“Mr. Mitsotakis, you will prove to be a Hero of Education,” stressed SYRIZA-PS MP Nina Kasimati in her speech to the Plenary. The central part of the speech concerned the role of the University as a field of freedom of ideas and the defense of the Constitution.
Nina Kasimati’s full speech:
“After a grand student rally today in Athens and throughout the country against the draft law of the Mitsotakis government, in the name of “Strengthening the Public University” and in essence the Framework for the operation of non-profit branches of foreign universities, the three-day debate in the Parliament ends and , with your rigid parliamentary majority, you will exercise your power undemocratically. You will vote for it in absolute, blatant, shameless, ipso facto, violation of Article 16 of the Constitution.
To realize your ideology, but also your ideology against Education as a public good. This is the crystal clear diamond, kept unscathed, in the ark of the State, the Constitution of Greece, despite your unfortunate attempts to expropriate it in three Constitutional Revisions, and with which you want to adorn your neoliberal crown. That’s why you steal it in broad daylight, from the youth and the future of Greek society, with an unimaginably provocative riff. So why can you!
With the same authoritarian logic that you covered the crime in Tempi with tons of cement in broad daylight, with the same authoritarian logic of the illegal surveillance inside the Maximos Palace, with the same authoritarian logic of the illegal treatment of the voters’ data that was entrusted to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the conduct democratic elections. The post-racial Right looks like an innocent child in front of you and the destruction you are wreaking for our country in the medium and long term will be much worse than this post-racial Right. We know your visions from History.
After all, it is no coincidence that all the democratic, national and social conquests of the Postcolonial period have been in your crosshairs before the memorandums, during and of course after them. Like Postcolonialism itself as an idea and as a historical period of democratic normality.
You and the constitutionalists of your regime know very well that there can be no contra legem interpretation of the Constitution, much less that there is no conflict with Union Law. But there will be conflict after you pass this bill, at the expense of Public Higher Education as a means of advancement and social mobility at the expense of the popular and middle classes you are hostile to.
Article 16 has crucial elements, insurmountable, the exclusivity of the State in the provision of Higher Education, the corresponding express prohibition to private individuals, academic freedom and the status of University Professors as public officials.
This is how you “celebrate” the 50th anniversary of your hated Postcolonialism, just as you celebrated the 200th anniversary of the National Rebirth, with the annulment of the Constitution.
As for the alleged transformation of the Democritus University of Thrace into a metropolitan one, it would be good if you close-merge-eliminate the departments of Ethnology and Near Eastern countries in return. Your salary is worth it. We see you.
After all, for you, the country is an annex of foreigners, without familiar will and independence. And you claim for yourself the gold-paid role of the Forecasters, that is, the senior administrators and officials of each foreign empire, which wants our country and People not sovereign, but possessions and subjects.
And how will you make foreign nationals, instead of citizens? But checking their Education. Obstructing the unconditional truth, national, transnational, social. The truth of academic research that is not controlled and the formation of free spirits that can take science further – This is Progress. And who can defend Democracy and Freedom every minute. Intellectual and productive autonomy in a globalized age of heteronomy of even the most educated, where those who hold the keys to technology, as well as the funds to develop that technology and so-called artificial intelligence, hold the world.
This Truth is defended by the Public University, and its combination with the archetypal Greek status of the Citizen, as Michel Foucault said in his traditions in 1983 in the Public…. College de France – proving that the courage of the truth, to tell the truth, is the forgotten moral foundation of the Athenian Republic. While re-reading Plato’s 7th Letter, he described how with the decline of the Cities, the courage of the truth is transformed into a pleasing address to the soul of the Ruler. This is what you want to do in the country with the Foreign Branches opposite the Public Universities, to eat and witness the beans, as our people say, of every foreign Ruler.
While the Public University defends its autonomy against the Sovereign. The, according to Jacques Derrida, Unconditional University, which entails the unconditional right to constructive criticism, the freedom of questioning and the right to say publicly everything that research, knowledge and unhindered thinking about the truth of things requires.
I did not expand on the vulgar economy with which you surrounded the discussion, on the thousands of Greek children studying abroad or in Cyprus and your other false sorrows about the currency that is being lost. Arguments have been filed by colleagues and written in the press.
After all, you can’t convince them that you stole from the Greek people and the morsel, and their books and children, by keeping them out of a Greek university with the Minimum Entry Basis – swindling private individuals. Or by sending them migrants due to crisis.
I did not expand because I wanted above all to talk about your purpose, about the teleology of your legislation. Because it is structural and responds to the great debate that must continue on the national and social necessity of not revising article 16 of the Constitution and for Higher Education to remain Public.
You are characterized by neo-feudal constitutionalism, as the Athens Law professor K.Th. Giannakopoulos the phenomenon of the evolution of constitutional deregulation into a regressive course of modern European constitutionalism due to patterns of revival of medieval feudalism, which modern constitutionalism did not completely overcome and which were rekindled in the context of neoliberal market liberalization policies. And you are now importing, as known traders.
And you put a noose on the Public University by excluding Education from the field of exclusive competence that we have as an EU member state and by including it in European Union Law. Something that can raise, and will certainly raise, issues of violation of the Principle of Equality and the rules of Competition, bringing unfavorable consequences to the self-government and the financing of Public Greek Universities in favor of the rights of foreign Universities that will be born with your legal authority.
I submit in the Minutes of the Parliament a relevant article by Vassilis Asimakopoulos, lawyer, political scientist and lecturer at the Democritus University of Thrace, who we fought together in 2006 for the non-revision of Article 16, entitled “Higher Education and Article 16 of the Constitution –
The relationship between EU and national constitutional law, the grammatical interpretation and the organization of education in Greece through the constitutional texts”.
First for you Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. Mitsotakis, who will prove to be a Hero of Education, for Mr. Deputies who will unfortunately vote today, for the Deputies and political parties who are in favor of the revision of Article 16 of the Constitution and must think again very carefully.
Above all, however, for the citizens and academic scholars of the Practices, to competitively keep alive and common for all the flame of Education in our homeland and our People”.
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