Text written by Profa. Dr. Fabrina Moreira, teacher of the Professional Master's in Education (MPE) from UNITAU. In the article, originally published on OVALE portal, the professor shares reflections on university sustainability based on her experience leading the Profoco organizing committee and her post-doctoral research, developed at the USP Psychology Institute. Read next:
Sometimes, the research surprises us. We spent years asking questions, organizing references and building hypotheses until, unexpectedly, reality responds even before the study is completed. It was exactly this feeling that I experienced when I chaired the organizing committee of this year's Profoco. While accompanying teachers, students, administrative technicians and guest researchers reflecting on teaching, innovation and social commitment, I had the impression that my research had left the project pages to happen, viva, before my eyes.
At that moment, I understood that a sustainable university is not just born from institutional documents. It starts when the university itself decides to listen to itself. What makes a university, in fact, sustainable? This is the question that guides my postdoctoral studies, developed at the Psychology Institute of the University of São Paulo (PUSH), titled Mapping Voices, Listening to Silences: a Cartography of the Sustainable University. The answer is not just in institutional plans, indicators or reports. This, about everything, in the people who build the institution daily and in the different meanings they attribute to sustainability itself.
Profoco made visible what research seeks to understand. A university does not transform itself just by incorporating new concepts into its plans. It begins to change when it creates listening spaces capable of bringing together different perspectives and building, from them, a common horizon.
At the opening of the event, a reflection from Profa. Dr. Rosamaria Cox Moura-Leite Padgett, founder and coordinator of Rede UniSustentável, summarized this thought. According to her, the Agenda 2030 It's a safe path, and the university should not be a mirror, but lighthouse. The mirror only reproduces the existing reality; the lighthouse illuminates the paths that still need to be followed. Since then, This image accompanies me as a synthesis of what I try to build in research and teaching.
This way of understanding the university also speaks to my academic trajectory. PhD in Philosophy of Science, I investigated Pierre Bourdieu's epistemology and his critique of scientific knowledge. I learned that no institution can be explained solely by indicators or official speeches. It is also made of relationships, meanings, symbolic disputes and silences. Maybe that's why my research chose to start by listening before measuring.
I noticed, then, that listening to the university also required creating instruments capable of following this trajectory closely. It was from this path that OBSUS was born, the Sustainable University Observatory, today linked to CEUS. Initially designed to support research, became a space for integration between academic knowledge and university management, bringing together projects, indicators, UNITAU sustainability documents and initiatives. See this work presented during Profoco, alongside Brazilian and Latin American researchers, was realizing that academic investigation can go beyond the limits of scientific production and become part of institutional life.
No university becomes sustainable just because it declares itself to be so. It becomes sustainable when it learns to listen to itself, recognizing that its mission is not just to transmit knowledge, but produce meanings, ask questions and take responsibility for the future you help build.
Thomas More imagined, in Utopia, a place that doesn't yet exist, but that guides our way of thinking about the world. I like to believe that a sustainable university is also this horizon: not a destination already reached, but a direction that invites us, every day, building a better future. Maybe she'll never be ready. Perhaps this is precisely its greatest virtue: continue calling us to walk.
It is to this university that I continue to dedicate my research, my teaching and my hope.
Published in OVALE (Sampi) in: https://sampi.net.br/ovale/noticias/2996625/vale-do-paraiba/2026/08/escutar-para-transformar-reflexoes-de-universidade-sustentavel