Linguist and poet Carlos Vogt, professor emeritus at Unicamp, who served as rector between 1990 and 1994, was honored by the Virtual University of the State of São Paulo (Univesp) on Wednesday night (11), with the first title of “Professor Ad Honorem Univesp”. The ceremony, at the Memorial da América Latina, in São Paulo, was conducted by Vahan Agopyan, Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Innovation, and by Marcos Borges, president of Univesp.
Vogt, currently the CEO of the Conrado Wessel Foundation, is the founder and patron of Univesp, a public university in São Paulo exclusively dedicated to Distance Education (EAD), founded in 2012. “It is a great satisfaction to receive this honor. Looking back, it gives me pride to have been able to build this project, with the fundamental support of the Secretariat of Science and Technology. In the first entrance exam, we had 12 candidates and 3 enrollments. Today, the projection is to reach 88 students,” he highlighted.
According to Vogt, the idea for Univesp was born in 2004. “At the time, I was the president of Fapesp [São Paulo State Research Foundation] and was on the board of trustees of the Padre Anchieta Foundation, when we were informed that TV Cultura would start operating on multiple channels. I emphasized that this was an opportunity for it to resume its work in the area of education and proposed the creation of a channel dedicated to higher education, a virtual university. I even suggested the name Univesp,” he recounts.
To move the project forward, Vogt emphasizes that he relied on key partners. “I called on Professor Waldomiro Loyola, a specialist in distance education; Professor Geraldo Di Giovanni, who had been my chief of staff when I was rector; and Jocimar Archangelo, who was the coordinator of the Unicamp entrance exams and one of the founders of Equipe Vestibulares, later Colégio Equipe. From there, we drew up a first draft of what would become this university,” he continues.
The proposal reached the governor at the time, José Serra, who supported the project. Through partnerships with Unicamp, the University of São Paulo (USP), the São Paulo State University (Unesp), and the Paula Souza Center, as well as Fapesp, Univesp began to take shape. “In 2005, I was invited to be the Secretary of Higher Education for the State Government. I took over the secretariat and brought the project, which was sent to the Legislative Assembly in the following government and ended up being approved as a public foundation,” he says.
“Today, Univesp is a reality that maintains its purpose of providing capillarity and expanding opportunities for more young people to enter higher education, with a presence in several cities in the interior,” he adds. “The partnerships continue, and Univesp offers bachelor's and teaching degree courses autonomously because it was recognized by the MEC (Ministry of Education) and fulfilled all the necessary institutional requirements,” concludes Vogt, who presided over the institution until 2016.
For the Paulista Academy of Education, of which Vogt is a member, the honor represents public recognition of a career that has contributed to expanding access to knowledge and consolidating higher education as a structuring axis of development in São Paulo and Brazil. In a statement, the Academy highlights that the granting of the first "Professor Ad Honorem" title in the history of Univesp confers "a unique character to the ceremony, recognizing an intellectual and administrative trajectory that was decisive for the consolidation of the São Paulo public university, especially in the field of educational innovation and the democratization of access to higher education."
A graduate in Letters from USP (University of São Paulo), Vogt holds a master's degree in Linguistics from the Literary Theory and Comparative Literature program at the same institution and a doctorate in Sciences from Unicamp (University of Campinas). He joined the University as a professor in 1969 and, since then, has developed his career in the areas of Literature and Linguistics. In 2005, he received the Order of Scientific Merit medal, awarded by the Presidency of the Republic. In 2015, he was honored with the title of professor emeritus at Unicamp. He is also an emeritus researcher at CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) and one of the founders of the Laboratory for Advanced Studies in Journalism (Labjor).
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