Good morning! Education Ministry to financially smother leftist universities. Pandering to the base: churches and agribusiness. Bolsonaro at Agrishow. Bolsonaro provokes another rollercoaster day on the stock market.
Education Ministry to financially smother ‘leftist’ universities
Newly-appointed Education Minister Abraham Weintraub has started a process to financially strangle federal universities which are perceived to be “ideologically opposed” to the government. The first targets are federal universities in Brasília, Rio (UFF), and Bahia. The ministry has to cut BRL 230m in spending—and more than half of this comes from these 3 institutions, which lost 30% of their budgets.
What these universities have in common is a strong left-leaning agenda. UFF hosted a controversial event “against fascism” during the 2018 campaign—aimed at Jair Bolsonaro—while the University of Brasília has recently hosted debates with Workers’ Party presidential candidate Fernando Haddad and created a political science course to analyze the “2016 coup”—as the left calls Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment.
Education Minister Weintraub is a disciple of self-described philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, the guru of Bolsonarism. He has linked homosexuality to pedophilia and left-leaning thoughts to drug abuse. He has repeatedly criticized the influence of left-leaning...