Not the "beer pong" kind, the "from Greece" kind.

More than 6,000 students protested in Athens today as part of a long-running campaign against proposed changes to the national University system. The campaign, which has included traditional tactics of sit-ins and protests, but also the more confrontational (and wildly successful) campus takeovers, has been going on since this past summer, when the governing party recommended the changes. Now, a bit of background:

Greece's Constitution (may or may not be the one that Eisenhower told the Greek Ambassador to "fuck") guarantees free, public education in Article 16. Such niceties of the Greek system include:

  • free textbooks & materials
  • de facto impossibility for outside police to enter campus grounds unless specifically invited,
  • ease of transfer to different universities depending on hardship,
  • the fact that every single university in Greece is public and free
  • the complete absence of any "administrators" -- all decisions are made by either faculty or a combination of students and faculty.

A lot of these facets of Greek education have long and interesting histories. For example, it was the brutal repression of the famed Athens Polytechnic uprising against the military junta in 1973 that led to the eventual adoption of the current police ban on campus (though police may be granted entrance by decision of a typically slow-moving "asylum committee"). In 2006, the Greek government set up a panel of "experts" to recommend changes to the current system. Big surprise, all the niceties just described, and more, have been recommended to get the chopping block. A good deal of the pressure is coming from private interests, who wish to set up private non-profit and for-profit schools in Greece, but the EU also is prodding them to abandon their current educational system, which is considered to be rather mediocre when compared to its EU member's counterparts.

If there's anything the young Greek left knows how to do, it's mobilize. I can't find the latest numbers, but at its height last year, students were in direct control of ~80% of Greek campuses. The latest updates are available at the Athens Indymedia. Here's an interesting Indymedia piece (though a bit dated - last June) linking the proposed school changes with changes in Greece's economic realities.

I consider it crucial to understanding what's going on by reading the students' own words: here is the text from a pamphlet distributed in the summer of 2006. From the text:

Blocking university’s function means that first of all we stop working, studying, going round hospitals and compulsory courses. At last we have some time… some time to live (something that we cannot usually do). At last we feel that the university campus belongs to us and we give up wasting our everyday activity in an alien place. At last we can truly meet with other people, laugh, laze, enjoy ourselves. We know that in the present situation these moments of negation are probably temporary. In a couple of weeks the occupation will end. Nevertheless, we have to embrace with serenity the fact that there will be no return to normal, and then inhabit this irreversibility.