“For several months now in trying to defend the unacceptable private universities bill, the government has engaged in a recital of slander and mockerywhen it was said through the mouth of the prime minister that the students behave almost like bandits, while the government continues to say that the students are a minority,” said member of the Central Committee of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoubasspeaking in the Plenary of the Parliament, on his bill Ministry of Education.
«You’ve missed the eggs and Easter“, he said, addressing the government, adding “you also gave a “tutorial” to your faction (DAP-NDFK) in the universities which does not find its vote in the general assemblies in the schools and since your doctrine is “where there is no word, there is a rod”. your faction called the MAT, like in the Law School of Komotini”.
Noting that “more than half of the society, especially in the younger ages, is against the establishment of private universities”, he added that “the student unions may have been excluded from the Educational Affairs committee, but their voice is heard here through the KKE”.
“The government conveys the voice of SEV and the groups that call for the establishment of private universities, as well as for public universities to operate like businesses,” he pointed out and added: “The government is handing over to entrepreneurs a sector with guaranteed clientele because it meets a social need, as it did with the Energy, Railways and Health and says that privatization and “liberation” will supposedly upgrade the public sector. And he tells it to the Greek people who are asked to pay a legal fee to be operated on.”
“The real modern thing is the expansion of the right of access to free education and not its reduction, as what the government is doing is anachronism and a return to previous centuries,” emphasized the head of the Central Committee of the KKE.
He made it clear that “only the objection of unconstitutionality of the KKE was essential”, recalling that in the last constitutional review in 2018, the KKE “proposed an extension of Article 16 to fully guarantee the uniform public character of education by prohibiting the operation of private schools altogether, which they rejected ND, PASOK, SYRIZA and all the MPs of the New Left who were then MPs and ministers of the SYRIZA-ANEL government”.
He referred to the “magnificent movement of students and students that has momentum and has squeezed apart from the government and the “yes, but” parties”.
“The bill,” he said, “is nothing more than a real stunt because it also brings in private universities and because it privatizes public ones more. These are the two sides of the same coin that is called the “university of the market” and is being built by the lobbies of the EU, the Bologna Treaty and the European Education Area, which are widely signed by ND, SYRIZA and PASOK”.
D. Koutsoubas highlighted “the agreement of all the other parties, who say that the degree is a qualification, who talk about self-financing universities, that is, about tuition fees”.
Fire against PASOK
“PASOK, in particular, says that Article 16 simply needs to be revised first and invokes the anecdote of the Scandinavian model, whose students have bitter experience with the imposition of tuition fees.
“For the Nordic model anecdote, even the Scandinavians don’t believe you, since they too have too much bitter experience of imposing fees that even lead to this rot new girls, college girls looking for sugar daddies to sponsor their studies. With known exchanges of course, you know them, but you probably have to find another capitalist paradise to copy”, he said characteristically, in a rather controversial comment.
“As for SYRIZA, which invokes the European model over the Cypriot one, it does blunt and misleading criticism, as privatization is promoted throughout the EU. The possibility of establishing private universities will be a Trojan Horse for the further privatization of public universities. In particular, SYRIZA pioneered the creation of foreign-language undergraduates with tuition fees, while tuition fees were generalized to postgraduates during his administration” pointed out D. Koutsoumbas.
“The government raises new walls in education, makes injustice a law“, underlined D. Koutsoubas, referring to the two ways of admission to Universities. One with the nationwide tickets and one with the wallet.”
“Many will continue to struggle, with only their family as support, to pass the walls of class barriers and the various “cutters” for a place at university, while some will enter universities with the “strict criteria” of their tax declaration, since the admission will be made through a “socket” Minimum Admission Base or international and paid high school diplomas.
You will enter the Medical School of the public university with 19,000 points, while in private medicine with 9,000 points but 19,000 euros/year. You are instituting degrees with honor, instead of degrees with value, as students demand,” he said, citing, characteristically, “Pocket excellence.”
At the same time he pointed out that “there is not even half an argument that scientifically documents the benefits of the bill, only references to the market, economic viability, entrepreneurship and companies”.
He criticized the imposition of the Minimum Admission Base “which excludes, unfairly, children from universities” noting, among other things, that the government is taking advantage of a problem it and its predecessors created “to close and merge departments with anti-scientific criteria”.
“Hypocrisy and great audacity”, D. Koutsoumbas described “closing public and opening private ones in the name of ‘more opportunities'”.
“Besides”, he underlined, “it is not confirmed by any country that the establishment of private universities contributed to stopping student immigration. Specifically, 2-3 thousand students from Cyprus come to Greece every year because they cannot afford the cost of studying in their country».
“Another big negative step of the bill is that research will be done exclusively at the behest of business in private universities,” he said, adding that “also, the door is wide open for undergraduate tuition for Greeksstarting with tuition fees for foreign students”.
He also noted that “it is not an upgrade to transfer the responsibility for state funding to the universities themselves. With the bill, even at the faculty level, the deaneries are led to seek income. We already have bitter experience and every time we hear “self-sufficiency” in universities, this means cutting the remaining free benefits.”
He underlined that “the real upgrading of the universities concerns the real problems posed by the students’ requests. That is, exclusively public education, really free, high-level studies, a degree to ensure a job in the subject with rights. The university that wants customers is not a one-way street.”
“Everything confirms that the needs of students to study comprehensively and of graduates to work in their subject, offering to society, cannot find a way out in the “answers” given by the EU, governments and parties of the system and which make the situation worse” said D. Koutsoubas and addressing, to university staff, students, parents, “all over the world who are affected and reacting to the bill”, he emphasized, among other things, that “the new, the modern, the progressive is to make use of all the achievements of humanity so that we can all live better”.
“And this is understood very well by the majority of young people and students who turn their backs on you by 70%. And that is why this bill, even if passed, will find obstacles, because it is unfair.
For all this, it is the games that pave the way for the future today. Because this is the future. If we want to respond to the needs of the many. Together – the workers, the people, the youth, the university community – we will dissolve this present in order to rise to the bright future” concluded D. Koutsoubas in his speech.
with information from APE-MPE