Urgent Appeal to the International Academic Community

“Defend Higher Education in Greece!”

The Greek government is passing a university Reform Bill, while universities are closed for holidays and the whole academic community is against it. This Bill demolishes what we know as university, academic disciplines, research, knowledge production and reproduction and academic freedom. It promulgates the model of authoritarian management and educational neoliberalism in the worst imaginable blend of Bologna process. It not only transforms university into an enterprise, distributing funds through qualitative assessment to the "most profitable" sectors of knowledge, but it also transforms university education into college training. Departments and their academic role are abolished and replaced by "teams of teachers" of unspecified disciplinary constitution, who will be "teaching machines" with no say as to how their curriculum will be constructed.  
If you take into consideration that university funds are cut by 50% already, you can imagine that not much of it will survive unless tuition fees are imposed, a move forbidden however by the Greek Constitution, which guarantees free higher education for all. As for social science and humanities, I am afraid that not much will be left of it.
For all these reasons, we are launching a petition to the international academic community to support our struggle against the Bill. Below you will find two links. In the first, you can find a summary of what is going on and you can sign by sending an email. The second is an ordinary petition with little information. You just get in and sign.  http://supportgreekacademia.wordpress.com/ http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?GRUNIV Please give us some of your time, please sign it and pass it around  to any list available to you.