The State University of 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,Anuário Estatístico 2023 (Base 2022) - AEPLAN/UNICAMP 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 located in the district of Barão Geraldo, a suburban area 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 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.
After Zeferino's death in 1981, a conflict took place between the university's General Coordinator, appointed and backed by the government, and the Directive Council, composed of directors of different institutes. The rector introduced new rules reducing the power of the General Coordinator. As retaliation, the State's government removed 6 members of the Directive Council, replacing them with people from the state's Education Council, loyal to the governor, Paulo Maluf.Tensions between the academic community and the government-appointed counselors increased, with the future Minister of Education, Paulo Renato Costa Souza, then president of the Faculty Association, classifying the episode as a "white intervention". Following the dismissal of several institute heads and members of the administration, the administrative workers went on strike, with the support of students and faculty. With activities in the university frozen by the strike, the governor declared a formal intervention in the university in October 1981.
Despite the police-backed intervention, the university continued on strike. The appointed institute heads failed to break the stalemate between internal and external forces, and by early 1982, discussions began on a new list of candidates to the rectorship. Eventually, José Aristodemo Pinotti, a former dean of the School of Medical Sciences generally considered a moderate, was selected by the academic community and accepted by the governor. In the following week, on April 19, 1982, the intervention was lifted, and academic activities resumed normally.
After the crisis, Unicamp saw a period of renewal and restructuring. In 1983 the bylaws were rewritten, ensuring the autonomy of the academic community, and the new management structure for the campus was implemented. In 1986 the newly created University Council replaces the previous Directive Council as the supreme body of the university. The last years of the 1980s saw a reformulation of the admissions exam, expansion of the laboratories and the completion of the first units of the student housing.
1990 onwards
With a new administrative structure capable of supporting continuous growth and with its autonomy secured, Unicamp went through a period of consolidation in the 1990s. There was an increase in night programs, created to provide an alternative for low-income students who had to work during the day, and to increase utilization of classrooms and the existing infrastructure, reaching one third of total available places.
The period also saw an expansion of the technology industry in the region, centered around Unicamp, with Motorola, IBM, Solectron, Lucent Technologies and many others set up research labs and production centers in the region driven by the large number of highly qualified students graduating every year, culminating in the opening of the Institute of Computing in 1996.
In the 2000s Unicamp consolidated itself as one of the leading research and education centers in Latin America but also brought new challenges: just as with other public universities in Brazil, the high payroll costs (over 90% of the total budget) constrain investment and expansion. This is further aggravated by the economic depression that Brazil has been facing since 2014, the largest in the country's history.
Campus
Main campus
The flagship campus of the University of Campinas is located in the district of Barão Geraldo, from the center of Campinas. It currently occupies an area of 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 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 , 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.
While initial construction was considered complete by 1978, the campus has grown through continuous addition of new buildings and institutes. In 2014, after years of negotiation, the university decided to buy the Argentina Farm, located on the east side of the campus, increasing the total area by 60% to . This purchase will allow for expansion of the medical sciences and athletics areas, as well as new laboratories.
Medical center
Unicamp's main campus houses the School of Medical Sciences' teaching hospital, the Hospital das Clinicas. Construction started in 1975 and the hospital opened its first clinics and patient facilities in 1979, but was only fully operational in 1985, when the School of Medical Sciences was transferred from Campinas' maternity to the new campus.