GREEK PUBLIC UNIVERSITY IS IN DANGER! PLEASE SIGN AND FORWARD PETITION

[forwarded]:

Dear Colleagues,

As detailed below, Greek public universities are in danger of being demolished by the new higher education bill the government will propose to Parliament for voting within the next couple of weeks. Please help us stop the voting of the bill by signing the petition.

If you agree with the call that follows, please sign the petition and forward it to as many colleages as possible.

Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek and Noam Chomsky have signed it, among others.

with many thanks and best wishes

[...]

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To the international academic community

PUBLIC Greek Universities in Danger

In the last few years, a wave of ‘reforms’ within the European Union and throughout the world has subjected Higher Education to the logic of the market. Higher Education has increasingly been transformed from a public good and a civil right to a commodity for the wealthy. The self-government of Universities and the autonomy of academic processes are also being eroded. The processes of knowledge production and acquisition, as well as the working conditions of the academic community, are now governed by the principles of the private sector, from which Universities are obliged to seek funds.
Greece is possibly the only European Union country where attempts to implement these ‘reforms’ have so far failed. Important factors in this failure are the intense opposition of Greek society as well as the Greek Constitution, according to which Higher Education is provided exclusively by public, fully self-governed and state-funded institutions.
According to the existing institutional framework for the functioning of Universities, itself the result of academic and student struggles before and after the military dictatorship (1967-1974), universities govern themselves through bodies elected by the academic community. Although this institutional framework has contributed enormously to the development of Higher Education in Greece, insufficient funding and suffocating state control, as well as certain unlawful and unprofessional practices by the academic community, have rendered Higher Education reform necessary.
The current government has now hastily attempted a radical reform of Higher Education. On the pretext of the improvement of the ‘quality of education’ and its harmonization with ‘international academic standards’, the government is promoting the principles of ‘reciprocity’ in Higher Education. At the same time, it is drastically decreasing public funding for education (up to 50% decrease) which is already amongst the lowest in the European Union. New appointments of teaching staff will follow a ratio 1:10 to the retirement of existing staff members. This will have devastating results in the academic teaching process as well as in the progress of scientific knowledge.
The government proposals seek to bypass the constitutional obligations of the state towards public Universities and abolish their academic character.

• The self-government of Universities will be circumvented, with the current elected governing bodies replaced by appointed ‘Councils’ who will not be accountable to the academic community.
• The future of Universities located on the periphery, as well as of University departments dedicated to ‘non-commercial’ scientific fields, looks gloomy.
• Academic staff will no longer be regarded as public functionaries. The existing national payscale is to be abolished and replaced by individualized, ‘productivity’ related payscales, while insecure employment is to become the norm for lower rank employees.
• Higher Education will be transformed into ‘training’ and, along with research, gradually submitted to market forces.

The government proposals have been rejected by the Greek academic community. The Council of Vice-Chancellors and the Senates of almost all Universities have publicly called the government to withdraw the proposals and have suggested alternative proposals which can more effectively deal with the problems of Greek Universities. Despite this, the government proceeds with promoting its proposals, in confrontation with the entire academic community.
We appeal to our colleagues from the international academic community, who have experienced the consequences of similar reforms, to support us in our struggle to defend education as a public good. We fight, together with our British, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and other colleagues, for the respect of the academic tradition of the European universitas in current conditions.

We ask you to send electronically the appeal below, signed with your name and indicating your academic status and institutional affiliation, to the Initiative of Greek Academics (europeanuniversitas1@gmail.com) or sign online at http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?GRUNIV

The support of the international academic community will prove invaluable for the upcoming developments not only in Greek Universities but in respect to public European Higher Education as a whole.

Initiative of Greek academics

Necessity, Choice and the Future of Universities

by Tim May*

Conflicting strategies that internalise ambiguities are being perpetuated in universities. Academics receive communications from central management concerning the importance of engagement and knowledge transfer activities, whilst also being urged to target a narrow list of journals in ever more rapid timeframes in order to meet the next round of evaluation exercises.

Communications become disjointed. Tensions dominate in the translation of strategic direction through faculty and institutional structures to individual academics; all ably assisted by universities collecting enormous amounts of information that has no bearing upon the capacity for creating intelligence.

Wholehearted embrace of the current crisis as an opportunity is a familiar route. Along with a new modus operandi come disparaging backward glances at those who do not understand the apparent self-evidence of the new realities, as if history had no bearing upon the present. Within the context of the university as a whole, the effect is to further uncertainty concerning its social, economic and cultural purpose.

The potential to identify the distinctiveness of the university as an institution then diminishes and along with that goes its long-term viability. Paradoxically, in these seats of learning, there is little active engagement that challenges pre-conceptions and limited hierarchies of knowledge are perpetuated. Given the important role of universities in society as a challenge to short-termism, learning is the casualty.

The contemporary climate surrounding universities, defined by the idea of the free market and its penetration into knowledge-based institutions, has led to a significant shift in values. These have been exemplified in corporate re-branding, institutional restructuring and strategic orientation, as well as attribution of high value to particular forms of knowledge.

These shifts have re-cast what has been traditionally recognized as the university. However, just as there is no single history of the university, there is no single present. A variety of strategic responses exist that refract and mediate external values and lead to particular effects for the work that is performed within them.

University managers construct views of the position of their institutions and then mobilize differential resources to secure their reproduction. That, in turn, leads to an embrace of particular conceptions of what is required for ‘moving forward’. The apparent choice that comes with occupying such positions then evaporates in the face of necessity.

In wholesale translation of current conditions, we see higher education institutions subject to centralisation. The result is to sever, even more, the connection between purpose and process through a growing pre-occupation with organisational control for its own sake.

These external necessities are increasingly judged in terms of ‘business performance’ through extended regulatory systems, performance indicators and so forth, but not by reference to a public service ethic or set of well articulated and defensible professional values. Overall, institutions then move away from accountability based on common understandings of purpose, to narrow indicators of process-based performance.

The consequence is a separation between the production and dissemination of knowledge in its context through a whole series of attempts to determine the ‘how’ of practice through modes of surveillance that include workload balancing models. The overall result is that the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of knowledge is subsumed within the narrow confines of the measurability of ‘what’: external income generation, citation indexes, staff-student ratios; league tables and types of publication.

With full-scale translation we see universities increasingly modelling themselves in the images of businesses and operating as significant economic actors in their own right. Estates are then managed with profit and optimisation in mind, rather than the provision of places to furnish and support the institution’s cognitive requirements. New buildings are celebrated through allusion to ‘iconic’ status, but the reasons for their existence and the distinctive nature of the practices that will take place within them becomes of secondary consideration.

The external generation of finance is a tool to supplement reduction in the balance sheet, replacing any notion of civic responsibility, whilst economic output is translated into intellectual property and commodified through new organisational units that are designed to undertake activities called ‘knowledge transfer’ and ‘engagement’.

Practices are created which represent only highly selected facets of what an institution actually does on a daily basis. In terms of divisions of labour from the core functions of teaching, research and third mission activities, the efforts of making connections become an afterthought displaced within the organisation as a whole.

An analysis of different forms of values in these processes would require a degree of institutional reflexivity that is rare. Why? Because that would require a confidence among university managers in their capacity to engage in debate that is actually aimed at meaningful change based on recognition of constituent groups. Managerial prerogatives would then be open to contestation. Instead, we typically see ‘external’ individuals, usually consultants, brought in to advise on appropriate models for success, even though the knowledge they produce is actually based on learning from individuals within the organisation itself.

In the absence of a developed understanding - requiring recognition that the direct relation between position and control is a fantasy - the link between positioning and representation of the institution lies in a relationship between recognition, reward and promotion criteria as judged by those who do not have direct acquaintance with practice and its consequences.

Strategic managers – everyone is now ‘strategic’ - seek to represent universities in terms of economic relevance, but their internal dictates miss their mark without a clear understanding of occupational cultures, why they exists and how they operate. Yet to embark upon a sustained examination of this type means recognising that the object of control might just be the subject of institutional distinction.

Demands for flexibility then sit alongside those of standardization. Engagement between disciplines and between disciplines and institutions and the outside world is directly informed by structural and bureaucratic lines of accountability and management. Vertical (managerial control) and horizontal deadlock (professional cultures) emerge that limits the capacity for innovations to emerge out or across institutions, whilst preserving their sense of purpose and confidence in an otherwise fluid world.

Whilst there is no doubt that universities are facing profound changes, alternatives do exist to the narrowness of current thinking. The weight of effort is towards silencing these as if they were ‘idealistic’. The fear and anxiety that saturates these institutions is not well served by this myopia. An enlarged body of civic interests need to be involved in their futures and these are voices which have historically been excluded. Without this in place, we will return to a narrow elitism based on nothing more than a retreat to the past.

*) Tim May is Professor and Director at Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF), University of Salford, Manchester.

Establishing academic standards

A report from University World News by Gavin Moodie:
The privatisation of higher education in many countries has increased the financial incentive for institutions to compromise standards to maintain their viability. It has also led to the increased influence of institutions and their managers over lecturers and their academic decisions which were previously more strongly influenced by disciplinary norms and the expectations of the ‘invisible college’.
Full report on the University World News site

How America's Universities Became Hedge Funds

Have you seen this article by Bob Samuels from Huffington Post, January 28, 2010?
Quote:
"In August 2009, just one month after the state of California cut over a billion dollars from its higher education budget, the University of California (UC) turned around and lent the state $200 million. When journalists asked the UC president, Mark Yudof, how the university could lend millions of dollars to the state, while the school was raising student fees (tuition), furloughing employees, canceling classes, and laying off teachers, Yudof responded that when the university lends money to the state, it turns a profit, but when it spends money on salaries for teachers, the money is lost.

Welcome to the university as hedge fund world. In this strange new world, institutions of higher learning care more about interest rates than educational quality. In fact, Harvard cared so much about reducing the cost of borrowing money that it made several expensive credit default swaps, which resulted in a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars and the halting of an ambitious expansion plan. Not only did Harvard gamble on interest rates to support future construction plans, but it moved much of its endowment into high risk investments, and the result is that the world's wealthiest education institution is now claiming poverty."

Read more here...

Higher education is a public good, not a service

150 governments agree that higher education is a public good, not a service. See the lead article of the last issue of the World University News!
- quotes:
"UNESCO held its second World Conference on Higher Education in Paris last week. The biggest event on the global higher education calendar since the first world conference in 1998, the four-day meeting attracted 1,200 delegates from 150 countries. They debated current and future issues in higher education in the areas of social responsibility, access, equity and quality, internationalisation, regionalisation and globalisation, and learning, research and innovation. There was also a special focus on Africa. As the official media representative at the conference, University World News covered all the key events." (...)
"The 'public good' debate followed numerous political squabbles over the "commodification" of higher education. At its heart is the wish by several developed countries to export educational provision without facing barriers to entry in foreign markets. They have pushed other countries to sign into effect education's inclusion in GATS, which would allow private providers to set up freely in those countries.
Developing countries fear their governments will be constrained from regulating higher education. For instance, there has been concern that governments would be required under GATS to subsidise foreign education providers on the same basis as they fund local public universities or violate GATS anti-discriminatory clauses." (...)
"Use of the words 'public good' appeared in the first draft communiqué published on 26 June. It was replaced with 'public service' in the second draft - which also shunted the section on social responsibility in higher education down the list of themes - and then popped back up again in the final communiqué as the very first point: "Higher education as a public good is the responsibility of all stakeholders, especially governments," the communiqué says.
Minister after minister supported this stance and, sources said, India was insistent on this in the drafting group. India does not currently allow foreign higher education providers but the current government will present a bill to parliament to allow them in under certain conditions, an Indian delegate told the conference." (...)
"Speaking on behalf of the Latin American and Caribbean group within UNESCO, Argentina's Minister for Education Juan Carlos Tedesco said: "We have to stress the idea that education and knowledge is part of the public good which each and every citizen has a right to.""