I give all of my institutional solidarity to the Dean and my colleague who developed it, but as I am not a constructivist and I am quite doubtful of its technicalities and curricular adjustments, most pressingly when such models are being issued by decreed challenges, I would appreciate if we did not invent what is already invented, nor find what is already found.
Thusly, about this matter, I would prefer to care for the tree I have been assigned with, a semester-long subject of Introduction and Methodology of International Relations and another concerning History of the Present. That is project I am gratefully developing with two excellent collaborators, even training the process as a Guest Professor at the University of Brasília that, in the early 1980s, highly determined would teaching method of studying international relations.

As a matter of a fact, the unexpected steps taken on that academic cooperation did not allow me to participate on the meeting of the scientific board on which the present reform was voted, making me a sort of institutional absentee, a position that unfortunately was not that of Pilates.

But I must confess that I would rather see the whole matter regarding taught programmes of international relations in a supra-endogamy perspective, as a problem of the Portuguese university in its whole and as a problem of the very Portuguese State and its need to resort to scientists and professionals on the topic. I think that we live in the traditional, decadent model of the Portuguese people with megalomaniac tendencies for we do not have the necessary raw materials within our scientific resources for so many schools and departments of international relations, not only in state schools but also in the many ministries.

I think we should concentrate our efforts, not only to positively assume that the tax contributor is one the paying us, but also to assure that only one public system to the matter, with the cooperation of the foreign affairs, defence, intelligence and economy communities, with sane competition, as other countries in the European Union (even richer ones), in a way that this academic field would leave its Third world level where those lame translators made media commentating stars or subsidized-by-powers-trying-to-conquer-us puppets rule.

There is a profound lack of scientific patriotism in our public academic system of international relations and therefore we cannot even have the required emigrants to allow us to access the international standardization of these matters. I also see many reformers in need of a huge reform, as they do not seem to care about the employability of our graduate students, not to mention those who do not even know what it is to live the adventure the new generations have to experience for the last 20 years in order to cross the hopefulness edge. But I will collaborate with whoever wants to continue to work at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, the best school of international relations in the country, and will support especially those who allow our PhD. “students” working at other national and international schools to return to their “mother home” through urgent public evaluation applies to enter our Staff, so we guarantee the dynamism of competition. It is important to stream if we want to continue living as we think.

I do not like to participate in speeches to justify power and I decided to abstain myself, as it is not yet the time to free ourselves from certain shadows of a recent past that will not even allow an holistic reading of all the past, namely that of the liberal monarchy and that of the First Republic. As the present power conveniently continues to speak only with the Salazarist phase of our school, even though I was invited to participate in the speech, I would rather go plant apple trees instead of going to such cerimonies.

What I wrote about it, in books that could not be published at FSPS, forced me to the coherence of silence. But I am totally available to associate myself with any ceremony that would ask for forgiveness to someone that, loving the school and being a relevant scientific figure in Portugal, nevertheless suffered persecution and the very dismissal of public service. As long as we do not exorcise those ghosts of our autocratic wing, we will not earn the respect of free men. As long as we effectively neglect who people like Luciano Cordeiro, Álvaro de Castro, Jorge Dias, Alfredo de Sousa, D. António Ribeiro, José Hermano Saraiva, Manuel Belchior, Vitorino Magalhães Godinho or Luís Sá were, we are taking a side that is not mine, and having the illusion of writing a pseudo-history of the winners. If you want to continue qualifying me as a dissident, I am most honoured with the Epictetus. I will not go that way.

It depends of the concept of science and technology. It seems to me that the dominant concept in the speeches of the established power, at both the government and rector’s levels, still stammer about the scientificist rumblings of August Comte, looking at the social and human sciences as sciences of occultism. Plus, every once in a while it is asked to place a cherry on top of the cake of this decadent reality that is throwing us to the periphery of human development.

I would rather prefer if we copied the existing models from dominant powers where I do not think they consider as sheer ideology the treatment of the sciences of the spirit. It even looks like they forgot about cybernetics, that Norbert Wiener put it, the word that comes from the Greek referring to government, emerged in a context of system theories when a merging between the exact and social sciences was pursued. We only have to notice how evaluators and subsidies distributors are picked to the social sciences areas, where you do not comply with the logic of achieved hierarchy through public evaluation, preferring the figure of the party’s friend or the media character. It is the exact opposite of what happens in the civilized countries where the personal favour’s regime is long abolished by a minimally objective one.