For at least the past four years the public and democratic university has been systematically undermined by the neoliberal governments through its institutional liquidation, that has destroyed the collective and democratically elected academic bodies, predominantly by its economic strangulation.
At the same time, the mergers of departments, universities etc. in the context of the “Athena plan”* have reduced tertiary education to a minimum, especially wiping out the technological universities and those of the periphery. Now, they are striking the heart of the university – its people: 25% of the administration staff are being made redundant. This affects 1700 people in the administration, the workshops, laboratories, university clinics etc. which is referred to as “fast track evaluation” in accordance with and executed by the Ministry of Education.
This catastrophic coup d’état marks a historical regression of the Greek university to the 70s, while at the same time the collapse of the primary and secondary educational system are effected.
Concurrently, these redundancies of staff is the first stage for the equally serious redundancies of academics that is to follow in a few months. This logic has to the same extent been effecting other areas: The Troika needs flesh and must permanently be given a certain number of public employees who have to be fired:
The great and optimistic message is that both administrative and academic staff have already created a mass resistance movement through strikes, rallies and assemblies together with their unions in every university of Greece and in collaboration with the employees of other educational sectors, especially the teachers. This mass movement, in which the academics, the administrative members of SYRIZA and its students play the most decisive role, aims at paving the way for the overturning of the government.
To this effect, the creation of a wide activist front for education which unites teachers, academics and students is of crucial importance!
* Government project to reduce the number of faculties and thus the funding of universities.
Demonstration of university students against the merging of their faculties, according to “Athena project”.
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Increasing teaching hours leaves less time for research – which takes hours of thinking, weeks and months of laboratory experiments/field work etc and maybe days to write the final report for publication. All this means that Greek universities are less likely to do research, be cited in international journals and attract students and scholars. Which in turn means schooling will suffer as new teachers will be poorly prepared and doctors, architects, lawyers, engineers,pharmacists, economists etc will be on a downward path. My heart goes out to all Greeks.
What did they ever do to deserve this?
Why is this country being made to suffer in this way? Who benefits?
Ben, Sissy,
I’m not sure it is as black as the article posts. Unlike the UK which is heavily subsidized by Chinese and Indian corruption (aka companies paying bribes via funding official’s children to do MSc courses), Greece is largely government/student dependent. But not entirely!
The EU pays Eur50M a year to Greece in research (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/GR_FP7_0.pdf). Eur50M is nothing compared to the UK’s £3B research budget (http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/about/Aboutrcs/Pages/Governmentfunding.aspx), but it is certainly enough to maintain much more than 19 academics!
I wouldn’t hold your breath there! Academics going on strike tend to only hurt themselves!
In a factory it is straight forward. The boss makes does something unreasonable to pay and/or conditions and the workers withdraw their labour in protest. The boss loses money and either concedes defeat or has sufficient capital and scabs to defeat the workers.
In Universities academics are more like self employed persons. There are certain targets – especially research targets, which need to be achieved and are measured in years (in the UK every 5 years). Thus any period lost due to strike action just reduced the amount of time to reach those targets. There are no scabs, simply plenty of talented people who can take your place if you don’t reach the targets in the defined time period.
I’d welcome the thoughts of others in academia on this.