJ's new campus on the Ilha do Fundão in Guanabara Bay) commented that he “received two invitations from abroad, one from North Vietnam and the other from South Vietnam, and they both said the same thing: ‘We would very much like to have you on the front lines for us. After eating at the bandejão (university restaurant) for more than a year and not dying, you will be invincible on the battlefront.’”Footnote ⁷⁶ Another pamphlet found at UFRJ called the campus food service “one of the most explosive points of complaints,” due in no small part to “the constant worsening of the quality of the food.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Food also served to tap into broader issues: the commodification of goods, the cost of higher education, and who was responsible for both. At UFRJ, prices in the school cafeteria increased from Cr$0.05 to Cr$5.00 between 1967 and 1975, forcing students to pay more for a basic necessity on campus even as fees had also risen.Footnote ⁷⁸ Similar “food fights” against the poor quality and high price of food occurred at PUC-Rio and the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais. Students at UFF were even more emphatic. They tied the issue of food to broader political struggles over democracy, insisting that the need for cheaper, subsidized food was as essential to forming a “democratic university” as were the rights to free education and assembly, thereby forcefully politicizing the seemingly innocuous question of campus refreshments.Footnote ⁷⁹ And at PUC-Rio, the student newspaper commented on leaflets “that spoke about ‘the absurd increases in the University Restaurant,’” in the process broadening the audience for its limited number of leaflets. Lacking alternatives to the expensive campus restaurant, where lunch cost Cr$8.50, many poorer students, like “Jorge”—a fictional archetype representing broader student experiences at PUC-Rio—could not afford to eat between classes. While the fight for better quality food may seem inconsequential compared to the struggles against Decree-Law 477 and AI-5, or the fight for better quality education in Brazil, it was clear that the campus restaurants played an important role in student activism in the 1970s. Students' willingness to make food a central part of their demands for a “democratic university,” one that was open to those from poorer backgrounds, reveals that their quotidian experiences on campuses played an important role in contesting the policies of the dictatorship and defining their own political mobilization and discourse as part of the broader political struggles for democracy.

As did anuidades and jubilação, food affected students on campuses throughout Brazil. As the universities increased the prices of food at rates that outstripped the national inflation rate, the institutions—and, in the case of the public universities, the government that oversaw them—provided students with another seemingly apolitical arena around which they could politically mobilize and challenge the military regime and its policies. As with fees, students saw the food service that the state once provided virtually for free suddenly skyrocket in cost. There were no riots—the repressive atmosphere of the early 1970s and the absence of a national organization that could coordinate broader protests prevented the overt demonstrations of the 1960s. Yet the food issue also revealed the ways in which students continued to contest the military regime and its policies, deploying the everyday issues they faced on campuses and transforming those seemingly apolitical matters into political issues that could be used to highlight the worsening economic conditions under military rule in the latter half of the 1970s.

Student Discourse and Educational Reform in the 1970s

By pressing issues like anuidades and jubilação, the military regime had created discursive and political weapons that students could co-opt to resist and undermine the military's own efforts to control student activism. However, these issues paled in comparison to the scale of the Reforma Universitária, both in scope and in terms of providing students new issues with which to contest the military regime and its policies. In the implementation of the 1968 reform, students found the clearest path yet to challenge the military regime for its social failures, even as they outlined their own alternative vision of the role of higher education and the corresponding role of students in national development. Students also constructed visions of a democratic and representative system on campuses, one that could serve as a model and a synecdoche for the broader democratization of Brazilian politics and society.

As the 1970s dawned, the effects and failures of the Reforma Universitária became increasingly apparent, providing new avenues for students to organize based on their campus experiences. Early in the decade, leftist campus newspapers were already highlighting the lack of “sufficient space” in the classrooms. They complained that rapid expansion in enrollment on campus “impedes participation and learning” in the classroom. Such complaints were not unique nor did they constitute scaremongering. Expansion at one university was so dramatic that one class had 320 students. For these, there were only 50 copies of handouts available. Meanwhile, professors remaind “inaccessible to dialogue” and exams were based not on critical thought, but on rote memorization.Footnote ⁸⁰

As the decade continued, such complaints intensified. At UFRJ, a student newspaper listed 20 items on the agenda for a meeting of the council of student representatives from the engineering school, among them a proposal to hold seminars discussing the Reforma itself and the new curricula under it.Footnote ⁸¹ Similarly, students in the Instituto de Ciências Humanas e Filosofia at UFF suggested discussing the Reforma Universitária in small groups, as its implementation directly affected the school. Here again, as with other educational issues, there was little thought of recourse to a national political struggle, but that did not stop students on individual campuses from reacting to the daily issues they faced and organizing around them. These students were concerned that under the Reforma Universitária, the rates of anuidades would go up each time the minimum salary in Brazil was changed. The student-penned article asked rhetorically, “Until when will we passively accept the escalation of paid education?” Students tied the escalation directly to the 1968 Reforma.Footnote ⁸²

Meanwhile, these students' colleagues in the UFF Engineering department criticized the Reforma Universitária and the military's educational program since the 1960s more generally, lambasting the military's economic policies and claiming that the educational enterprise had become completely disconnected from Brazil's economic realities. They also suggested that the military's academic purges and efforts to strip campuses of any political activity rendered universities little more than “a prop for its [the dictatorship's] own maintenance” by eliminating the critical thinking and political organizing conducive to contesting the dictatorship.Footnote ⁸³ In challenging the Reforma Universitária directly, universities served as both the physical and discursive sites through which students challenged the military regime more generally.

Even private schools whose operations were not directly governed by the Reforma Universitária were critical of the government's policy. At PUC-Rio, students complained that theirs was the “first university in Brazil to apply the Reforma Universitária,” and second only to UFRJ's engineering and architecture school in the number of graduate theses defended. Until 1972, the article went on, PUC had sought to apply the Reforma Universitária by hiring more professors and directing its program toward teaching and research in an effort “to respond to the governmental policy.” Yet, by 1973, this program “revealed itself to be impractical, and … PUC entered into great crisis,” asking for a four million dollar loan from abroad just to be able to pay its faculty.Footnote ⁸⁴ The threat of foreign debt carried with it echoes of the fear of dependence upon US cultural imperialism via education. The incident served as a reminder that in spite of the regime's hope that the Reforma Universitária would improve higher education, the growing uncertainty and failures of the government program provided students new avenues to critique the regime on its failed social policies.

These perceived failures continued to multiply as the decade progressed. By the mid 1970s, it became clear that the issues of excedentes (students who passed entrance exams but for whom there were no openings) and the shortage of vagas (available positions for students in universities) had returned. This was particularly troubling for the military's educational program, as the Reforma Universitária had the specific goal of permanently addressing the matter of excedentes and vagas, both of which had been very real problems in the 1960s.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1975, students again noted that there were not enough openings nationwide for the number of matriculating students. At the Second National Seminar of Engineering Students—a national meeting that students utilized early on to attempt to reestablish national connections that the crackdown on UNE had eliminated—a pamphlet circulated among students pointing out that across the nation's 848 universities, faculdades, and private schools, there were only 940,000 openings for over one million students. Students claimed that this situation had led to a deficit of 160,000 vagas—nearly three times the entire capacity of the University of São Paulo, the country's largest university and exceeding the number of students enrolled in all universities and colleges in 1964.Footnote ⁸⁶ At UFF, some students blamed the termination of the astronomy and architecture programs on budget cuts, and the lack of infrastructure on overcrowding. The military police placed the blame elsewhere, declaring that “the greater problem is created by repeating students,” citing an administrative report from within UFF that indicated a failure rate of 80 percent out of a group of 120 students. According to the secret police, the number of students repeating the courses was thereby responsible for insufficient vagas for the next incoming class.Footnote ⁸⁷

Yet security agents' predilection to blame the students could not mask the fact that the dictatorship's educational policies, combined with the policy of jubilação, were making it more, not less, difficult for students to gain access to universities—the very problem that had been a cornerstone of students' demands in the 1960s. Psychology students in Belo Horizonte satirically reported on the “novelties” students could expect in 1977: “The number of lines increased and the number of vagas decreased!!!” The results, the pamphlet went on, were that many students could not matriculate in obligatory courses, and a greater number failed to receive passing grades in classes outside of their program.Footnote ⁸⁸ Newer students were finding it harder to enroll in courses where older students were being “held back,” leading to a bottleneck that left even fewer openings. Given that the regime had defended its 1968 Reforma Universitária in no small part on the grounds that it would make universities more accessible and get rid of the problem of too many applicants for too few openings—a major issue in the 1960s—both current and prospective students were increasingly willing to mobilize against the regime over such educational policies. Rather than addressing more overtly political issues and risking being branded as subversives, students pointed to vagas as evidence of the military's inability to uphold even that small end of the bargain promised by its Reforma Universitária.

The state was also unprepared for the dramatic increase in the number of students in the expanded university system that the Reforma Universitária itself had sought to amend. Students pointed out that the rapid expansion of student enrollment did not witness an accompanying increase in qualified faculty. Indeed, purges following the 1968 edicts suspended professors deemed subversive, further undermining universities' ability to educate students.Footnote ⁸⁹ The result was that universities hired under-qualified professors. The association of graduate students at PUC-Rio reported that higher education enrollment had increased by 131 percent from 1969 to 1973, and pointed out that of the professors hired to deal with this growth (and to replace those whom the regime had purged), “61 percent only have a Bachelors' degree, and 22 percent of these only have technical degrees; only eight percent have a Master's degree; and nine percent a doctoral degree.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Students throughout Brazil lamented the faculty shortages. Another article that circulated at the 1975 Second National Seminar of Engineering Students condemned the “failings in the curricula, the low level of professors and students, elevated fees, deficient installations and, principally, the lack of an opportunity to participate more in the solutions of the problems of the school.”Footnote ⁹¹ This latter point implicitly tapped into the undemocratic conditions on campuses that excluded students' voices from decision-making. Students at UFF, UFRJ, and UFPE echoed similar sentiments, going so far as to call higher education “a public calamity,” allowing the universities to serve as both real and emblematic examples of the military regime's failure to improve the federal universities and, in a larger arena, to help Brazil achieve overall progress.Footnote ⁹²

Although private universities were exempt from some of the Reforma Universitária provisions, several were quick to follow its prescriptions, and all schools in fact felt the effects of its incomplete implementation. Due to the cost of rapid expansion and the reduction in the percentage of the federal budget devoted to education, the military government could not expand the federal university system fast enough. Consequently, private universities increasingly saw their schools fill with the students whom public universities could not accommodate, a situation that led in turn to rapid growth and overcrowding in private universities. As this process accelerated, students at private universities joined their colleagues in the federal universities in complaining about the Reforma.

Student Demands, Commodified Degrees, and the Role of Higher Education

Further, students felt that the government, in its rush to expand the university system, had left the faculty at federal universities woefully unprepared and unqualified. Echoing the rhetoric of the 1960s, a student directorate at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais declared that “the University today, instrumentalized to serve the dominant sectors in accord with this phase of capitalist development, reduces higher education to fragmented, super-specialized, and non-integrating professionalization. The transmission of broad scientific knowledge and learning has been completely abandoned in favor of alienated professional training that serves the interest of business.”Footnote ⁹³

Students also criticized private businesses for their failure to invest in the development of technology on campuses, accusing business elites and the government of viewing the universities only as vehicles for the “formation of cheap and technical labor with the capacity to use and adapt imported technologies.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In this framing, students were genuinely interested in improving higher education and in turn the nation, while business elites were seeking only their own profit. Thus, students symbolically framed the universities as the medium through which national development would occur: only students combatting the military's Reforma Universitária were working in the nation's interest. Such a discursive move allowed students in the 1970s to reclaim the mantle of representing the true interests of the nation—much as they had done in the 1960s, albeit in a very different mode and context.

Students also felt that state-led efforts to increase the number of white-collar professionals to accelerate national development was having a negative effect on their education. Early in the decade, leftist students' campus newspapers emphasized that higher education should not aim to create technical professionals with narrow interests, but should instead provide a humanist education.Footnote ⁹⁵ These students felt that their training had become too narrow for them to take their broader place in Brazilian society as university-trained professionals. In the 1960s, conservatives in government like Aliomar Baleeiro had accused students of viewing degrees as commodities; students in the 1970s redirected such rhetoric, claiming that the emphasis on technical know-how commodified and devalued university degrees to suit the narrow-minded, self-serving, capitalist goals of the Brazilian state.Footnote ⁹⁶

Instead of providing a humanistic education for Brazilian students, degrees had become another item exchanged on a market, violating the traditional function of higher education in Brazil. One student newspaper article condemned the government for “dangerously pushing students for the exclusive search for a diploma at whatever cost.”Footnote ⁹⁷ A pamphlet found on UFRJ's campus similarly observed, “As the number of graduates increased at an accelerated rhythm, the value of the graduation diploma fell.”Footnote ⁹⁸ An article in the alternative newspaper Opinião declared that the commodification of degrees expanded “the market of those who have a high school diploma [who] were eager to consume higher education.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Students at an independent college in São Paulo published an article bluntly inquiring whether they were attending a college or a diploma factory.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At PUC-Rio, students produced a pamphlet featuring the stories of four fictional students who, they assured the reader, “although created by us, are not imaginary people. Any similarity between them and hundreds of students at PUC/RJ, in 1975, is not a mere coincidence.”

The case of one of the four, “Jorge,” mentioned above in this article, illustrated the issue of commodification. Jorge was anxious about the value of his college education for his own professional mobility and the economic security of his family. Using Jorge's imagined narrative, the students criticized the quality of education, with professors who saw students as “empty boxes in which they deposit all of the knowledge they should acquire” for students to regurgitate on exams. They also condemned “the preoccupation with tests and exams and the need to work.” These activities “impede[s] Jorge from participating in other activities. He learns only the techniques of work, without a general vision, without a perspective.” As a result, instead of becoming a good citizen who contributes to society through critical thinking and the benefits of his humanist education, Jorge would become obsessed with good grades in the name of personal financial advancement.Footnote ¹⁰¹

These examples reveal the ways students used the government's rapid expansion and reform of the university system to undermine the effectiveness of the state under military rule. Even as they reshaped the educational context that state policy attempted to impose on them, they used those very issues against the state, to continue to challenge the military regime. Students decried narrow professionalization that led to a degree stripped of any of their broader philosophical or social concerns, such as the student's role in the university and in society. Additionally, this emphasis on college degrees for professionalization led to an increasingly glutted job market as the 1970s went on. When the press commented that “today we produce medical doctors who are unable to find work as doctors, journalists who cannot be journalists, professors who do not learn,” it simply echoed a growing frustration among many students that rapid university expansion had left university graduates under-educated and the job market oversaturated.Footnote ¹⁰²

Poor campus infrastructure did nothing to brighten this situation or impede student demands. In 1975, attendees from around the country at a national meeting of medical students—another gathering in which leftist students organized and exchanged ideas in the absence of UNE—drafted a resolution on universities in Brazil. The resolution decried the fact that universities throughout the Brazil “did not have even the minimum number of books required for courses,” and suffered from an “absence of laboratories” and “didactic books for free consultation.” In the resolution, students also demanded “improvements in the material conditions of education.” These quotidian issues had come to serve as means to criticize the social policies, and thus the political legitimacy, of the regime.Footnote ¹⁰³ That it was medical students who in this instance contested the regime's policies was particularly ironic: along with engineering, medicine was an area that the military had praised and favored for its apolitical nature and its importance in national development.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Although the government had focused on improving medical schools, medical students were increasingly dissatisfied with their education and mobilized to contest the regime and its policies. At these national meetings, students from schools from throughout Brazil were able to meet and learn that these deficiencies were not isolated to certain campuses, but were a major issue confronting Brazilian education in general.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Students vociferously complained about the “physically deficient conditions” of campuses that were “inadequate” compared to the number of students entering the university system.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Leftist leaders even referred to these mobilizations as deploying “drinking-fountain tactics: it began with the drinking fountain and ended in imperialism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ While not all who mobilized used “ended in imperialism” in their rhetoric, the impact of such tactics was real. Even as UNE made its return at the end of the decade, student leaders looked back and acknowledged that these infrastructure issues had become a central pillar in bringing students together to reconstitute the organization.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Annex

For student mobilization in Brazil in the long 1960s, see Victoria Langland, Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); James N. Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Colin Snider, “'A More Systemic Fight for Reform': University Reform, Student Movements, Society, and the State in Brazil, 1957–1968,” in The Third World in the Global 1960s, Samantha Christiansen and Zachary Scarlett, eds. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 101–115; Maria Paula Araujo, Memórias estudantis: da fundação da UNE aos nossos dias (Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro Publicações S.A., 2007); Antônio de Padua Gurgel, A rebelião dos estudantes: Brasília, 1968 (Brasília: Editora Revan, 2004); Arthur José Poerner, O poder jovem: história da participação política dos estudantes brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1979); Roberto A. Salmeron, A universidade interrompida: Brasília 1964–1965, 2nd ed. (Brasília: Editora UnB, 2007); Maria Ribeiro do Valle, 1968: O diálogo é a violência – Movimento estudantil e ditadura militar no Brasil (Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2008); and Zuenir Ventura, 1968: O ano que não terminou: a aventura de uma geração, 13th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988).

For Latin American cases outside of Brazil, see Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Vania Markarian, Uruguay, 1968: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktails (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); Jaime Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); and Heather Vrana, “Do Not Mess with Us!”: Students and the State in Guatemala City, 1944–1996 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

For armed militancy in Brazil, see Jeffrey Lesser, A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980 (Durham: Duke University Pres, 2007); José Caldas da Costa, Caparaó: a primeira guerrilha contra a ditadura (São Paulo: Boitempo Editora, 2007); Elio Gaspari, A ditadura escancarada (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002); Jacob Gorender, Combate nas Trevas – A Esquerda Brasileira: Das Ilusões Perdidas à Luta Armada (São Paulo: Editora Atica, 1987); Fernando Portela, Guerra de guerrilhas no Brasil: A saga do Araguaia (São Paulo: Editora Terceiro Nome, 2002); and Liszt Vieira, A busca: memórias da Resistência (São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 2008). For armed resistance to regimes outside of Brazil, see Fernando Herrera Calderón and Adela Cedillo, eds., Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964–1982 (London: Routledge, 2012); Steve J. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973–1988 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and María José Moyano, Argentina's Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 1969–1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

For cultural forms of resistance, see Patrick Barr-Melej, Psychedelic Chile: Youth, Counterculture, and Politics on the Road to Socialism and Dictatorship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Christopher Dunn, Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, & Sexuality from Perón to Videla.(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); and Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).