After 31 days of hunger strike N. Romanos will be granted the educational leaves to be able to follow his studies with the use of an electronic position surveillance device under the condition that he will follow 1/3 of the courses of the first semester via internet.

After 31 days of hunger strike the state had to kneel down in front of the struggle for freedom. This is not only a victory of one person against the state, but a breath of freedom for everyone who is standing up against this totalitarian regime.

10/12/2014
ReINFORM

Related Articles:
Hunger strike in Greece: for a breath of freedom
Nikos Romanos: Better Dead than Educated?
Reactie regering Samaras op Romanos is symptomatisch voor algemeen beleid

Source of featured image: omniatv.com  (NIKHTHΣ means WINNER)

Nikos Romanos’ name is closely tied to the equally well known Alexandros Grigoropoulos, the 15-year-old boy who was shot and killed by police officer Epaminondas Korkoneas in Athens, on December 6, 2008. Only 15 years of age himself, Romanos witnessed his best friend die in front of his eyes. The murder sparked weeks of nationwide rioting.

Several years later, Romanos was caught together with four of his comrades while trying to flee from a bank robbery in Velvento. Following their arrest they were beaten up under police custody to such extent that the photographs released by the police had to be overtly photoshopped to hide their injuries.

Nikos Romanos, Andreas-Dimitris Bourzoukos, Giannis Mihailidis and Dimitris Politis openly stated that they are anarchists and revolutionaries. They were subsequently convicted on the charges of armed robbery, while the initial terrorism charges failed to stand in court. Many refer back to the speech delivered by the State Attorney Grigoris Peponis during the trial for the robbery in Velvento: “It is the first time I see a robbery in which they [the perpetrators] set the hostages free, while during the police chase, they did not use the heavy weapons they had, neither did they shoot the policemen, nor did they use the hostage as a human shield in order to escape.”

Last spring, while in prison, Nikos Romanos succeeded in passing the Greek entrance exams for university and was admitted to a faculty in Athens. Since September 2014, the beginning of the academic term, he has been eligible for educational furloughs (exit permits) to regularly attend classes.

The Ministry of Justice and the President of Greece, Karolos Papoulias, wanted to award Romanos and other inmates for their academic success. However, Romanos, being an anarchist, refused to attend the ceremony as this would go against his principles. The rejection of this invitation from the head of state and the refusal to accept the €500 prize money resulted in a clearly vindictive denial, by the prison council, of Romanos’s application for prison furlough to attend classes.

Many believe this is part of a more generalized vengeful tactic of the state to those resisting the new prison system. The type-C prisons in Greece have some similarities with the F-type prisons in Turkey. They are intended for “dangerous criminals” and the “ideological enemies of the state,” which includes revolutionary, political and rebellious prisoners — as well as those who voice their protest against injustices in jail.

On Monday, November 10, 2014, with anarchy forever in his heart (as he wrote), Nikos Romanos commenced his hunger strike. He thereby reaffirmed his anarchist principles and explained his motivation in a statement that laid claim to his lawful entitlement to educational leave from prison.

In his own words:

In addition to being instruments of control and repression, laws are also used for maintenance of balances or what is otherwise called social contracts; they reflect socio-political correlations and partially form certain positions for the conduct of the social war.

This is why I want to make my choice as clear as possible: I am not defending their legitimacy — on the contrary, I use them as political blackmail to gain breaths of freedom from the devastating condition of incarceration.

On November 24, Romanos was transferred to the Athens General Hospital Gennimatas, where he remains — under strong police surveillance — to this day. His transfer was accompanied by an official document of the prison prosecutor, who audaciously stated that the hospital doctors bear responsibility for whatever happens to him, thus indirectly urging the hospital staff to enforce force-feeding.

Nikos Romanos’s physician, Pantelia (Lina) Vergopoulou, reported on November 28 that he is in critical condition, faced with life-threatening complications. His doctor warns that “it is no longer his health that is in danger, but his life,” given that “from one day to the next he may suffer a kidney or a heart failure.”

According to Romanos’ lawyer, Fragkiskos Ragkousis, Romanos has lost 17 kilos (over 35 pounds) and is now fighting for his life. With a heart rate of 170 bpm, Ragousis said that unless there is a change, cardiac arrest is considered “to be expected.” He also denounced the forced-feeding ordered by the district attorney director of the prison, stating that “this is equal to torture of the prisoner.”

During Romanos’ battle, other prisoners joined him as a sign of support and comradery. On November 17, anarchist prisoner Yannis Michailidis went on hunger strike as a sign of solidarity with the struggle of Nikos Romanos and as of November 28 he in turn also needed to be hospitalized in Piraeus general hospital Tzaneio, after he was diagnosed with bradycardia.

On November 30, Andreas-Dimitris Bourzoukos and Dimitris Politis, anarchist prisoners and comrades of Romanos, released a statement saying that:

As a minimum token of solidarity with Nikos, we will also go on a hunger strike as of Monday December 1 — like comrade Yannis Michailidis, who is conducting a hunger strike since the 17th of November — until his claim is met. Together until the end, together until victory.

With fears that the health of the two initial hunger strikers may be imminently and irreversibly damaged, many solidarity actions have taken place both within Greece and in other parts of the world. Nikos’ comrades declared to stand by his side in his struggle and support every move he desires and must take to accompany his battle, and will support every expression of aggressive solidarity that is needed. Romanos also declared that “solidarity means attack” and added an interesting post scriptum: “To all the armchair ‘fighters’, the professional humanists, the ‘sensitive’ intellectuals and spiritual personages: I say to you good riddance in advance.”

Rather than defend the legitimacy of state laws, Nikos Romanos is using one of the few means of struggle at his disposal in a state of captivity: placing his body as a barricade to get a breath of freedom. All comrades stand firm and continue their hunger strike.

The passion for freedom is stronger than all prisons!

Danai Limneou is an activist in the anti-authoritarian/anarchist movement in Greece.

Source of the article: http://roarmag.org/2014/12/hunger-strike-romanos-anarchist/

Source of the featured image: Dromografos

Understanding the Corporatisation of Universities in the Netherlands and beyond 

Time : 24th May 2014, 13:00 – 18:00

Place : International institute for Research and Education – Lombokstraat 40, 1094 AL, Amsterdam

Register for free at borderless@grenzeloos.org

On hiring faculty off the tenure track

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a  corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors [4] on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress [5] in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.

That’s one aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite familiar from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management—a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up. There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters [6] (Oxford University Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style of massive administration and levels of administration—and of course, very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model.

But using cheap labor—and vulnerable labor—is a business practice that goes as far back as you can trace private enterprise, and unions emerged in response. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students. Graduate students are even more vulnerable, for obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education. The costs, of course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn into these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a business-run society to transfer costs to the people. In fact, economists tacitly cooperate in this. So, for example, suppose you find a mistake in your checking account and you call the bank to try to fix it. Well, you know what happens. You call them up, and you get a recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.” Maybe the menu has what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to find the right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your business,” and so on. Finally, after some period of time, you may get a human being, who you can ask a short question to. That’s what economists call “efficiency.” By economic measures, that system reduces labor costs to the bank; of course it imposes costs on you, and those costs are multiplied by the number of users, which can be enormous—but that’s not counted as a cost in economic calculation. And if you look over the way the society works, you find this everywhere. So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the  [7]Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki (New York University Press, 1975), produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy,” namely that there’s too much democracy. In the 1960s there were pressures from the population, these “special interests,” to try to gain rights within the political arena, and that put too much pressure on the state—you can’t do that. There was one special interest that they left out, namely the corporate sector, because its interests are the “national interest”; the corporate sector is supposed to control the state, so we don’t talk about them. But the “special interests” were causing problems and they said “we have to have more moderation in democracy,” the public has to go back to being passive and apathetic. And they were particularly concerned with schools and universities, which they said were not properly doing their job of “indoctrinating the young.” You can see from student activism (the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movements) that the young are just not being indoctrinated properly.

Well how do you indoctrinate the young? There are a number of ways. One way is to burden them with hopelessly heavy tuition debt. Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. They can even garnish social security if you default. That’s a disciplinary technique. I don’t say that it was consciously introduced for the purpose, but it certainly has that effect. And it’s hard to argue that there’s any economic basis for it. Just take a look around the world: higher education is mostly free. In the countries with the highest education standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top all the time, higher education is free. And in a rich, successful capitalist country like Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country, which has pretty decent education standards, considering the economic difficulties they face, it’s free. In fact, look at the United States: if you go back to the 1940s and 50s, higher education was pretty close to free. The GI Bill gave free education to vast numbers of people who would never have been able to go to college. It was very good for them and it was very good for the economy and the society; it was part of the reason for the high economic growth rate. Even in private colleges, education was pretty close to free. Take me: I went to college in 1945 at an Ivy League university, University of Pennsylvania, and tuition was $100. That would be maybe $800 in today’s dollars. And it was very easy to get a scholarship, so you could live at home, work, and go to school and it didn’t cost you anything. Now it’s outrageous. I have grandchildren in college, who have to pay for their tuition and work and it’s almost impossible. For the students that is a disciplinary technique.

And another technique of indoctrination is to cut back faculty-student contact: large classes, temporary teachers who are overburdened, who can barely survive on an adjunct salary. And since you don’t have any job security you can’t build up a career, you can’t move on and get more. These are all techniques of discipline, indoctrination, and control. And it’s very similar to what you’d expect in a factory, where factory workers have to be disciplined, to be obedient; they’re not supposed to play a role in, say, organizing production or determining how the workplace functions—that’s the job of management. This is now carried over to the universities. And I think it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has any experience in private enterprise, in industry; that’s the way they work.

On how higher education ought to be

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory.

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them—that’s freedom and democracy (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, book 4, ch. 7 [8]). We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system” (“Founding Ceremony” [9] for newly-organized Local Associations). Or take someone like, John Dewey, a mainstream 20th-century social philosopher, who called not only for education directed at creative independence in schools, but also worker control in industry, what he called “industrial democracy.” He says that as long as the crucial institutions of the society (like production, commerce, transportation, media) are not under democratic control, then “politics [will be] the shadow cast on society by big business” (John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party” [10][1931]). This idea is almost elementary, it has deep roots in American history and in classical liberalism, it should be second nature to working people, and it should apply the same way to universities. There are some decisions in a university where you don’t want to have [democratic transparency because] you have to preserve student privacy, say, and there are various kinds of sensitive issues, but on much of the normal activity of the university, there is no reason why direct participation can’t be not only legitimate but helpful. In my department, for example, for 40 years we’ve had student representatives helpfully participating in department meetings.

On “shared governance” and worker control

The university is probably the social institution in our society that comes closest to democratic worker control. Within a department, for example, it’s pretty normal for at least the tenured faculty to be able to determine a substantial amount of what their work is like: what they’re going to teach, when they’re going to teach, what the curriculum will be. And most of the decisions about the actual work that the faculty is doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of course there is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule or control. The faculty can recommend somebody for tenure, let’s say, and be turned down by the deans, or the president, or even the trustees or legislators. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen and it does. And that’s always a part of the background structure, which, although it always existed, was much less of a problem in the days when the administration was drawn from the faculty and in principle recallable. Under representative systems, you have to have someone doing administrative work but they should be recallable at some point under the authority of the people they administer. That’s less and less true. There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the faculty controls. I mentioned before The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the several universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a couple of others.

Meanwhile, the faculty are increasingly reduced to a category of temporary workers who are assured a precarious existence with no path to the tenure track. I have personal acquaintances who are effectively permanent lecturers; they’re not given real faculty status; they have to apply every year so that they can get appointed again. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And in the case of adjuncts, it’s been institutionalized: they’re not permitted to be a part of the decision-making apparatus, and they’re excluded from job security, which merely amplifies the problem. I think staff ought to also be integrated into decision-making, since they’re also a part of the university. So there’s plenty to do, but I think we can easily understand why these tendencies are developing. They are all part of imposing a business model on just about every aspect of life. That’s the neoliberal ideology that most of the world has been living under for 40 years. It’s very harmful to people, and there has been resistance to it. And it’s worth noticing that two parts of the world, at least, have pretty much escaped from it, namely East Asia, where they never really accepted it, and South America in the past 15 years.

On the alleged need for “flexibility”

“Flexibility” is a term that’s very familiar to workers in industry. Part of what’s called “labor reform” is to make labor more “flexible,” make it easier to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to ensure maximization of profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a good thing, like “greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry where the same is true, in universities there’s no justification. So take a case where there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big problem. One of my daughters teaches at a university; she just called me the other night and told me that her teaching load is being shifted because one of the courses that was being offered was under-enrolled. Okay, the world didn’t to an end, they just shifted around the teaching arrangements—you teach a different course, or an extra section, or something like that. People don’t have to be thrown out or be insecure because of the variation in the number of students enrolling in courses. There are all sorts of ways of adjusting for that variation. The idea that labor should meet the conditions of “flexibility” is just another standard technique of control and domination. Why not say that administrators should be thrown out if there’s nothing for them to do that semester, or trustees—what do they have to be there for? The situation is the same with top management in industry: if labor has to be flexible, how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them. And you can go on like this. Just to take the news from the last couple of days, take, say, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank: he just got a prettysubstantial raise [11], almost double his salary, out of gratitude because he had saved the bank from criminal charges that would have sent the management to jail; he got away with only $20 billion in fines for criminal activities. Well I can imagine that getting rid of somebody like that might be helpful to the economy. But that’s not what people are talking about when they talk about “labor reform.” It’s the working people who have to suffer, and they have to suffer by insecurity, by not knowing where tomorrow’s piece of bread is going to come from, and therefore be disciplined and obedient and not raise questions or ask for their rights. That’s the way that tyrannical systems operate. And the business world is a tyrannical system. When it’s imposed on the universities, you find it reflects the same ideas. This shouldn’t be any secret.

On the purpose of education

These are debates that go back to the Enlightenment, when issues of higher education and mass education were really being raised, not just education for the clergy and aristocracy. And there were basically two models discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were discussed with pretty evocative imagery. One image of education was that it should be like a vessel that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call these days “teaching to test”: you pour water into the vessel and then the vessel returns the water. But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of us who went through school experienced, since you could memorize something for an exam that you had no interest in to pass an exam and a week later you forgot what the course was about. The vessel model these days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to top,” whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities. Enlightenment thinkers opposed that model.

The other model was described as laying out a string along which the student progresses in his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the string means imposing some degree of structure. So an educational program, whatever it may be, a course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just anything goes; it has a certain structure. But the goal of it is for the student to acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge—that’s education. One world-famous physicist, in his freshman courses if he was asked “what are we going to cover this semester?”, his answer was “it doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.” You have gain the capacity and the self-confidence for that matter to challenge and create and innovate, and that way you learn; that way you’ve internalized the material and you can go on. It’s not a matter of accumulating some fixed array of facts which then you can write down on a test and forget about tomorrow.

These are two quite distinct models of education. The Enlightenment ideal was the second one, and I think that’s the one that we ought to be striving towards. That’s what real education is, from kindergarten to graduate school. In fact there are programs of that kind for kindergarten, pretty good ones.

On the love of teaching

We certainly want people, both faculty and students, to be engaged in activity that’s satisfying, enjoyable, challenging, exciting—and I don’t really think that’s hard. Even young children are creative, inquisitive, they want to know things, they want to understand things, and unless that’s beaten out of your head it stays with you the rest of your life. If you have opportunities to pursue those commitments and concerns, it’s one of the most satisfying things in life. That’s true if you’re a research physicist, it’s true if you’re a carpenter; you’re trying to create something of value and deal with a difficult problem and solve it. I think that’s what makes work the kind of thing you want to do; you do it even if you don’t have to do it. In a reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because they love it; that’s what they want to do; they’re given the opportunity, they have the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and independent and creative—what’s better? That’s what they love to do. And that, again, can be done at any level.

It’s worth thinking about some of the imaginative and creative educational programs that are being developed at different levels. So, for example, somebody just described to me the other day a program they’re using in high schools, a science program where the students are asked an interesting question: “How can a mosquito fly in the rain?” That’s a hard question when you think about it. If something hit a human being with the force of a raindrop hitting a mosquito it would absolutely flatten them immediately. So how come the mosquito isn’t crushed instantly? And how can the mosquito keep flying? If you pursue that question—and it’s a pretty hard question—you get into questions of mathematics, physics, and biology, questions that are challenging enough that you want to find an answer to them.

That’s what education should be like at every level, all the way down to kindergarten, literally. There are kindergarten programs in which, say, each child is given a collection of little items: pebbles, shells, seeds, and things like that. Then the class is given the task of finding out which ones are the seeds. It begins with what they call a “scientific conference”: the kids talk to each other and they try to figure out which ones are seeds. And of course there’s some teacher guidance, but the idea is to have the children think it through. After a while, they try various experiments and they figure out which ones are the seeds. At that point, each child is given a magnifying glass and, with the teacher’s help, cracks a seed and looks inside and finds the embryo that makes the seed grow. These children learn something—really, not only something about seeds and what makes things grow; but also about how to discover. They’re learning the joy of discovery and creation, and that’s what carries you on independently, outside the classroom, outside the course.

The same goes for all education up through graduate school. In a reasonable graduate seminar, you don’t expect students to copy it down and repeat whatever you say; you expect them to tell you when you’re wrong or to come up with new ideas, to challenge, to pursue some direction that hadn’t been thought of before. That’s what real education is at every level, and that’s what ought to be encouraged. That ought to be the purpose of education. It’s not to pour information into somebody’s head which will then leak out but to enable them to become creative, independent people who can find excitement in discovery and creation and creativity at whatever level or in whatever domain their interests carry them.

On using corporate rhetoric against corporatization

This is kind of like asking how you should justify to the slave owner that people shouldn’t be slaves. You’re at a level of moral inquiry where it’s probably pretty hard to find answers. We are human beings with human rights. It’s good for the individual, it’s good for the society, it’s even good for the economy, in the narrow sense, if people are creative and independent and free. Everyone benefits if people are able to participate, to control their fate, to work with each other—that may not maximize profit and domination, but why should we take those to be values to be concerned about?

Advice for adjunct faculty organizing unions

You know better than I do what has to be done, the kind of problems you face. Just got ahead and do what has to be done. Don’t be intimidated, don’t be frightened, and recognize that the future can be in our hands if we’re willing to grasp it.

Prof. Chomsky’s remarks in this transcript were elicited by questions from Robin Clarke, Adam Davis, David Hoinski, Maria Somma, Robin J. Sowards, Matthew Ussia, and Joshua Zelesnick. Noam Chomsky’s OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity [12] is published by Zuccotti Park Press. [13]

A few days ago, a group of them showed up in front of prime minister’s, Antonis Samaras residence in Athens, to sing the Christmas carols for him. Watch the video someone managed to film before the police stopped them.

This is their carols’ text in English:

“Antonis Samaras
listen carefully
the teachers are singing
the Christmas carols for you!
We used to be in the classrooms,
inside the schools
and you now throw us all out at once
you shut the schools down
leaving the poor students out
and you take away society’s happiness
Antonis Samaras, listen carefully!
These lay offs will remain on paper
We will return to our schools
We will win in broad daylight”

lan Collinge, author of “The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History and How We Can Fight Back,” recently spoke to students at the University of Illinois Urbana campus. His argument is detailed, persuasive, and heartbreaking; it is also a call to action for students and progressives. I was privileged to speak briefly at this event about the economic and political context of student debt, and I would like to elaborate on these remarks.

The inability of students to afford college without going into debt is the product of 40 years of policies advocated by ruling elites in this country which have resulted in astronomical increases in both student and credit card debt. These policies result from calculated choices, not from inevitable processes of globalization and technological progress.

Our country is twice as rich on a per capita basis as it was in 1970, when post-secondary students aged 18-25 constituted 4% (8.5 million) of the entire population of 200 million. Thus we should certainly be able to fund at the same level the current 21 million aged 18-25 that are now enrolled, who constitute less than 7% of the total U.S. population of over 300 million.

But while public higher education was virtually free or at least affordable in 1970, it is now prohibitively expensive for many. What I paid on a yearly basis to attend the University of California in 1970 would, if inflation were the only factor, now cost $4,000. Yet it costs over $13,000.

So why has our country gotten richer while our citizens and public institutions have gotten poorer?

First, labor’s (workers’) share of GDP has declined by at least 6% of total GDP, or at least $1 trillion per year in current dollars. This is reflected in stagnant wages over decades for most of the population, obviously including college students and their parents. Workers have not benefitted from gains in productivity—CEOs and shareholders have. In 1970, a year-round halftime (1000 hours per year) job at the common wage of $2 an hour could pay for all student tuition and living expenses. In 2013 such a job at $8 an hour would at best pay for one-third. Moreover, many parents are less able to help, see above.

Second, an inefficient and exorbitantly expensive for-profit healthcare system, spending $1 trillion more of our GDP than would “Medicare for All,” consumes increasing portions of federal and state budgets. This is not due to Medicare or Medicaid per se, but to health insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical supply corporations’ profits. In 1980, state governments spent 13% of their budgets on health and 39% on education; in 2010 those figures were 22% and 33%.

It is of course higher education funding that has decreased at a more rapid pace than K-12, because tuitions can be raised to compensate, and predatory student lenders like that just fine. Wasteful and needless military spending can be added to this increasingly constricted federal-to-state budgetary calculus.

Finally, federal tax rates over the past decades have remained low in relation to other developed nations and have become more regressive (unfair to low income workers) for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, state taxation systems which are more regressive by nature because of their dependence on sales taxes are increasingly burdened with mandatory healthcare expenses—see above—in terms of states being required to match federal Medicaid expenses.

It needs to be emphasized that as an economy develops, a smaller percentage of its GDP is spent on the basics of food, clothing, shelter, and normal consumption. A higher percentage of the GDP should be available for governmental social and human services of all kinds, including education. This would result from a higher but easily affordable level of taxation in a country that—again—is twice as rich per capita in real terms.

But due to dramatically lower tax rates for the richest among us, the overall level of federal income taxes as a percentage of GDP decreased from 8.9% in 1970 to 7.6% in 2013; the corresponding figures for federal corporate taxes actually collected are 3.2% and 1.8%. This trend is exactly backwards, and has done enormous damage to funding for services at all levels of government, from federal to state to local.

Federal spending is not properly and beneficially used to ease pressure on state and local budgets and provide more funding room for public higher education, traditionally a function of state governments. Meanwhile, corporations play state governments off against each other in a race to the bottom regarding lower taxation and decreased public services—all while congratulating themselves for their self-serving donations to higher education.

All of these factors have conspired to put the current generation of college students at risk of indebtedness, inadequate employment, and “delayed futures” in terms of marriage and children. Specific reforms are urgently needed, especially in regard to interest rates and bankruptcy law. But we must address the overall economic and political context of student debt; by doing so many other systemic problems that have been manufactured by the 1% to the detriment of the 99% would fall by the wayside.

David Green lives in Champaign, IL and is a social policy analyst at the University of Illinois. He can be reached at davidgreen50@gmail.com.

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/04/the-economic-and-political-context-of-student-debt/

This scheme calls for mandatory transfers that in fact disguise the truth – that the largest number of these people will eventually be fired. Of the two major universities, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (UoA) and the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), which are being worst hit, the former will lose 40% of its staff and the latter 45%: in short these institutions will be unable to function.

The “mobility” scheme for the universities which are, by law, self-governed institutions, was not discussed with their administration prior to the government’s attempt to enforce its decision. Therefore, it is a plan which is in direct conflict with the institutions’ internal evaluations carried out according to government guidelines. According to the institutions themselves they are in fact, understaffed. For example, in the UoA there are 1,316 employees for 65,682 students and 1,974 academic staff whereas the University claims that a minimum of administrative and technical staff required is 1,917. It is understaffed by 601 employees, the administrative-technical staff and student ratio being 1.66 to 100, when, for example, in British universities the average is 7.9 to 100 and in American universities an average of 9.5 to 100.

The Resistance Movement

For the past 6 weeks both the employees and the academic staff of UoA and NTUA have been on strike while at the same time the function of the two universities has been suspended. In Greece there has been a long history of a powerful university resistance movement against destructive governmental policies such as, for example, the implementation of the Bologna Process and the attempted “coup” to abolish the Article 16 of the Constitution that declares the free and public character of tertiary education. However this is the first time that the usual barriers between administrative staff and academics have been abolished within and by the same struggle on the basis of the common awareness that if the “mobility” measures of the neoliberal government pass this will be the end of the two universities. The mergers of whole schools and departments will ensue, something that will threaten the academic staff itself. It is obvious that the employees to be fired is the first link in the chain of academic redundancies, already and silently implemented by the firing of academic staff under contract. The struggle of the whole academic community is grounded on the development of solidarity and support first of the academic staff who will suffer a severe financial loss for being on strike but also of the administrative and technical staff of other universities, who are not presently hit, towards their colleagues.

This massive movement has been multifaceted and has taken original forms. I’ll focus on a specifically hegemonic appropriation of formal university ceremonies as well as the premises where they take place. The unions of the teaching staff of the UoA and of the NTUA in cooperation with the unions of the employees of the two universities organized the opening of the new academic year for their freshmen in two parallel events held on 9 October 2013. The idea was to offer an alternative welcome where the new students and their parents, misguided by the systematic propaganda of the powerful media against the mobilizations, would be informed by their own teachers on strike about the real reasons for the strike. These groundbreaking events turned out to be hugely successful since approx. 4,000 students and parents turned out in the UoA and approx. 1,500 in the NTUA. Speaking of the UoA, this unexpected massive attendance made the organizers open the meeting onto the area of Propylaia outside the large ceremony hall! During this exciting ceremony also attended by the Presidents of the School of Law and Theology the Rector congratulated the freshmen for their successful entry into an institution that is internationally ranked as belonging to the 1,26%  best universities of the world. He called for their understanding and support for the situation making emphatically clear that the personal cost for the loss of the Fall semester is less important than the condemnation of the new generations to downgraded and poor education and the sinking of Greece into ignorance. As he said, “the university has been open to social struggle for many decades. It is high time that it defended its own survival”, phrases that were applauded by the students. He closed his speech by challenging the Ministry that has demanded the official persecution of those Rectors who are unruly: “I have done no offence of any kind. Let them arrest me!”

The message from this highly original event whereby the academic community on strike summons the students for an alternative welcome was that the true university is here in its historical building and it cares and fights for the protection of its academic quality, its democratic function. Last but not least the academic community fights for the future of Greece within the chaos and catastrophe brought upon it by the Memorandum and the government that slavishly tries to enforce upon us all.

***

Petition

Protect Status and Staff of Greek Universities

Eight universities in Greece (University of Athens, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki the Athens Polytechnic and University of Economics and Business as well as the University of Crete, Ioannina, Thessaly and Patras) have been forced to halt all activities as a result of Greek ministry of education proposals to suspend unilaterally 1349 university administrative workers.

The impact on teaching, research, clinical work and international collaboration is unparalleled and the threat to higher education in Greece as a result of stringently imposed EU austerity measures is a cause of great concern far beyond Greece’s shores.

As academics, university workers, students and others, we call on the EU and the Greek government to protect the status and staff of Greek universities, to ensure that they remain able to engage in education and research and to recognize that these institutions are more important now than ever.

They are and must remain beacons of critical thinking in a Europe whose social structures are being eroded by massive cutbacks and over which the shadow of far-right extremism looms.

Sign the petition here.

Source: http://leftunity.org/the-struggle-in-the-greek-universities/

In May, the University of London (UOL) announced its decision to shut down the University of London Union (ULU) from August 2014, and replace it with a management run services centre. In response, students at UOL have launched a campaign to reverse the decision, which was taken without student consent. The ‘Save Your Union‘ campaign is not only fighting to prevent the closure of ULU but is also demanding better working conditions for all campus workers and greater student oversight into the running the university itself. 

The initial organising meeting for the campaign took place at the beginning of October and representatives from numerous campuses, clubs and societies were in attendance and spent the evening in working groups developing a coordinated campaign strategy for the next six months. The first major date of the campaign will be a national mobilisation on campus (Malet Street, London WC1E 7HY), scheduled for this Wednesday (13 November) at 13.00pm. Additionally, a student referendum is expected to be carried out in the near future and a number of complimentary actions—including club-nights and promotional videos—are already being planned.

The loss of ULU—the only democratically ran representative body for students within UOL and a genuine focal point for student life in London—would be catastrophic.

For more information contact:

daniel.cooper@ulu.lon.ac.uk

michael.chessum@ulu.lon.ac.uk

womens@ulu.lon.ac.uk

Source: http://www.redpepper.org.uk/demonstration-to-save-the-university-of-london-union/

De Senaat van de Universiteit van Athene ( UOA ) is tot de conclusie gekomen dat

• de UOA objectief in volledig onvermogen verkeert om haar onderwijs- , onderzoeks- en administratieve taken uit te voeren;
• de onbegrijpelijke hardnekkigheid van het Griekse ministerie van Onderwijs op geen enkele wijze kan worden aanvaard; het beleid van het ministerie leidt tot ondermijning van het hoger onderwijs en van de nieuwe generatie in Griekenland, de generatie die de sociale en economische crisis het hoofd moet biede in de komende jaren;
• met niet onderbouwd boekhoudkundige berekeningen en onlogische sprongen – die niet passend zijn voor verantwoordelijke actoren en niet thuis horen in een goed staatsbestuur – marginaliseert het ministerie de eerste universiteit van Balkan, die sinds 1837 continue onderwijs van zeer aanzienlijk kwaliteit, onderzoek en maatschappelijk werk beidt die bijdragen aan de ontwikkeling van het land.

De Senaat is genoodzaakt om een rechtszaak aan te spanen bij de bevoegde rechtbanken van het land en Europa zich beroepend op de grondwettelijke rechten en internationale verdragen die geldig zijn in de Europese ruimte voor hoger onderwijs.

De Senaat van de Universiteit van Athene betreurt het publiek te informeren dat de Universiteit van Athene gedwongen en onvrijwillig in onmacht verkeert om de inschrijving van nieuwe studenten te verwerken, examens af te nemen, studenten te laten afstuderen of te kunnen voldoen aan alle andere academische en maatschappelijke verplichtingen, inclusief internationale verplichtingen.

De Senaat richt tenslotte een dringend verzoek tot alle bevoegden om, zelfs op het laatste moment, de pijnlijke maatregelen tegen de UOA af te remmen.

Athene 23-9-2013

De Senaat van de UOA

Source:

http://www.uoa.gr/anakoinoseis-kai-ekdhloseis/proboli-newn/apofash-sygklitoy-toy-ekpa.html

Dear parents, dear students,

We, the professors and employees of the National Technical University of Athens, welcome you to the largest and oldest Technical Institution in the country. We congratulate you, students and your parents who supported you, as we know well how hard you have worked to make your dream come true, to study in a good, public, internationally prestigious Greek University.

Today at our University, while we are preparing to begin the academic year, to register fresh undergraduate and postgraduate students, to say farewell to its successful graduates, to start the new curriculum, to open its classrooms and laboratories, something strange and dramatic happened.

The government announced that they suspend 550 of our administrative employees, that is 65% of our administrative staff. At the same time, they announce the labour reserve of 40% of the professors in the next year. To put it in a nutshell, it seems they want to reduce the size of the university in half. Our economic potential has already been reduced more than half, the funds for classes, buildings, libraries, salaries. At the same time, they have laid off the contract professors, they have been refusing for years to appoint the newly elected lecturers and professors, while our Schools have been bleeding from retirements. Even worse than that, they have recently seized 30 million euros from the research reserves, money that had not been given to us by the government, but we had ensured ourselves, the professors, young researchers and our management, through European or Greek research programmes. Money, that is, that we had brought here and which we recycled on studies, on scholarships, on educational and research infrastructure.

And yet, the government does not want to reduce the size of the National Technical University in half, as they have increased the number of admissions of undergraduate students! They are planning something much worse: half of the administrative employees, half of the professors, with tiny budgets will have to educate thousands of students. How will that happen? Obviously, classes will be reduced, academic textbooks will cease to be free of charge, libraries will be closed (we possess the best technical library in the country), secretariats will dissolve, buildings will be left without maintenance (we possess some of the best university infrastructure in the Balkans, in Athens, an excellent technological-cultural park in Lavrion and an important research centre in Metsovo-Epirus), our pioneering web centre will dissolve, laboratories will be closed and postgraduate programmes will cease to exist.

Briefly, the National Technical University of Athens is being pushed into becoming a post-secondary training institution, a vocational training institute, with easy and fast-to-get certificates, for a future of certain unemployment, with few impoverished workers and professors who will not care about how to teach but only about how to survive. Then you will be asked to pay tuition fees. This will not happen in the distant future, it is happening now.

Dear parents, dear students,

Under these circumstances, we have decided that we cannot function anymore, we cannot endure the downfall anymore. We cannot wait until our next colleague is fired, until it is our turn to be fired, until we do not have a computer, an office, a classroom, an auditorium, a research laboratory. Until the six out of the nine historic academic Departments of the National Technical University of Athens cease to exist, until our students are forced to pay tuition fees to get their education. We cannot imagine how it is possible that our colleagues, who on September 16th will be made redundant, young people with children, with other laid-off and unemployed members in their families, will work with a smile, just before they pick up their things from their offices for the last time, at the secretariats of the Schools registering our students. We cannot imagine how it is possible that the professors who know that in a few months they will suffer the same fate, will find the courage to teach in the auditoriums, will stand upright and dignified as academics. And you will say: Greece already has one million of unemployed citizens, Athens has forty thousand homeless people in the streets, one third of households lives under the poverty line, the salaries of those lucky enough to get paid are reduced in half or a third. Yes, this is the reality. You are also in the same condition, any parent of you can be unemployed, any home can be in danger of being auctioned, your paycheck is not enough, your children’s education is at risk. You do not know if and how they will manage to graduate with a degree.

We know that, too, we are people just like you, with families, with small children or with children who study. We grew up in the same streets, at the same school desks. We have been serving a great academic Institution with history, with prestige. We have received from our professors a Technical University of knowledge, scientific vanguard, innovation, research, democracy and dignity. If you shut your ears for a while to the low-level domestic media and search for the international rankings, you will see how high the National Technical University of Athens stands worldwide. You will see how important its courses are, how recognized its professors are globally, how its postgraduate students excel in European and American universities, how high the standards of our Greek engineers are.

Therefore, for all these reasons, dear parents and students,

The professors and employees of the National Technical University of Athens have decided to stand up with our heads high, instead of remaining idle and hopeless. We will do everything in our power to deliver the Technical University as it is today, and even improved, to the next generations, as it has been delivered to us. We remember something else, too: During two major and critical times of History –the War and the Dictatorship- the flame of the Institution’s emblem, Prometheus shone in the darkness. The Greek people took that flame in their hands and won. We do not forget and ask you to come here, with us, to stand by us in the noble struggle we begin.

The National Technical University of Athens Assembly of September 6th, 2013