A number of rather alarming things have been going around about Katehi’s involvement with dismantling the “university sanctuary” policy in Greece (How UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi Brought Oppression Back To Greece’s Universities, and Athens Polytechnic Comes to UC Davis). Now that I’ve found a complete translation, I thought excerpting the parts relevant to our current struggle at UC Davis would be apropos. Unfortunately, I am at the mercy of the translator.
Background
What the committee was, and Katehi’s involvement with it.
The committee includes nine members from around the world who agreed to offer their advice and guidance. The members of the committee are international scholars with extensive experience as presidents of major universities from the EU, US, Australia and Asia. [...]
A subset of the committee including Chancellor Katehi, President Sexton, President Naylor, President Hernes and President Ritzen met in Greece on December 17, 2010 and participated in discussions with Minister Diamantopoulou, Deputy Minister Panaretos, Rectors and Vice Rectors of various Greek Universities, and representatives of political parties. [...]
The members of the committee who participated in the visit have constructed the following report that expresses their impressions and observations, and offers recommendations that the Greek Government could consider as it tries to rethink and reform Higher Education in Greece.
Urgency of the Report
Why Katehi et al. think this report is especially relevant in Greece. Sound familiar?
History has proven that major financial crises affect societal values and have the potential to trigger major social changes. In the past two years, Greece has been at the center of an unprecedented financial challenge that is threatening the social values, dogmas and structures upon which the Greek state has been built.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression, so I should note that in the report the topic of financial crises are connected most often with the characterization of the university as a potential economic engine, rather than as a potential political hotbed. Instead, politics seems to be characterized as waste, student- and professor-expended energy which doesn’t lead to economic growth.
“Politicization” and “Security”
The famous part.
Greek university campuses are not secure. While the Constitution allows University leaders to protect campuses against elements that seek political instability, Rectors have been reluctant to exercise their rights and responsibilities, and to make decisions needed in order to keep faculty, staff and students safe. As a result, University leaders and faculty have not been able to be good stewards of the facilities they have been entrusted with by the public.
The politicization of the campuses—and specifically the politicization of students—represents a beyond-reasonable involvement in the political process. This is contributing to an accelerated degradation of higher education.
Note that it is security “against elements that seek political instability.” Now we know what Katehi meant when she thought the encampment in the quad was “unsafe.”
“Autonomy”
The report by Ketehi et al. heavily focuses on the topic of “autonomy,” which seems to be a very weird, Orwellian double-speak.
B. Strengthen the Autonomy of the Greek Universities: The University Board
[...]
Universities should be autonomous in terms of managing their resources, independently appointing the leadership and administration and making academic decisions that promote their strategic goals. Each institution must be able to manage and support its choices and identify additional resources that will help the institution in achieving its goals.
The universities should be managed and overseen by an appointed, independent Board of Overseers which is responsible for the well-being of the university (ies) they oversee. There are many examples around the world to select from, but the two most common approaches are: (a) an independent board for each institution or (b) an independent board for a group of institutions that share common characteristics.
Here’s a clue to what the committee means by “autonomy”:
A number of political decisions have led to governance policies within the university that provide an imbalance of power and control on academic issues and decisions. For example, students have 40% of the vote in the selection of university administrators. This imbalance of governance has led to decisions that are politically motivated and have not benefited the quality of the academic enterprise.
Again, the problem is that “political decisions” aren’t efficient enough. University administrators were elected by the entire campus community. Instead they suggest a small electoral board.
The “autonomy” Katehi et al. mean seems to be the autonomy of the administrators from the students, and to a lesser extent from the faculty.
Aftermath: What this Means for Us
All of the committee’s recommendations were enacted.
Almost everything in the report is something we have been fighting against at the University of California: the “autonomy” of the regents from the university community, the crackdown on politicization in the name of safety, and the subordination of the academic role of the university to the need for economic growth. However, this should not surprise us. In reading through the report, many times I thought I saw wholesale adoptions of University of California structure, or at least clear references to it. It seems extremely probable that rather than the privatization and depoliticization of Greek universities being a dark glimpse of our impending future, it was the already-existing framework of privatization and depoliticization of our public universities here that allowed the transformation of Greek public education to take place.
Under the operating ethos of the University of California, Katehi is not an incompetent chancellor. She is the perfect chancellor. She has responded to politics on our campus as have the chancellors of all the other UCs. We would have to be naive to think that this wasn’t the result of a university-wide policy decision. In seeking a resolution to this crisis, we have to keep this in mind. The structure of the University of California is set up not only to allow people like Katehi to encourage privatization while suppressing dissent, but to actively encourage this behavior. If our solutions to this crisis are not structural, if they extend only to the removal of Katehi herself, then we will not get meaningful change. Instead, all we will achieve is a pale emotional catharsis, and the world’s consciousness of the structural problems in our university will be forgotten with the removal of their symbol.
