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End of an era for student unions
The rise of student groups signalled the beginning of the post-dictatorship period, the time widely known as metapolitefsi, or regime change. Riding on the wings of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising, student groups enlisted thousands of leftist activists, grew in activity and played a major role in the transition to democracy.
The end of their power might as well mark the definite end of the post-dictatorship decades. On September 7 this year, student organisations lost almost all their rights and privileges when the new law on higher education came into effect.
The participation of multiple representatives in the university senate, the dean’s council as well as in academic department boards and general assemblies has now been abolished.
Moreover, the students no longer have the right to vote in the elections of the governing bodies or the newly created council, which will be the supreme academic authority. Only one student representative will be allowed on the same bodies, after being elected by his or her fellow students.
Will this mark the end of the student unionism?
Athens University professor of criminology Yiannis Panousis was one of the writers of the 1982 law, which first opened the way for students to participate in university administration as well as in the elections for rectors, deans and department presidents.
Almost 30 years later, the law of Education Minister Anna Diamantopoulou could bring an end to an era of a highly politicised academic community, which Panousis helped create.
Panousis summarised the history of student participation and criticised Diamantopoulou for her decision to effectively abolish student representation at university level.
“During the first years after the law was passed, the elected student representatives were active in all governing bodies where they had the right to participate,” Panousis told the Athens News. This was followed by a “period of degeneration”, in which “a student political elite rose and a few powerful students ‘represented’ all the representatives”. The third period was characterised by the interdependence of students and professors - the former, Panousis noted, tradet their votes in the rector and president elections for passing grades in several courses or a seat on research programmes.
During the last period, which covers this past decade, the student representation was severely undermined by “anarchists and far-left youth that stormed into the meetings of the university administrative bodies and broke them up”.
In recent years student organisations at universities have been characterised by a lack in the spirit of consensus: since they cannot even agree on the official results of the yearly student elections, they issue separate returns. In addition, for the past 15 years they have been unable to appoint the board of the national students’ union (EFEE), which remains inactive.
As former minister of education Marietta Yiannakou told the Athens News, “the meetings of the European ministers of education during the Bologna process (to create a European higher education area) were attended by student representatives from all countries but Greece. Since EFEE was inactive, Greek students were not represented at a pan-European level.”
This time, though, student organisations presented a united front against the implementation of the new law, reacting to the majority of its provisions. DAP-NDFK (affiliated with New Democracy), PASP (Pasok), PKS (KKE), AREN (Synaspismos) and other student parties have directly or indirectly supported the occupations of universities, which currently affect more than 200 academic departments all over Greece.
Speaking to Athens News, Sakis Ioannidis and Michalis Nikiforos, heads of DAP and PASP respectively, argued that the law, which was passed by both New Democracy and Pasok, has many flaws and does more harm than good to the academic community. They also confirmed their decision to continue to fight for the law’s withdrawal by all means necessary, even against the will of their mother parties.
Nikiforos, a postgraduate student at the Athens University of Economics and Business, claims that student unionism as we know it will not cease to exist. “The law doesn’t abolish student organisations, it abolishes student representation. It tries to convey the message that the blame for the current situation in Greek tertiary education can be solely laid on student organisations and not on members of the faculty, who try to serve their own interests and the interests of each government,“ he said.
The student organisations have served as the seedbed of major political parties. The education minister herself, Citizen Protection Minister Christos Papoutsis and Transport Minister Yiannis Ragousis, all were active members of PASP in their student years. Regarding New Democracy, seven out of the nine presidents of ONNED (the youth wing of the party) from 1976 to 1995 served as ministers in the Karamanlis administration between 2004 and 2009.
Yiannakou, one of the leading figures in DAP and ONNED in the late 70s, was the minister of education that brought about key changes in the university landscape with a 2006 law. For the first time, all students - and not just the representatives of student organisations - were given the right to vote for their rectors.
“The new law,” she told the Athens News, effectively “ends student representation in all bodies.” Recalling her participation in the student movement, she said that the occupations of university buildings and the interdependent relationship between students and members of the faculty were rare phenomena back then. “The way student organisations are operating nowadays may be closer to the reality of our times,” she concluded.
A former member of DAP and the first Greek president of the Youth of the European People’s Party (YEPP), Yiannis Smirlis, argues:”The student parties are not the reason that the Greek universities are facing so many problems and score low in the global rankings, so the solution cannot be their abolition.” He claims that the way Greek students participate actively and politically in their universities is highly regarded among European youth political parties. “After all,” he adds, “does it make sense that an 18-year-old student can vote for the prime minister of his country, but not for the rector of his university?”
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