This article discusses changes in higher education produced by the recontextualization of the World Bank's discourse in Brazil, considering the ways in which "governance-related conditionalities" have been converted into political practices. It consists of two parts. The first one, centred on discourse as a material form of ideology, analyzes the "key publications" related to higher education, based on the features of what can be called a "discourse of emergences". The second part approaches the material dimension of the new imperialism, elicits its fundamental contradictions and focuses the conditions of production of shifting from the university-based model to the tertiary one.
discourse; new imperialism; recontextualization; higher education