Crisis at PUC-SP

meeting of the Centro Acadêmico in the courtyards of the Social Sciences building at PUC

From what I understand (and I’m sure I’m missing a lot here), PUC is going through a financial crisis...and like any crisis in Brazil, or in the world for that matter, the issue is much deeper than what's on the surface. first, PUC is a catholic university and their funding comes from some Church bubble that has a local department in the state of São Paulo. PUC receives money and then later has to pay it back. Except over the years, PUC has not been able to pay back the money, so they've turned to banks here in Brazil for loans. Needless to say, loans here have VERY high interest rates and there's no way PUC can pay them at the moment. so they kept taking out loans, and now not only owe money to the church, but to the banks also. the banks stopped loaning PUC money and requested that the church put pressure on PUC to pay back the money. so what've they had to do? they've had to cut back on their expenses, and the biggest expense is professor salaries. PUC was supposed to get rid of 30% of their faculty in January/February. so they fired a large number of professors, mostly professors without contracts who were teaching now and then when they were needed. except they didn’t reach that goal of 30% and now the church is pressuring them to fire actual professors ( i.e. what we would consider professors with tenure). the issue with this is that now there are several classes without teachers, and the students are starting to mobilize because they have classes without profs, and this is a breach of contract. PUC is a paid university, and so when you pay the money, you're paying for professors to be in your class, and now that this is being put at risk, the students are rising up about it. there's been a lot of talk about having a strike, but that's only part of the student population. they have a student government here called Centro Academico, and the representatives in this assembly are calling for a strike, but the deal is that not everyone agrees with their point of view. for example, the people in one of my classes are opposed a strike, where as the people that take night classes tend to agree more with the assembly. so there's no telling what's going to happen at this point. our CIEE classes will continue as normal. in any case, this is an extremely interesting time to be at PUC.