As críticas de um catedrático e o roubo do futuro dos filhos das famílias mais pobres

Num excelente e contundente artigo hoje no jornal Público, o catedrático Luís M. Rocha parte de um dado que deveria envergonhar qualquer Governo, os estudantes provenientes das famílias mais pobres representam apenas 3% dos novos colocados no ensino superior, uma obscenidade social politicamente imperdoável, moralmente repugnante e civilizacionalmente indefensável (palavras minhas), para arrasar um sistema educativo que funciona, na prática, como "um mecanismo de autosselecção e preservação das classes dominantes, que têm melhores recursos para preparar os seus filhos". 

A formulação é rigorosa, mas poderia ser ainda mais acusatória. O sistema actual constitui um roubo descarado do futuro dos jovens das famílias mais pobres, praticado com a cumplicidade política de sucessivos governos. E foi precisamente esta vergonhosa fraude social que denunciei no texto “Aquecimento global provoca explosão de notas de 19 e 20 valores nos colégios privados em Portugal”. Um país que permite que a origem económica determine o acesso às melhores oportunidades não possui verdadeiramente um sistema meritocrático; possui apenas uma aristocracia hereditária disfarçada por médias viciadas.

Felizmente, porém que o ilustre catedrático Luís M. Rocha não se ficou "apenas" por esta denúncia. Atacou também o fracasso das universidades de Lisboa e do Porto, relegadas para uma posição humilhante nos escalões internacionais do prestigiado ranking de Shanghai de 2026. Este resultado representa um verdadeiro chumbo nas exigências de excelência com que os responsáveis daquelas duas universidades tanto gostam de encher a boca. Recordo que também escrevi sobre este fracasso, no dia 21 de Agosto, no post de título “Ranking Shanghai de 2026 — As universidades de Lisboa e Porto são as responsáveis por Portugal estar agora abaixo da Argentina”. 

As duas denúncias expõem as duas faces da mesma fraude. À entrada, o sistema esmaga os jovens pobres para reservar os melhores lugares aos herdeiros das classes dominantes; no topo, transforma a autonomia universitária num escudo destinado a proteger burocracias acomodadas, redes de interesses e estruturas incapazes de competir com a verdadeira excelência internacional. Aos pobres exige-se uma meritocracia implacável e adulterada; às elites académicas perdoam-se décadas de endogamia, mediocridade e fracasso. O resultado não é apenas um sistema injusto, é na verdade uma máquina de reprodução social que confisca o futuro dos mais desfavorecidos, distribui oportunidades segundo o berço e depois protege ferozmente os responsáveis pela irrelevância científica do país. Portugal não tem um elevador social nem um sistema universitário orientado para a excelência, tem uma fortaleza de privilégios, construída para manter os pobres do lado de fora e os medíocres confortavelmente instalados na Academia e protegidos pela impunidade institucional.

China Is Engineering Academic Fear and Expecting It to Produce Scientific Genius

In my recent post, Can China Engineer Scientific Genius?, I asked whether scientific genius could be deliberately manufactured by a state through massive investment, aggressive recruitment, publication incentives and the systematic reorganization of universities around national technological ambitions. China has now provided an unexpected and disturbing extension to that question. As reported by the Times Higher Education on 27 August, Tongji University, one of the country's most prestigious research institutions and one of the institutions selected at institutional level in the Double First Class initiative, has effectively abolished academic tenure. Under a notice that took effect in late July, pre-tenure academics will be assessed every three years, whereas tenured faculty will undergo an interim review every three years and a comprehensive assessment every six. Failure could result in salary cuts, demotion or dismissal. Simon Marginson, professor at the universities of Oxford and Bristol, has described the decision as "an earthquake in Chinese academia".

Tongji is therefore testing the opposite of academic security, whether scientific greatness can be produced by permanently exposing researchers to the possibility of professional decline. Yet fear is exceptionally effective at generating measurable activity and exceptionally poor at generating intellectual courage. Academics whose salaries, status and employment depend on recurrent assessments will rationally favour abundant publications, fashionable subjects, predictable results and projects capable of producing rapid indicators. They will be less willing to spend a decade pursuing a difficult idea, challenge an influential orthodoxy or undertake research whose importance might not become apparent within the next evaluation cycle. China may obtain more papers from such a system, but more papers are not necessarily more science and they are certainly not more genius.

Yet one of the strongest quasi-experimental studies of scientific incentives points decisively in the opposite direction. Azoulay et al. compared scientists appointed as Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators who received long-term support, freedom to change direction and explicit tolerance of early failure with similarly accomplished scientists operating under the NIH system of shorter review cycles, predefined deliverables and funding renewal less forgiving of failure. The HHMI investigators produced 55% more papers in the top 5% of the citation distribution and 97% more in the top 1%, while also moving into more novel lines of inquiry. The study demonstrated something directly relevant to Tongji’s experiment, when exceptional researchers are given time, autonomy and permission to fail, they do not become complacent, they become substantially more likely to produce exceptional science. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1756-2171.2011.00140.x

More worryingly, Tongji’s decision also directly undermines the vision I recently proposed in Civilizational Futures: Five Normative Imperatives for a Science-Based Civilization. Under the imperative to Liberate, I argued that humanity must stop wasting intelligence by creating environments in which caution is safer than intellectual risk. Under Know, I defended the systematic conquest of ignorance through institutions that preserve contradiction, uncertainty and dissent rather than suppressing them. And under Build, I argued that universities must be capable of funding research whose conclusions may belong to another generation. Tongji is moving in precisely the opposite direction. An academic who can be demoted, impoverished or dismissed at the next assessment according to criteria that have not even been defined, will be encouraged to protect a career rather than endanger it in pursuit of an uncertain truth. Six-year administrative horizons will displace scientific horizons that may require decades.

A science-based civilization cannot place researchers at the centre of humanity’s intellectual aspirations while simultaneously treating them as disposable production units under permanent managerial surveillance. Nor can it claim to admire discovery while rewarding primarily what can be counted before the next review. The most transformative ideas are often initially unfashionable, unproductive and apparently wrong; their survival depends on minds sufficiently secure to resist consensus and institutions sufficiently patient to tolerate failure. Tongji may believe that insecurity will eradicate complacency. In reality, it risks eradicating the independence, courage and long-term imagination from which scientific revolutions are born. Fear can manufacture obedience, frenetic publication and metric-compliant careers; it cannot manufacture genius. A civilization that terrorizes its intellectual explorers will not conquer ignorance; it will merely teach its brightest minds never to venture beyond the safety of the already known, where all scientific revolutions are born.

PS - Defending tenure does not mean defending academic impunity or turning it into lifelong welfare for academic cowards. Tenure exists to protect scholars who take intellectual risks, confront powerful interests, publicly defend inconvenient truths and speak when silence would be professionally safer. Academics who never question authority, defend persecuted colleagues, enter controversial debates or confront institutional wrongdoing do not need tenure, they have voluntarily embraced the obedience it was created to prevent. They demand protection for a freedom they refuse to exercise. Tenure should safeguard courage and intellectual independence not complacency, parasitism or carefully cultivated silence. As I have argued before, the rule should be simple: tenure, use it courageously or risk losing it.

A New Social Contract Between Science and Humanity Against Disinformation and Denial

On August 26, Nature argued that "South Africa’s proposed registration law for scientists could become “a template for the world”. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02568-4 The proposal deserves international attention because it confronts a question that every scientifically advanced society will eventually face: how can scientific power be made answerable without placing scientific inquiry under political permission?

Science has become too powerful to remain institutionally unaccountable. Scientific advice now shapes environmental permits, public-health decisions, agricultural systems, artificial intelligence and technologies capable of affecting entire populations and ecosystems. Yet most countries still rely on a fragmented mixture of qualifications, professional reputation, employer oversight and peer review, none of which necessarily prevents an incompetent or dishonest scientist from providing consequential advice. As an old engineer, I know that professional registration can protect the public by linking safety-critical responsibilities to demonstrated competence, ethical duties and enforceable accountability.

This regulatory vacuum has become more dangerous with the rise of organised movements hostile to scientific knowledge. Flat-earth beliefs may appear merely absurd, but vaccine denial, climate-change denial and other forms of manufactured doubt can cost lives, delay essential policies and erode the public’s capacity to distinguish evidence from propaganda. The danger becomes particularly acute when such movements recruit people with scientific credentials, because professional authority can make misinformation resemble legitimate scientific disagreement. No democratic society should criminalise ignorance, scepticism or dissent. It may, however, legitimately demand accountability when qualified professionals knowingly or recklessly misrepresent established evidence while performing activities with serious consequences for public health, safety or the environment. The ambition behind South Africa’s proposal is therefore not an attack on science. Properly designed, it could fill a regulatory vacuum that most countries have not yet acknowledged. 

But a global template must draw its boundaries with exceptional care. South Africa’s proposed Bill defines scientific practice broadly enough to include unpaid advice, while failing expressly to protect research, publication, peer review and public commentary. Unregistered practice could carry imprisonment of up to twelve months, and practising scientists are not guaranteed a majority on the ministerially appointed regulatory board. These provisions risk transforming accountability for harmful conduct into political control over who may speak with scientific authority. If copied elsewhere, such a model could give governments a ready-made legal instrument for disciplining inconvenient expertise while offering the public only the illusion that registration guarantees sound judgement.

The soundest professional regimes attach registration to defined, consequential responsibilities rather than to an entire intellectual identity: in engineering, for example, responsibility for certain safety-critical designs is tied to demonstrated professional competence; in medicine, prescribing medicines is a legally restricted act. Any regime worth exporting should follow the same principle and regulate risk rather than scientific identity. Compulsory registration should apply only to precisely defined activities whose negligent performance can directly endanger people or ecosystems, for example, certifying laboratory results, signing legally consequential environmental assessments or assuming responsibility for other safety-critical scientific services. Research, publication, peer review, public-interest communication, citizen science, whistle-blowing and unpaid community advice should be explicitly protected. 

The regulator should have an independently nominated scientific majority, transparent appointments and decisions, declared conflicts of interest and access to external judicial review. Sanctions should be proportional, correction and retraining for minor failures, suspension or fines for serious misconduct, and imprisonment only for intentional fraud, deliberate endangerment or persistent violation of a lawful order. Even reserved activities should be periodically reassessed against evidence of actual harm, preventing public protection from degenerating into professional closure. These safeguards would not make the law weaker. They would make it much tougher where danger is real and inapplicable where freedom is essential.

PS - This is where the argument of the manifesto, Civilizational Futures: Five Normative Imperatives for a Science-Based Civilization, meets a live legislative test. Know requires institutions capable of distinguishing reliable knowledge from incompetence and fraud, while preserving dissent and the freedom to challenge power. Care requires that scientific authority affecting people, other species and ecosystems carry enforceable responsibilities. Build requires institutions designed not only for the governments that create them, but also against future governments tempted to misuse them. A mature science-based civilization refuses to let disinformation and denial hide behind the language of dissent. When anufactured for profit or power, they become a business model whose product is preventable death. The answer is not to constrain inquiry, but to hold fully accountable anyone who wields, exploits or counterfeits scientific authority, while keeping humanity’s pursuit of truth fearless and free.