As have a number of other Greek universities. All claim that they cannot operate under the new government mandate to fire huge chunks of administrative staff.
All say that cuts in administrative staff, including guards and archivists, have made it impossible to keep their doors open… Among the 12,500 civil servants already identified [by the government] for [removal] are administrative staff at universities working in libraries, laboratories, clinics and professorial offices. Announcing suspension of operations on Tuesday, the rector of the University of Athens, the country’s oldest higher education institution, said it was impossible for the university to operate without the 498 employees who have been stripped from its ranks.
UD suspects these places can indeed operate with skeletal staff, but they can’t begin to think of how. After all, things have always been done in a certain way:
[O]nly 295 of the 7,680 administrative staff employed in tertiary education since 1994 [has] been appointed on the basis of a meritocratic process, according to [one source]. “In one historic case a lifeguard was paid for years by Athens University of Economics and Business despite the pool in the student housing complex to which he had once been appointed having closed,” [a] newspaper reported.