In the past, teaching staff (not professors!) were prohibited from participating in companies, having private offices, medical practices… These provisions were abolished. A new attempt was made when the lecturers (all now professors) had to declare full-time or part-time employment at the HEIs. The provision was brazenly flouted.
At the same time, companies or foreign (usually private) universities established private universities in Greece “through the window”, bypassing the constitution. The procedure is known. A “college” (a branch of a foreign private university) is established in Greece, which ensures a university diploma by obtaining the college degree in Greece.
It is known that education is a social right and should be provided free of charge to the world by the public.
But if we go a little further, the commodification of social rights in “late capitalism” has progressed: social security, energy, health, telecommunications, public administration, water supply, road network, ports and airports, trains and many others are already in his hands of private capital, of the famous “market”, today’s axis of the capitalist system, or are being prepared to be given to it.
But let’s see what Maria Karamanof, former vice-president of the Council of State, points out about the role of the “market” (“Sustainable state and public ownership, the limits of privatization”. Athens – Komotini, 2010).
It clarifies the difference between public and private interest. If an activity (health, welfare, education) functions as a public good based on the public interest, then the framework of action is the provision of the above services to every citizen at no cost, which is undertaken by the state. If, however, an activity operates as a private enterprise, then it is driven by profit and he emphasizes that there is no morality in the market, “it is the logic of the Market that forms the criteria of Ethics, Art and Science”, i.e. profit (p. 43 ) and especially for education, that “Knowledge, from […] free public good passes into the legal status of tradable good” (p.46).
Karamanov recalls the constitution where education is the main mission of the state, while with its affiliation to the “market” she emphasizes that “academic research thus becomes directly dependent on large companies […] a fact which mortgages the independence and autonomy of researchers, students and educational institutions” (ibid.). We recall that the honored (especially by Nazism) Plato wanted the works of the Ionian philosophers to be burned (and the Inquisition to burn Galileo and Copernicus along with their books).
He also emphasizes that “the decisive competence of the State is now assigned to the private sector […] the nature of the decision-maker as a public body or as a private person […] also determines the corresponding criteria […] (of the Decision)”, the public with the criterion of the public interest, and the private the profit (p. 95). And it clarifies that even with 5% private participation, profit has been mandatorily introduced as the main criterion and the private and public sector partnerships, etc. they essentially constitute simple and universal privatization.
In closing, two examples:
In the USA, a company or an individual can finance a university seat. Obviously, the professor who will undertake it, informally usually, “consequently” receives the approval of the “donor”. Obviously no comments are needed…
At the Industrial University of Piraeus, he was a professor at the same time as the director of a well-known car industry, responsible for Greece (and later responsible for Europe). His full-page article in “Kathimerini” (28.6.1998) was entitled “The future promises three cars per person – what are the scenarios for the production-marketing framework” (we are killing ourselves in our studies to convince our students to be in favor of public media of transport and not of vehicles!).
And the University of Piraeus is a public university. Where it was private!
#Private #universities #commercialization
