Been some Occupation down South American Way. (Ah, the very phrase, the very song “South American Way” – if Ricochet’s hyperlink-insertion system only worked, I’d insert one for Marisa Monte’s version. Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi/Have you everrr danced in the trrropics/in that hazy lazy-like/kind of crrrazy-like/South American Way! But I digress.) Any, um, Way, students at the University of São Paulo (USP) were unlawfully lodging themselves in various buildings, and the cops had to roust ‘em, and online commenters commented on how shame would be brought to their families – in Brazil, people rarely swear and sem-vergonha, a “shameless one,” is a harsh though ineffective epithet – and here we are, back wherever Brazilians started.

The episode isn’t really related to the Occupy capers here but it does point out, at least to me, that there are at least two profound differences between American and other universities, not one as I had long imagined. All universities produce roughly the same thing, but American U’s produce one, maybe two other things as well.

I don’t mean just football teams, or alumni associations, or licensed apparel, although that is the case. The paraphernalia of “college” is unknown in Brazil, and perhaps in all other countries. Maybe even Canada, though I did once see a kid on the train to Newfoundland wearing a Dalhousie sweatshirt, and I did hear a roar from the U of Manitoba’s stadium as the Bisons (sic) did something. What I mean is: scientists.

Universities outside the U.S. produce almost no scientists. There was on the cover of Science magazine a few months ago, ludicrously, “Science in Egypt,” but it could’ve been Brazil, or Rwanda, or Wrigley Field. What is science education like in a place like Brazil? I recall lingering near some students at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, as they struggled to translate paragraphs from Chemical Abstracts. The institution had a Sala de NMR, and there was the reassuring smell of ether; but seriously, you can’t study chemistry in such an underprovided place. You can’t just read about it. But that’s what the minimal fraction of would-be scientists does in such a place. Brazil will produce little in this field.

(Weirdly, it promises the same in computer science, a field where hardware needs are minimal and you can just read about it, then do it.)

But I knew that. What I didn’t know, or didn’t bother to think about until both the Occupy business and the USP ructions (which were, quaintly, just about kids being arrested after smoking dope, itself a protest against a police presence on campus)  was that liberal-arts output here and there differ profoundly. All produce petty aristocrats. What we see now here is that U.S. U’s also produce – disastrously – petty aristocrats-in-waiting. And if there’s anything an aristocrat hates, it’s waiting. The Occupy phenomenon is assuredly just an intramural upper-class quarrel the rest of us have to watch and smell. 

I don’t think you see that in Brazil. Universities in Brazil produce lawyers, few of whom practice; but also people who majored in Tourism or Social Communication. There have got to be Marketing majors in there, too. But except for the med students, I’ve never known what folks get out of college thereabouts. Certainly not “training” in any sense, and not “status” either. So what is it that they are about? I don’t know – even after factoring in that Southern-Hemisphere final exams are, like, right now, man!