A Universidade que premeia quem sempre se cala e castiga quem ainda ousa pensar

Depois de dois posts anteriores com títulos tão pouco equívocos como um publicado no dia 25 de Maio, “A quem interessa fabricar uma Academia que ladra baixinho e nunca morde?”, que se tornou o 5.º mais visualizado nos últimos trinta dias, ou um outro, publicado no dia 29 de Maio, que conseguiu tornar-se muito rapidamente o 2.º mais visualizado no mesmo período, sobre “A extraordinária falta de vergonha de uma conhecida universidade pública”, é quase reconfortante porém nada surpreendente ler, na primeira semana de Junho, um artigo da revista Sábado intitulado “O medo na academia, o espelho do país”.

O autor escreve sobre uma academia asfixiante, onde a crítica deixou de ser entendida como dever intelectual e passou a ser tratada como delito disciplinar informal. Um espaço onde quem ousa discordar arrisca isolamento, o silêncio administrativo, a exclusão de redes, o bloqueio de oportunidades e outras formas higiénicas de punição institucional, discreta, eficaz, cobarde, rotineira, silenciosa e exemplar que raramente deixam impressões digitais.

Mas o ponto mais inquietante suscitado pelo artigo é outro: este medo não fica fechado dentro das universidades. Transborda para a sociedade. Quando os académicos se calam por receio de represálias, os cidadãos percebem que até aqueles que deveriam pensar livremente aprenderam a falar em voz baixa. E quando a inteligência pública se ajoelha diante do medo disciplinador, a confiança nas instituições não pode senão apodrecer.

Não admira por isso que numa lista dos países cujos cidadãos mais confiam nas instituições públicas, Portugal nem sequer consegue aparecer entre os 20 primeiros colocados. Afinal, que confiança merecem as instituições públicas se até a academia que devia vigiá-las e expor os seus abusos se domesticou ao ponto de transformar a autocensura em método, o silêncio em carreira e a cobardia em prudência institucional, respeitável e conveniente?

PS - É curioso, ou talvez apenas deprimente, ver como o tema não envelhece. Há cinco anos questionei: "Como pode a Universidade interpelar a sociedade se os próprios professores têm medo de falar?". Cinco anos depois, a pergunta morreu de excesso de evidência. O medo deixou de ser sintoma para ser regime. A liberdade académica continua lá, claro — embalsamada com todas as honras, nos regulamentos, nos discursos solenes, e nas cerimónias oficiais. Existe onde não incomoda. Onde seria necessária, faz-se cadáver.

Climate Apartheid and the Cruel Shadow Line of Segregation Across European Cities

https://shop.elsevier.com/books/eco-efficient-materials-for-reducing-cooling-needs-in-buildings-and-construction/pacheco-torgal/978-0-12-820791-8

As my colleagues and I prepare the new edition of Eco-efficient Materials for Reducing Cooling Needs in Buildings and Construction (linked above), the heat dome that suffocated Europe in late May 2026 made clear: cooling can no longer be dismissed as a footnote to the climate crisis. It is becoming a precondition for survival, dignity, social equality and ordinary urban life in increasingly overheated cities. Portugal registered a May temperature record of 40.3 °C in Mora, while France endured its hottest May day ever recorded — midsummer arriving weeks too early on a continent warming more than twice as fast as the global average.

A recent study reveals what this overheating actually does to urban life across different social groups. Writing in PNAS Nexus, researchers analysed mobile-phone mobility data covering 13 million people, providing an unusually large-scale picture of how extreme heat alters everyday movement and activity. They found that mobility falls by up to 10% on hot days and by as much as 20% on hot afternoons, precisely when exposure becomes most dangerous and the need for effective cooling becomes most urgent.https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/4/pgag078/8651395

Predictably, the burden is not shared equally. Older adults retreat most sharply from daily life, while lower-income people remain more exposed because avoiding work is a privilege they cannot afford. Social mixing declines and activity drains from city centres. Extreme heat does not merely raise electricity bills or mortality figures; it quietly turns cities into places where normal life becomes increasingly reserved for those with the resources to escape indoors.

The conclusion should now be impossible to avoid: cooling is no longer a matter of comfort, architectural refinement or reduced energy consumption. It is about whether people can still work, move, meet and inhabit their cities as Europe rapidly, relentlessly and dangerously overheats — and whether the poorest will once again be forced to pay the highest price. Eco-efficient cooling materials are no longer a niche energy-saving solution. They are part of the basic infrastructure required to prevent liveable cities from becoming a climatic privilege.

PS - The brutal truth behind all this is simple: when a city begins to divide between those who can buy their way into cooled interiors and those condemned to endure the street, the bus stop, the workplace and the overheated flat, we are no longer merely describing a heatwave. We are watching segregation being modernised quietly, brutally, and in plain sight — drawn no longer on maps, but on overheated bodies and homes, in poverty-weighted degrees Celsius.

Europe’s Humiliating Exodus: How Rigged Excellence Betrays Its Peripheral Talent

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-humiliating-lie-behind-europes.html

In the previous post, linked above, I argued that Europe’s technological humiliation is not the result of insufficient talent, but of its refusal to give talent the power to matter. The continent trains exceptional researchers, deprives them of the compute, capital and scale needed to compete, and then acts surprised when the United States absorbs them. But emigration is only the end of the betrayal. Long before Europe loses researchers across the Atlantic, it abandons many at home — by reserving the laboratories, networks, investment and institutional advantages that make innovation possible for regions rich enough to possess them.

A paper just published in Higher Education makes the pattern unusually clear. Examining direct university patenting across 2,886 institutions in 31 European countries and 295 regions between 2011 and 2019, it lands on precisely the kind of finding European policymakers adore: universities drawing a larger share of their revenue from competitive, third-party funding file more patents, and patents with greater citation impact, than those relying mainly on core public allocations. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-026-01687-1?

More competition, more entrepreneurship, more innovation: the familiar Brussels catechism. But the sermon collapses the moment one asks where this supposedly meritocratic machinery actually works. The relationship between third-party funding and university patenting is strongest in Europe’s richest regions, weaker in middle-income ones, and negligible in the poorest. In other words, the funding system does not level the field; it pours further advantage into the regions already equipped with laboratories, industrial partners, investors, networks and prestige. 

Europe calls it excellence. In practice, it is accumulated advantage receiving another instalment. The numbers expose the underlying obscenity. The concentration is not merely uncomfortable; it is grotesque. Universities in just five countries — Germany, the UK, France, Belgium and Switzerland — account for more than 70% of all direct patent application, while 73% of the universities examined filed no direct patents at all.

This is the missing half of Europe's talent story. The continent concentrates opportunity in a narrow core, leaves everyone else to compete in a game whose decisive assets were handed out long before the whistle, and then acts surprised when its most ambitious researchers — having found that even Europe's privileged core cannot match the scale on offer in California — leave the continent altogether. Talent flows uphill at every level: from the periphery to the core, and from the core to America.

The mechanism is brutally simple. Poorer regions are told to compete harder in a system whose laboratories, industrial partners, venture capital, reputations and grant-winning machinery are already concentrated among the winners. When the periphery predictably struggles, it is lectured about ambition and entrepreneurial culture. And the winners applaud. Europe has built one of its most elegant, deeply cynical and politically useful machines: a device for laundering inherited advantage through the vocabulary of merit. Historical concentration becomes competitive success. Institutional wealth becomes performance. Regional privilege becomes innovation policy. And geography, at last, is renamed excellence.

PS - My own country offers a revolting illustration of how Europe betrays its peripheral talent. Portugal uses scarce public money to train scientists such as Cristiana Pires, Fábio Rosa and Filipe Pereira — only for a system rigged in favour of Europe’s rich core where they can build an innovative cancer-biotech company worth tens of millions of euros. The poor periphery pays for the brains; the wealthy core captures the company, the investment, the qualified jobs and the wealth. Europe calls it scientific mobility. The honest name is organised extraction: rich countries becoming richer by absorbing the stolen future of poorer ones. 

Update after 1 day - Blogger analytics indicate that the majority of views for this post come from the USA (17%), Germany (16%), Finland (6%) and Sweden (5%).