… 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.
… settles in for more years of state-sponsored locked-in syndrome with occasional violent twitches, the British system begins to show a little movement.
Britain’s elite universities should be allowed to privatise to form a US-style Ivy league, a senior vice-chancellor said today.
Sir Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College, said institutions including his own, as well as Cambridge and Oxford universities, should be freed from state control to allow them to charge students more than the current £3,140 capped fees and recruit greater numbers of international students to boost their income.
… “The trouble is all, universities are too dependent on the government. You don’t want to be subject to the mores of government funding or changing educational structures.”…
France, Italy, and Greece remain the hopeless paralytics of European higher education, leaving the path clear for Germany and England and everybody else.
… only slightly better than that of Greece, will reform itself a little bit.
The Italian Parliament on Thursday gave a definitive green light to a government decree designed to promote meritocracy in Italy’s higher education system and overhaul the hiring of university staff.
“Today the university system changes,” Italian Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini said after the Chamber of Deputies okayed the decree with 281 in favor, 196 against and 28 abstentions.
Among measures introduced in the decree, which forms part of a wider program of cost-cutting reforms for the sector yet to be finalized, 7 percent of government funds allocated to universities will be shared out on a performance basis from 2009, rewarding universities which demonstrate excellence in teaching and research.
In a bid to help out people at the start of their careers, 60 percent of funds must be spent on the employment of young researchers.
The decree also increases funding for research studentships by 135 million euros from this year.
The decree has been welcomed by some university bodies including the Conference of Italian University Chancellors and heads of research institutes.
There is a general consensus that the university system, which fails to gain a single entry in the top 100 universities in the world and which Gelmini has said “produces fewer graduates than Chile,” needs to be overhauled.
But critics have downplayed the usefulness of the decree in the light of government spending cuts of an estimated 1.5 billion euros in the sector planned from 2010.
Background here.