University of Campinas

The State University of Campinas (Portuguese: Universidade Estadual de Campinas), commonly called Unicamp, is a public research university in the state of São Paulo, Brazil.

Established in 1962, Unicamp was designed from scratch as an integrated research center unlike other top Brazilian universities, usually created by the consolidation of previously existing schools and institutes. Its research focus reflects on almost half of its students being graduate students, the largest proportion across all large universities in Brazil, and also in the large number of graduate programs it offers: 153 compared to 70 undergraduate programs. It also offers several non-degree granting open-enrollment courses to around 8,000 students through its extension school.

Its main campus occupies 3.5 square kilometres (860 acres) located in the district of Barão Geraldo, a suburban area 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) from the downtown center of Campinas, built shortly after the creation of the university. It also has satellite campuses in Limeira, Piracicaba and Paulínia, and manages two technical high schools located in Campinas and Limeira. Funding is provided almost entirely by the state government and, like other Brazilian public universities, no tuition fees or administrative fees are charged for undergraduate and graduate programs.

Unicamp is responsible for around 15% of Brazilian research, a disproportionately high number when compared to much larger and older institutions in the country such as the University of São Paulo. It also produces more patents than any other research organization in Brazil, being second only to the state-owned oil company, Petrobras.

History

1960s: Foundation

In the early 1960s the Government of the State of São Paulo planned to open a new research center in the interior of the state to promote development and industrialization in the region, and commissioned Zeferino Vaz, founder of the University of São Paulo's School of Medicine in Ribeirão Preto, to organize it. In parallel, a medical school was being planned in Campinas, a demand from the local population that dated from the early 1940s. The School of Medicine of Campinas was created by law in 1959, but actual implementation never took place.

The new university was created by law on December 28, 1962, but effective functioning begun in 1966. Before that, only the School of Medicine functioned. In April 1963 the first vestibular, the general admissions exam, was conducted, with 1,592 candidates competing for 50 spots in the medicine program. The first lecture in the newly created University of Campinas took place on May 20 of the same year. By 1965, the organizing commission for the new university started looking for a location for a new campus.

A large area comprising 110 hectares (270 acres) was donated by the Almeida Prado family, located in a valley in the district of Barão Geraldo in the city of Campinas, near the intersections of multiple highways. Until then, Barão Geraldo was a small village surrounded by farmland, in particular sugar cane plantations. The new development brought dramatic change to the district, resulting in entire new neighborhoods being zoned, planned and built, usually by the same Almeida Prado family.

Work on the new campus began on October 5, 1966, and the first building completed was the Institute of Biology, followed by administrative buildings. In the same year, Zeferino Vaz was nominated the rector. In parallel to the new campus, new units were opened in other cities, absorbing local schools. The Dental School of Piracicaba was absorbed in 1967, and in 1969 the Engineering School of Limeira.

1970–1990: Growth and crisis

Over the following two decades, the new university expanded rapidly. The campus quickly grew to 19 institutes and schools, and after Zeferino Vaz died in 1981 was named after him. With the campus construction completed, the School of Medical Sciences (formerly the School of Medicine of Campinas) was moved into the new campus, and its teaching hospital, Hospital de Clínicas, became the largest public hospital in the region.

Expansion on the campus continued rapidly, with new buildings, institutes and expansions being added nearly every year. However, by the late 1970s, the university faced a crisis. During its rapid expansion, it relied on draft bylaws, mostly borrowed from the University of São Paulo, and lacked formal internal regulations with the aging Zeferino Vaz, while no longer the rector, acting as a moderating force between parties with conflicting interests, in particular the leftist academic community and the State's government, appointed by the conservative military regime ruling the country.

Campus

Main campus

The flagship campus of the University of Campinas is located in the district of Barão Geraldo, 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) from the center of Campinas. It currently occupies an area of 350 hectares (860 acres) situated in a valley surrounded by gentle rolling hills and is bounded on the west by the urban area of Barão Geraldo, on the south and east by farmland and to the north by a lake and a new industrial park built in the 2000s.

Design

The campus has a unique design, with the main library, student service buildings and restaurant in a central circular plaza, and most of the academic buildings located in blocks emanating from the center in a radial fashion. The different areas of study are grouped in larger sections, but neighboring other areas with which they share similarities: the philosophy buildings mark the frontier between human sciences, mathematics and economics, while the School of Food Engineering is bordered by the chemical engineering and biology buildings. The architect responsible for the overall design of the campus was João Carlos Bross.

Streets are named after significant contributors to each field, including Elis Regina and Carlos Gomes Streets, a Brazilian singer and a composer, respectively, Alan Turing Avenue and others.

History

The area occupied by the campus was part of the much larger Rio das Pedras farm, owned by the prominent Almeida Prado family. In order to establish a new campus, Zeferino Vaz was looking for a large, flat area in the outskirts of the city, where he would have the freedom to design the campus and its surroundings from scratch. Interested in developing the area of the farm around Barão Geraldo, the family donated an initial area of 110 hectares (270 acres) to the university. The remainder of the farmland was eventually zoned and developed into multiple neighborhoods, but the main historical farmhouse and its surroundings remain, now a protected heritage site and a natural reserve.

With the land secured, the campus was designed in a way to ensure the maximum collaboration between the different sciences, with buildings laid along radial streets emanating from a central circular plaza, which also hosted administrative buildings. The layout of the campus would eventually be used on the design of the university's logo, created by Max Schiefer, which is essentially a simplified map of the core circle of the campus. This design is similar to the University of California, Irvine campus, build around the same time.

Construction started in 1966, with General Castello Branco, the first president of Brazil's military regime, laying the cornerstone of the Institute of Biology, which was inaugurated in 1968, and classes started in the new campus on the following year. In 1971 the area of the campus was expanded by 130 hectares (320 acres), more than doubling its size, to accommodate the move of the School of Medical Sciences, until then located across several buildings in Campinas, to the new campus. This expansion saw the construction of a massive public hospital, the Hospital das Clínicas (HC), which began serving the public in 1979.

Organization and administration

Similarly to other Brazilian institutions, Unicamp is composed of several semi-autonomous teaching units, designated as schools and institutes. Each unit is headed by a director from the faculty, equivalent to a dean, elected by the faculty and student representatives.

The university's administration is structured in a way similar to other public universities in Brazil. The supreme decision body is the University Council (CONSU), composed of all deans, plus several representatives from the academic community, students, administrative staff and the external community. The council meets roughly 4 to 5 times per year, ruling on high level administrative decisions such as approving the budget and has the final word in internal administrative processes. Routine administration is left to the rector, similar to a university chancellor in English-speaking countries, and the rectorate.

Rectors

The rector is chosen by the governor of the State of São Paulo from a list of 3 candidates elected by the university's community, including students and administrative staff. Traditionally, the governor always selects the candidate with the largest number of votes, but it retains the power to choose a different one should it decide to do so. The rector serves for a term of 4 years before a new election is held, and can not be reelected in the following term. Zeferino Vaz was the first rector and held the position for 12 years until his mandatory retirement.

• Zeferino Vaz (1966–1978)
• Plínio Alves de Moraes (1978–1982)
• José Aristodemo Pinotti (1982–1986)
• Paulo Renato Costa Souza (1986–1990)
• Carlos Vogt (1990–1994)
• José Martins Filho (1994–1998)
• Hermano Tavares (1998–2002)
• Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz (2002–2005)
• José Tadeu Jorge (2005–2009)
• Fernando Ferreira Costa (2009–2013)
• José Tadeu Jorge (2013–2017)
• Marcelo Knobel (2017–2021)
• Antonio José de Almeida Meirelles, Tom Zé, (2021–2025)
• Paulo Cesar Montagner, Cesinha, (2025–present)

Schools and institutes

Unicamp is composed of a total of 24 units, 10 of which are institutes and 14 are schools. The university is also home to 22 interdisciplinary centers which conduct research and outreach on topics ranging from dance (such as LUME) to computing and education (such as NIED).

Unicamp is also responsible for two technical high schools, the Technical High School of Campinas (COTUCA) and the Technical High School of Limeira (COTIL).

Funding & financial information

Like other public universities in Brazil, Unicamp is almost entirely funded by the government, in this particular case of the State of São Paulo. Funding is provided mainly from sales taxes, but a small percentage of total budget is obtained from donations, paid extension programs and corporate sponsors.

Academics

At Unicamp, academic studies are usually divided into four main areas: exact sciences (which includes formal and physical sciences), human sciences (roughly equivalent to social science, including Arts), biological sciences (roughly equivalent to life sciences) and technologies (including engineering and technical studies). This division reflects on how the university are structured how the campuses was designed.

Undergraduate programs

Unicamp offers 70 different degree-granting undergraduate programs, covering nearly all different areas of science. Completing an undergraduate program grants either a bachelor's degree or a licentiate degree, although some programs offer both degrees. In line with the Brazilian educational system, no graduate education is required to practice any profession, including law and medicine, so undergraduate programs vary in length to provide all the necessary training. Most programs at Unicamp last a total of 4 years, with engineering programs typically lasting 5 years and medicine lasting 6 years.

The academic year is aligned with the calendar year, with classes usually starting in late February, and ending in early December, the beginning of summer in Brazil. The year is divided into two semester terms, and all courses are a semester long. While there is a suggested curriculum for each program, students are free to choose any classes to attend during a specific semester, and class attribution is done in the basis of grade average, with higher-graded students having priority when choosing classes.

Students are admitted to a single program and are expected to take all the classes required to complete that program in the number of semesters prescribed, although they can take 50% longer before facing administrative measures. While each program is usually managed by a single school or institute (exceptions apply, such as Computer Engineering, co-managed by the Institute of Computing and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering), classes are usually ministered across different institutes or schools.

Program class sizes usually range between 30 and 60 students per year for each program, but some programs can have over 100 students per year, and are named by the year of admission: the class of 2015 is composed of all students entering in the year of 2015, regardless of the program length or expected graduation. There is no campus-wide graduation ceremony, with each school or institute conducting its own.

Graduate programs

Unicamp offers 153 postgraduate programs, with about half of those being masters, serving almost 16 thousand students, one third of which come from outside the State of São Paulo, and around 5% are international students. Just as with undergraduate studies, students pay no tuition fees. While the programs are coordinated by the rectorship, the individual institutions have a lot of freedom on defining the focus, length and admission process of each program.

Admissions

Undergraduate programs

Similarly to other Brazilian public universities, admissions to undergraduate programs are through a comprehensive general examination, called vestibular. While other Brazilian public universities, specially federally managed ones, which use the National High School Exam (ENEM, in Portuguese Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio) as an entrance exam, Unicamp has its own national entrance exam applied yearly by its Vestibular Commission (COMVEST, in Portuguese Comissão Permanente para os Vestibulares) in two rounds. Generally, the first round happens in November and is a test composed of 90 multiple-choice general knowledge questions. Students applying to programs that require specific skills (such as music, architecture, dance, and others) must take a specific knowledge test even before the first phase.

Selection in the admissions process is program-specific. Applicants that score a minimum standardized grade in the first round are selected to participate in the second round, which takes place over three days in January, where they must answer 48 short-answer written questions, plus write two long-form essays, on themes selected by the evaluation board.

The Unicamp national exam is very competitive and is considered one of the most difficult in Brazil. In 2015 there were 77,145 applications for only 3,320 possible places, with 23 candidates competing for each position in an undergraduate program, an average acceptance rate of 4.3%. The exam covers all topics taught in the Brazilian high school system, including Portuguese, mathematics, Brazilian and world history, geography, biology, physics, chemistry, sociology, philosophy, arts and English. Despite that, questions in the exams are generally interdisciplinary.

Эх сурвалж: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)