Reform paradoxes: academic freedom and governance in Greek and Turkish higher education (original) (raw)
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This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the current developments in higher education in Greece. Towards this direction, it offers a historicized overview of the relation between the state and higher education in Greece over the last forty years by situating it within a broader context, that is, by taking into consideration both students' protests from below and the wider global transformations from above. In order to conceptualize the historicity of these dynamics, we propose a periodization in three temporally discrete, though dialectically interlinked, phases as we set to explain the substantial penetration, through specific policies, of neoliberalism in the Greek university after 2008, a project that until that time had not been successful.
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Increasing access to higher education is often perceived as a threat to authoritarian regimes because, as liberal theory suggests, universities would cultivate critical citizenry and oppositional politics. However, Turkey, under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, contradicts this assumption and necessitates a rethinking of the relationship between the university and democracy. Although university-educated sections of society are generally more embracive of democratic values, universities have also played an important role in nationalist indoctrination, elite reproduction, and class inequality. Moreover, emerging evidence indicates the role of universities in authoritarian regimes. This paper focuses on the double processes of the remarkable growth of access to universities associated with democratization in liberal theory and the simultaneous intensification and consolidation of authoritarian rule in Turkey. It argues that the changes in higher education have not only been a reflection of Erdoğan’s autocratic rule but also serve as one of its building blocks. Universities fulfill this function by extending political patronage to new clientele and fortifying control and coercion among students and academics, who have historically been central to democratic politics in the country.
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