Since Thursday March 7, the rectorate of the University of Athens has been occupied by angry students. On the pediment of the neoclassical building in the heart of the capital, a poster calls for “set fire to the bill” which was to be adopted Friday evening by the Greek Parliament. This text allows private universities to set up in Greece, authorizing in particular large renowned American or English establishments to open annexes in Athens and to provide diplomas equivalent to those of public establishments. After nine weeks of mobilization and rallies often punctuated with violence, more than 17,000 people, according to the police, marched on Friday in the streets of Athens.
For the left opposition, the law violates article 16 of the 1974 Constitution, adopted after the fall of the dictatorship of the colonels, which provides that higher education is exclusively provided by public institutions. The conservative Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, replied from the platform of Vouli (Parliament) that “it was an anachronism” which needed to be revised to “put Greece on the global education map”. The head of the executive hopes to attract foreign investments, foreign students and enable young Greeks “to study at international universities without leaving their country”.
According to UNESCO, in 2021, more than 40,000 Greek high school graduates left to study abroad without returning to their country of origin. Greece thus has, within the European Union (EU), the largest number of students abroad, in proportion to its population.
“Ideological revenge of the right”
In the middle of the crowd on Friday, Dimitris Christopoulos, dean of political science at Panteion University in Athens, believes that this law “is an ideological revenge of the Greek right, which has tried, for around thirty years, to put an end to this Greek exception which wants higher education to be exclusively public”. For the academic, “good public establishments will hold their own in the face of competition from the private sector but not necessarily those smaller, in the provinces, which have few resources”.
But what worries him most is “this logic of disinvestment in the public for the benefit of the private sector”. “We have seen what this has done in the field of health. Public hospitals are in a terrible state, while private clinics are flourishing all over Greece”he specifies.
Greek universities suffered big budget cuts following the economic crisis and austerity measures imposed by creditors (EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund), between 2008 and 2018. According to the latest data from the Bank world, Greece spent, in 2021, 4.1% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on education, while France invested 5.2% of its GDP during the same period.
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