The speech of Sia Anagnostopoulos in the Plenary of the Parliament during the debate of the Ministry of Education on the establishment of private universities, today Wednesday 6.3.2024.
The speech in detail:
Thousands of students are for weeks either on the streets or in their universities in sit-ins. Senates, Departments issue resolutions once morest this bill brought by the Government and its unconstitutionality. Leading constitutionalists, who do not give opinions at the request of the Government and who analyze, are once morest this bill precisely because of its unconstitutionality. Are all these people, all generations of the university community, the scientific community, society, all these people anachronists? Are all these people hooked on 1975? Or are all of them and especially the new generation pulling a thread that comes from far away?
Sixty years since the great reform of 1964: Papandreou, Papanoutsos, Akritas. Sixty years, maybe less, but too many years since the great demonstrations of the Lambrakis youth of “1-1-4” and for education. Fifty years since Article 16 which is the epitome, a historic compromise – I would say – on what is a university, what is higher education, higher education. And you came now and talk regarding anachronisms, misspellings, etc. Anyone who listens to your arguments knows what lies behind. What is hidden is a deeply, profoundly class-based treatment of higher education, a complete commercialization. It is also a division of the new generation into those who have and can study whatever they want, get a degree in whatever they want, and those who don’t and will have to write 19,500 credits to get into Medicine in any public school university, while if their parents have to pay, they pass with the minimum admission base in the field. Leave these gimmicks if we want or don’t want the minimum input base.
Secondly, the Minister told us in all the Committees: “Shouldn’t the state exercise its national sovereignty in the colleges?”. Here really this argument goes beyond any merely thinking mind. No, he doesn’t want the state to exercise national sovereignty over colleges. It wants to exercise market dominance over all higher education, a weak state for many, which is vulnerable to those who pressure it to do oligarchs, funds, etc.
Don’t hear that big universities are going to come here and build branches. This is standing nowhere. Tell me. I asked the Minister. He did not answer me to any Committee. Which major universities will build branches? Where else have they made? And what they have made, the minimal ones – I gave the Committees examples – these minimal annexes are addressed to their own students, Columbia to the Americans and the French, – because this is Paris – and for a minimal period of time.
We are told that we have “exiled” students. There are very few undergraduates. Masters and PhDs always have a more international path anyway. Undergraduates are few. Can we take them back to Greece? Yes, if we remove the admission basis for public universities.
Colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, higher education really is the battle of battles for society and it is the battle of battles because the university is where not only knowledge is built, but collective research is built, access to collective research. It is the optimism of the new generation that it can change the world, because it is the only way it can change the world, when it has the possibility to acquire a critical spirit, to have access to collective research, to participate and to dream that through this process of research, he and she may at some point manage to place a small stone. This optimism of the new generation is cut with this bill, because knowledge and research – research for the Government is something reprehensible anyway – has been transferred to the Ministry of Development, to the National Observatory, because research must produce what it wants this Government.
But I want to say something else. Today, where is the modern debate in both America and the European Union? The debate is how to lower tuition, how to get this hoarseness of student loans out of the hands of the new generations. And in America and the European Union, all the studies are also being done on the public universities in the countries where fees were introduced, how to reduce this cost, because it undermines the new generations, undermines the future.
We in Greece always go the opposite way, with a Right that considers modernization everything that is absolutely anachronistic. Which course are we on? We bring in private universities which are called affiliates and “through the window” we put fees in the public universities as well. Because this is the big stake for the New Democracy, for this Government, to put fees in public universities.
We in the New Left say that we must invest as a country in the economy of knowledge and research, that this country, in order to have real economic, cultural, scientific development, must invest exactly there. We shout that it is a misnomer that male and female students should be at the worst level of all European countries in terms of the ratio of what the state gives for each student. We say that it is a misnomer that universities are understaffed, with too little funding, that there is not the student care that should be there. It is wrong to prevent children, all children from studying in the provinces and anywhere. It is a misspelling with these non-profit annexes – allegedly – to put the region at risk.
I was listening to one of our great athletes these days who got a medal, who said: “When I have the coat of arms on my lapel I can grow wings.” I thought at that moment: A National Technical University of Metsovia, a EKPA, an AUTH, a Panteion, a University of Patras, a University of Crete, a University of Thrace, all the universities have played a huge role in this coat of arms. All these generations who contributed in all ways to this collective knowledge, collective research, collective critical thinking that passed through all classes of society and did not remain the exclusive privilege of a few. In a country whose tradition should be an inspiration for the future and not become a provincial country where there will be some private universities, which will be crap anyway, leaving the public universities to wither.
We are with this new generation and their optimism, which we owe to them.
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