The mission of the university during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The mission of a humanized university is to permanently engage in a dialogue with the community, in order to improve the general quality of life of the population, in the different contexts in which we live. In order to better understand the university's mission, the present study presents the institutional message, the opinions of its segments and examples of responses that USP produced over the past few months, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the narrative of the different speeches, there was a dissonant understanding of the participants in relation to the institution's performance in the challenging scenario. The difficulty of establishing effective communication was reflected in terms of its “identity crisis”, which probably results from the lack of a deep understanding of the institutional mission, in some of its active segments. Despite this dissonance, many of the responses found demonstrate a deep concern with maintaining the dignity of students, and the population in general. Invariably, it may be the occasion to think even more seriously about the repositioning the identity of higher education in Brazil and how to effectively conceive of a “multi-university”, defragmented and vigorous.