Resumo

Globally, universities are being called upon to contribute to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Given their social functions of creating and disseminating knowledge, universities have a unique position within society in building a more just and more sustainable society, besides the responsibility to educate citizens, researchers and leaders to participate in solutions to sustainability issues. Although there are several studies that address the relationship between SDGs and universities, the community’s expectations about this subject has not been set out yet.

In order to identify what do students, faculty members and staffs expect on the university’s contributions to SDG, we conducted a survey in the context of the oldest public Brazilian university.

From the literature, we propose H1: The greater the community’s knowledge about the Sustainable Development Goals, the greater the expectation regarding the contribution of the university to their achievement and H2: The greater the engagement of the university community with issues related to sustainable development, the greater its expectation concerning the university's contribution to the achievement of the SDGs.

To achieve the objective of the study and test the proposed hypotheses, we applied the quantitative survey method. Data collection was carried out with faculty members, administration staff and students from a public university in southern Brazil. The online questionnaire was widely disseminated to the entire academic community of around 30 thousand people, through e-mails and institutional websites. Data collection was carried out from 30 days between November and December 2019. We had 1054 responses, of which 796 were considered valid once were complete.

We conducted multivariate statistics analysis in order to test both hypotheses. The results showed the level of knowledge of the university community about the SDGs, their different levels of engagement with the themes surrounding the SDGs, and how it reflects on their expectations of the university’s contribution in this area. The evidence demonstrated that engagement may be more relevant in terms of expectations towards SDGs.

The data analysis showed that the level of knowledge on SDGs influences the expectation regarding the contribution of university in achieving them except for SDG5-Gender Equality and SDG13-Protect the planet, partially validating Hypothesis 1. This evidence contrasts with most results that claim for the importance of specific knowledge on the subject. Another result is that expectations are higher among students and those with a higher level of engagement with SD domains. This validates Hypothesis 2 and is supportive of previous studies.

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