… implodes, University Diaries readers may find her extensive coverage of the Greek university system of interest.
To find my posts about Greece, you can click on Foreign Universities (under Categories) and scroll through for Greek posts; you can also type Greece Universities or some similar phrase into her search engine.
Greek universities are only one of many arenas of outrageous public spending and outrageous corruption in that country. But they’re a very good entry point to the larger Greek economic failure.
… is that of Greece. The system there isn’t merely corrupt; it’s quite violent. It has long been an object of contempt on this blog. [The link is to a search on UD of the word “Greece.” It will take you to some relevant and some irrelevant posts. Scroll through.]
As the EU and IMF prepare to bail out the country, an article in the Wall Street Journal explains why it’s money down the drain. The country is profoundly corrupt, and more money will no doubt make it more corrupt.
An update on a recent enormous, long-running theft of funds by the leadership of Panteion University:
The thieving rector, Emilios Metaxopoulous, is already out of prison, a few months into his 25-year sentence. No doubt a fine Greek surgeon (“A U.K. court on Wednesday jailed a former executive of medical-goods supplier DePuy International Ltd., a unit of Johnson & Johnson, for channeling £4.5 million ($7 million) in bribes to Greek surgeons…. [Greek surgeons’] demands for bribes have put operations out of reach for some Greeks. Stents for heart operations, for example, cost up to five times as much in Greece as in Germany…”) was found to attest to his deathly illness.
The vice-rector, serving a 16-year sentence, preceded the rector out of prison, for he also has a deathly illness. The vice-rector seems to have been in jail for twenty minutes or so.
… moves smartly along on the question of whether you can have private universities in your country.
There are two models for this.
One, typified by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is a comprehensive institution, almost entirely devoted to extortion of private and public funds. Other examples of the-university-as-criminal-conspiracy are Asia University (currently available for purchase at seven billion won) and Panteion University in Greece.
The other model involves top-down, restricted theft, as in the recent case of Hungary’s National Defense University. Here the extortion seems to have been performed by the rector, on his own initiative.
The rector of the Zrinyi Miklós National Defense University – Hungary’s higher education facility for military personnel – was placed on remand last Thursday on suspicion of abuse of office. János Szabó had to be wrestled to the ground by National Bureau of Investigation (NNI) officers while attempting to resist arrest the previous Tuesday.
Szabó had allegedly told the Hungarian arm of the German parcel carrier DHL that it was the subject of an investigation over personnel transporting drugs and arms. He is alleged to have offered to use his influence to have the probe stopped, in exchange for DHL signing a contract with a security firm nominated by Szabó.
Scrappy Hungarians! Can you imagine an American university president wrestled to the ground while resisting arrest? You know they’d go quietly.
In response to Egyptian courts having outlawed niqabs during university examinations, some students now wear swine flu masks.
The swine veil doesn’t convey much about the wearer’s religious sentiments. It seems to say something along the lines of If it weren’t for the pigs in this country, I wouldn’t have to hide my identity.
It’s not exactly Harvard destroying Allston, but Boston University has some Londoners upset about air conditioning units.
… BU’s London [campus] installed five condenser cooling units behind its Victorian town house in the summer of 2008. They say the bulky equipment is an eyesore and a noise nuisance, and have stepped up their protests in recent months after it became clear that the units were not going away easily.
… Residents want BU to relocate the Mitsubishi units to a less visible location, one that can’t be seen or heard by BU’s neighbors. Committee members say they recently appealed to college officials in Boston, including the president’s office and the board of trustees, to no avail.
Residents have flooded the planning department in the British capital with complaints. The constant humming of the units, which are supposed to operate year-round, deter them from spending time outside and from sleeping with their windows open, they say.
… Under one plan, BU would raise a dividing wall to make the units less visible. But residents say that would block precious sunlight from some adjacent homes. It would also prevent one resident’s cats from access to the garden…
He’s crashingly undiplomatic.
He is also about to invest massively in French universities. He knows that they’re terrible, and is trying to make them better. Let’s see if he can do it. Certainly he’s right to give up on the sordid soixante-huitard campuses. They will never change. He seems to be concentrating on several not-yet-dead universities.
As always, though, Sarkozy accompanies his announcement of this good news with hilarious put-downs.
The roundtable [where he made the announcement] had a highly scripted feel, but as usual, Sarkozy improvised his own, somewhat rambling contribution — and he wouldn’t be Sarkozy if he didn’t manage to fling an insult at the research community as well. Putting sloths on notice that they would not benefit from the bond plan, he said: “There’s something everybody has to understand well. There are scientists who search and who find. There are others who search but don’t find — those we have to help. And then there are those who don’t search at all.”
From The Nation:
…Italy’s economy is floundering, with small businesses going belly up, 2 million jobless and no prospects at all for the young (up to 50 percent of young people are unemployed in some regions, and university graduates are fleeing the country). While across Europe governments are pouring funds into research, universities and the knowledge economy, and into green and sustainable growth, Italy is doing nothing…
Bomb her house.
While she, her mother, and her daughter, are in it.
The Independent provides more detail about Greek universities:
… [A]cademics and concerned citizens are increasing calls for authorities to revise – if not scrap – the so-called asylum law which in recent years has allowed extremists to seek haven within university campuses, turning them into launching pads for their offensives against police.
“This has to stop,” said Ioannis Karakostas, a professor of law and deputy rector of Athens University. “These extremist elements are abusing the law to suit their own agendas and not the founding spirit of the law, which is to shelter and shield free thought.”
The rector, Christos Kittas, was attacked last Saturday when about 100 masked anarchists stormed the soaring green gates of the university – seizing control of the marble neo-classical building amid violent riots sparked during demonstrations commemorating last year’s police shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15.
Because of the law, thousands of officers and riot police stood idle, watching youths destroy the building, tear down the Greek flag, set it ablaze and then hoist a black-and-red anarchist banner over the university’s rooftop. The televised scenes sent shock waves across the country, fanning debate on the controversial asylum law.
“I felt dead inside watching people who could be my grandchildren or students commit crimes and vandalise the shrine of free thought,” Mr Kittas said on Wednesday.
To the fury of the “anarchists”, the board of directors at Athens Law School have proposed a raft of bold measures to shield the institution from further attacks including student identification cards intended to ward off militant intruders…
What’s most striking to UD about the unbelievable Greek story – beyond the violence – is the apparent nothingness of the violent forces themselves. Various journalists give them various names — “anarchists” in those telling quotation marks, anti-government forces, radicals — but from what I can tell they’re nihilists who like to bludgeon people and burn buildings.
… Yiannis Panousis, a prominent criminologist at the University of Athens … was hospitalized in February after being set upon during a lecture by extremists with iron bars and sledgehammers.
It’s business as usual in the Greek university system, where a law keeping police off of university campuses has made them ground zero for assholes who throttle people trying to give lectures…
Anastassios Manthos, rector of Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University, who was knocked unconscious in a similar campus raid last year, said things had gotten worse. “The violence in universities, and in Greek society in general, is explosive and unprecedented,” he said.
Not business as usual. Worse.
…[T]here is a general climate of fear in universities…
One campus has decided to do something:
[T]he Athens Law School on Tuesday took a bold step toward restricting access to its campus, approving a program to issue identity cards for students and to place guards at its gates.
From Prague Daily Monitor:
Two renowned Czech university teachers and scholars in the field of psychology, Jiri Hoskovec and Jiri Stikar, have confessed to plagiarism they committed two years ago, the daily Pravo reports Thursday.
They apologised on the web page of the Charles University publisher’s for having passed a scientific text written by another author off as their own in their joint book Safe Mobility at the Old Age from 2007, the paper adds.
In their book, which is to be used in university courses as well as by researchers and general public, both authors included almost word-for-word excerpts from Psychology for Drivers written by Karel Havlik without citing the source, Pravo writes…
There won’t be any punishment. The press only responded when Havlik threatened to go to court.
A pharmacy student at this Hungarian university pulled out his gun and began shooting during class. He killed one student and badly injured others in the room. He has been captured.
Local media quoted other students as saying the alleged gunman had recently been acting strangely and did not get along well with his classmates.
Yet how can that be true? The author of this update on the nothingness of the Italian university system, a British professor who teaches in Trento, notes that the Italians have no trouble with the “buffoonish” Berlusconi, leader of their whole country. The fact that their higher education system is a black hole is a trifle.
Like the Greeks with Marietta Giannakou, the Italians have at the moment a minister of education so appalled by the country’s brain drain, and by what’s left in the country’s universities now that almost all of the smart students and professors have gone away, that she’s determined to do something. But, again like Giannakou, Mariastella Gelmini is unlikely to get anywhere. Corruption, insufficient funds, you know the deal.
The article describes what Italy has now:
… Parliament is full of superannuated professors itching to water down the proposed reforms.
[Gelmini] wants universities to be less like the Civil Service and more like businesses. To this end, she is proposing that rettori (elected vice-chancellors) should be limited to an eight-year term and be flanked by a professional general manager. The administrative council of the university will become a de facto board of directors, with at least 40 per cent of its members drawn from outside the university. It is intended that public-spirited business people will serve. University senates will occupy themselves purely with academic concerns. Given that many Italian universities have bankrupted themselves, this is no bad thing.
Second, Ms Gelmini wants to professionalise the staff. Professors will dedicate 1,500 hours a year to research and teaching, outside consultancies will be curbed, professors who do not meet standards will miss pay increments, and teaching and research assessment will be tougher. Farming out teaching to unqualified assistants will rightly be banned….
They’ve got crass cynical no-showism down to a science in Italian universities. Hard to see how, with a clown running the country, you change that.