Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Accepted Paper:

Race-based affirmative action in Brazilian higher education  
David Lehmann (King's College London)

Paper short abstract:

An account of the 'quotas movement' which promoted the cause of positive discrimination principally for blacks in entry to state and federal universities, culminating in a historic Supreme Court decision and a law requiring Federal universities to establish a quota system for blacks and indigenous.

Paper long abstract:

Over a period of some 17 years a relatively small network of people conducted a campaign promoting the cause of 'quotas' for blacks in Brazilian public higher education at the undergraduate level. Their argument was that blacks suffer racial exclusion and are grossly underrepresented in HE and the only way to overcome this injustice is to allocate quotas for them. The campaign received strong and perhaps crucial support from the Ford Foundation, and was carried forward in university councils and the federal bureaucracy, and in community-based preparatory courses taught by volunteer staff, more than on the street. It was opposed by people who readily recognized the racial injustice but regarded official recognition of racial classification as a serious mistake which could have disastrous consequences for the country. By 2012 the Supreme Court had ruled that officially recognized racial classification was not unconstitutional and the Congress had passed a law requiring Federal Universities to set aside half their undergraduate places for people from state schools, divided between blacks, indigenous and students from low-income families. The paper will present a multi-layered account of these campaigns in several different institutional contexts, charting the movement's trajectory and the sometimes bitter polemics which divided the academic world for several years.

Panel P14
Higher education in Latin America: challenges of quality, equality, inclusion and recognition
  Session 1