Nowhere in the world does one find universities without autonomy and freedom, without their own funding and collaborations with private business enterprises and capital.
The establishment of new universities and faculties became entangled with untrammeled electoral pledges in the post-junta era. It ended up serving economic objectives more than academic aims.
The peculiar tolerance that all sorts of vandals and self-styled anti-authority groups have enjoyed under successive governments and rectors cannot continue.
The duty of authorities is first of all to provide security for professors and students and together to truly guard university asylum.
Meeting places and bases for illegal forays that operated within universities and in Athens neighbourhoods were reclaimed.
The education minister’s initiatives and the decisions of the Central Archaeological Council demonstrate that the country is abandoning a cycle of counter-productive ideological fixations and that a spirit of reason is prevailing.
For some odd reason, we have linked the freedom to propagate ideas and the prohibition of external interventions with toleration for violence, lawlessness, AND thuggish attacks against university teaching staff.
The most intense criticism is regarding the merger of Polytechnics with tertiary technical schools (DEH) which is intended to upgrade the status of technical schools
With no plan, programme, studies, evaluation or consensus, Education Minister Gavroglu is merging tertiary technical schools (TEI) with universities for purely petty partisan reasons.
SYRIZA ministers and cadres may have studied abroad and sent their children to private schools, but the establishment of non-state universities remains taboo.
With no planning, no dialogue, and no fundamental consensus, Education Minister Kostas Gavroglu is playing with the anxieties and future of young people and their families.
