Rudolph Atcon, entre o educacional e o urbanístico na definição de diretrizes para Campi Universitários no Brasil

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of the American consultant Rudolph Atcon on the review process of higher education in Brazil in the 1960s. Atcon was born in Greece and became an American citizen, a country where he had a thorough education, coursing civil engineering (1943) and liberal arts (1951), and completing a graduate's course in philosophy of science and symbolic logic. He developed several studies in Brazil since 1951. In this context, his activities in the field of higher education stand out, which began in the early years of the CAPES (Campaign for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) and, subsequently, in the 1960s, in the context of agreements between the Brazilian Department of Education (MEC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The goal of these agreements was to establish arrangements to stimulate Brazilian education through technical and financial assistance, revising the existing system. In this period, he encouraged the creation of the CRUB (Council of Deans of Brazilian Universities) in 1966, where he served as secretary and drafted an important text on the planning of university spaces, the Manual Sobre o Planejamento Integral do Campus Universitário (Manual On the Integral Planning of the University Campus, 1970). This book had a wide reach in Brazilian universities precisely at the time of their physical expansion. In addition to Brazil and the United States, he also provided services to many universities in Latin American countries, such as Venezuela, Chile, Honduras and Colombia; and in Central America: Santo Domingo and Mexico. The objective of this study is to understand Atcon's thoughts on the university structure, both in a physical and educational sense, in addition to their impact on the planning of some Brazilian universities. As such, two types of university cities were analyzed. the first type included the campuses that the consultant himself highlighted as physical models of his recommendations: Ufes and UFPA; the second selection sought out a university on which he didn’t work directly, but that was established at the same time as the others, in order to understand how the ideas advocated by the consultant circulated across the country. For this analysis the campus of Unicamp was selected. For the development of this study primary sources were given priority, such as the publications in Brazil by Rudolph Atcon himself, including letters obtained from UNESCO's Documentation Center and the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (Research and Documentation Center of Contemporary History in Brazil, CPDOC); as well as documents pertaining to the founding of the selected universities. For a broader understanding of the period under study, secondary sources including texts that describe and evaluate his performance in Brazil were also used.