The precarious teaching work in the higher education in Brazil

The Higher Education in Brazil from 1990 was marked by reforms that attended to the imperatives of the international agencies, in particular the World Bank that had a fundamental part in the dissemination of the neoliberal guidelines. This article raises questions in the current reform of the Higher Education in the country, emphasizing the expansion of private education, the investments in long distance courses, and the precarious situation of the teaching work. The results point to production-driven and meritocratic tendencies which reign in the education in detriment of research, demonstrating that the demeaning work conditions that demand an excessive workload of bureaucratic and administrative tasks, distancing themselves from the first function which is to build and disseminate critical knowledge. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.