Normally,
I would arrive at the house of professor Jose
Oliveira Fonseca, on Carlos Perreira street,
at five in the morning. Every morning, from
Monday to Saturday, there we would be for our
class of syntax analysis and other more objective
topics of the Portuguese language. We weren’t
many students, all together, but we were extremely
curious and interested, principally Mauro Lafeta,
Corby Aquino, Afranio Nogueira, Odil Oliveira
and I. They, candidates for the public concourse
of Law school in Pouso Alegre or Niteroi; myself,
a student of Linguistics, taking advantage of
the magnificence of professor Fonseca, unequalled
and unsurpassed in the subject of all Montes
Claros. It was a wonderful time, cheerful, brimming
with mature enthusiasm, dreams of persons that,
at a certain time of calling in life, know what
to do in life and how to do it.
Afranio has just left his special classes for
the conclusion of grade school students and
already studied at night he last phases to pass
high school. A great effort of a year and a
half between primary school and the university.
Mauro with all his God-given pose, serious,
compenetrated, a dreamer, almost demanded to
be referred to as “doctor”. It was
all a dream, even though the professor had never
once given us a cup of coffee to help us wake
us completely up at such a wee hour…
It was around there, at the time of change from
late night to early dawn, mornings of a delicious
coolness that required no or little protection,
that the professor and we made the first proposals
for the foundation of the Law school. Between
one syntax analysis and another, between one
verse and a noun, a new observation about the
future of the second school for the creation
of the University of Montes Claros. Who would
be willing to collaborate? With what lawyers
and professors would we be able to count on
to form the school staff? Who would be capable
of the seat of the first director? Where would
it be located? In what building? Where would
financial support be found? They were questions
and more questions, so present as their originators.
It didn’t take long, the phase of dreams
and coagitations, and in less than one month,
We were already in the street alisting help,
and finding first, in the person of the state
deputy, Euler Lafetá, uncle of Mauro
and a man close to the government, and federal
inspector of schools, Jose Monteiro Fonseca,
who was more enthusiastic than we, ourselves.
The battle began to thicken, the spirit of determination
was born. Mauro, each day becoming more and
more enthralled with the project, and anticipatedly
victorious.
We
began our first interviews of the principal
lawyers, through a special commission-Mauro,
Afranio and I- in a unfolding of work done before
by the professor Francolino Santos and the industrialist
Corby. No one could imagine or preview the human
and professional reactions before a challenge
such as this. Who could judge where the personal
interest would be, the unselfishness the enthusiasm
or, the opposite, the fear of future competition.
Who would believe in we, dreamers, striving
to build from the bottom up, inverting the whole
logical sequence of the foundation of a university?
Students, anticipating and doing the structuring
work of the professors. Really, before our proposal,
future professors showed themselves to be happy
or sad with it, in the majority of times, exceedingly
ironic. Who were really those students, who
ousadamente wanted to found a law school in
Montes Claros? Who knows, one of those three
young and dreamers inbued with the university
spirit? Crazy is what they called us…why
didn’t we simply go to another city to
study, as so many other Montes Claros natives
had done before instead of trying to found our
own university? Traveling around touring the
country would be a lot easier than founding
a university…
Two
factors became decisive in our battle: The JMC,
principal newspaper of Montes Claros was against
it, affirming the desnecessity of new bacharrels,
this, because they felt that our Brazil and
the world was already full of lawyers. Happily
professor João Luiz de Almeida the deputies
Francelino Perreira and Cicero Dumont showed
themselved to be very interested in our project.
Doctor João Luiz ceded various classrooms
of his school to us and put himself at our disposition
as the first dean; Francelino took the ideas
and the plans directly to the state governor
Magalhães Pinto; Cicero organized the
by-laws of the foundation. From that moment
on, no one could hold him down. Friend and enemies
alike, stimulated us still more in our battle.
The reaction of the midia provoked a challenge,
the help of powerful friends gave us the last
condiments to our sprouting university.
Today,
a happy ending with our law school completing
twenty years! We have very well guarded the
tapes of the definite day of the foundation,
reunion realized on São Francisco street,
downtown, at the federal school office, workroom
of the inspector Jose Monteiro Fonseca!
