PAPER DARTS AGAINST EDUCATION‐AGAINST THE WORK THAT NEEDS IT

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The entrepreneurial university and the new “enclosures” around it

“Academic asylum, for us, has no place in the Greek public university, in the way it is applied today. The same rules that apply to every public space in the country, will also apply to the public university. The authorities will be able to intervene on their own initiative for any criminal act that takes place at the university. This is an idea we want to discuss. We are considering introducing an entry check system in the academic institutions. I am not aware of any university abroad that does not have access control“.

N. Kerameus. Minister of Education and Religious Affairs, 10th July 2019 on SKAI TV.

The state, recognizing – just like we do – the universities as potential centres of struggle against the state’s management of the pandemic, took advantage of the panic that it itself had cultivated around the pandemic, and shut the institutions down at the first opportunity, imposing remote learning as early as last March and remote examinations in the exam period of the spring semester.

The state management of the terms of operation of the universities has been totally aggressive towards our class if we consider that it completely ceased their function as reappropriated public spaces and fields of struggle, where assemblies, events and migrant squats were housed, while at the same time, every effort was made to prevent the suspension of any business activity that is carried out thanks to the unpaid labour of students or the poorly paid labour of doctoral students and research staff.

Remote learning, which has been generally implemented since March and continues to this day, is a clear weapon for further individualization of students, forcing hem to stay at home, isolated.

The disciplinary-repressive dimension of remote learning is made clear by the fact that while the government had relaxed its measures from May all the way up to 6/11/2020, universities never stopped being in lock-down throughout this period. It is also indicative that during the spring lockdown period not even a week had passed since the closure of the universities that the occupation of the “Ghini” building [in the National Technical University of Athens, a space that had been a centre of struggle for years and where immigrants lived] was evacuated.

The evacuation of the Ghini building was followed by a new sequence of repressive actions, such as the attempt to evacuate the student dormitories and the aggressive eviction of all students living there, as well as the sabotage of the “espiv” server, which is housed in Panteion University. Let us note here that it was real-world, physical, in-person activism that eventually managed to repel these aggressive actions of the government. Only temporarily, of course, since with the enforcement of the new lockdown, the expulsion of students from student halls is being attempted again, as we have learnt from complaints made by students in Komotini (Northern Greece), who are even asked to collect all of their belongings with their departure.

The lack of this physical, in-person activism, the fact that university premises have been rendered lifeless and empty of students as a result of intensified student labour and the political management of the pandemic by the state and in particular the implementation of remote learning, the escalation of repressive violence during the second phase of the biopolitics of confinement, the abolition of academic asylum and the overall entrepreneurialization of the university was what provided the possibility for the simultaneous invasion of hundreds of cops of all kinds (DELTA, OPKE, EKAM units) to evacuate both the historical Polytechnic school in the city centre and the students’ occupation of the Rector’s Office of the National Technical University of Athens, on 13/11/2020.

This attack on the gathering of workers and students at the Polytechnic School and the occupation of the NTUA Rector’s Office in the Polytechnic Campus resulted in the arrest of a total of 92 activists, who opposed the NTUA lockout and kept the university open in the middle of a general lockdown, in order to demand that the three-day celebrations and demonstration of the 17th November (landmark day for the revolt against the Greek dictatorship in 1973) should be conducted as normal

Besides the e-learning cameras we have in our homes, they tried to introduce cameras in the classrooms and now cameras in the universities. And not only that. At the recent meeting of the rectors of the universities with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Education, the government proposed to introduce barriers and cameras at the entrances of the faculties; to establish a special police unit for their protection; as well as the toughening of the penalties imposed on students for offences committed in spaces of the “university community”.

The rectors, playing the role of the “good cop”, refused the toughening of the penalties, claiming that the stated that they agree with the establishment of a special already strict legal framework is sufficient, but they police unit, as long as it answers to the university administration and not the Ministry of Citizen Protection. Nevertheless, the government seems to prioritize the policing of the university in very specific terms. That is why, only a few days after the decision of the rectors, the Minister of Education N. Kerameus announced the recruitment of 1,500 special guards by the Ministry of Citizen Protection. The “university protection unit”, as it will be called, will have its headquarters within university premises, will be under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Citizen Protection and will be assigned to (certain) higher education institutions. Details on the exact characteristics of this unit are not yet known.

A more recent development in the effects of policing and imposing enclosures in the university is the decision of the Rector’s council of the University of Athens to implement entry checks and keep records of those who enter the dormitories of the institution, supposedly for the “health protection” of the students who live there. It is no coincidence, of course, that student dormitories have in recent months become the main space where political ac- tivism and assemblies (not just of students) are housed.

With the enclosing of the universities with cops, security guards and entrance barriers and the complete control of their interior, an attempt is made to strip the function of the universities from the counterweight of any applied proletarian critique so that they are nothing more than factories producing an important commodity, specialized labour power. The latter consists of structured skills and knowledge exploit- able by capital within the alienating productive-labour process, be it paid or unpaid.

So we understand very well what the police and the cam- eras in the universities are there to protect, using as a pre- text the so-called “hooligan-terrorists”, as they have used immigrant peddlers and drug addicts in the past. The cops and the cameras protect the attempted, ever in- creasing entrepreneurialization of university func- tions, which goes hand in hand with the (pre-emptive) suppression of any prospect of antagonistic activity within them.In other words, they try to preserve the unhampered running of universities as enterprises that profit from the exploitation of unpaid and paid student work (from the unpaid undergraduate preparation of our labour power and unpaid internships up to poorly paid research work).

Research programs –in addition to having as their main function the exploitation of students’ labour – are organised collaborations with the private business sector, the army and the police. NTUA (National Technical University of Athens) is known for its research in relation to border protection, repression, military equipment (see Ranger, Andromeda, Ingenious,Prevision research programs), but it is also known for its important collaboration with other international universities as well as with the largest companies in Greece. To give just one example, consider the research on the development of wind farms or the exploitation of energy reserves in natural gas and hydrocarbons. The reason we choose to cite this particular example, among many others – the NTUA alone runs more than 1,500 research projects – is that the government rushed, in the midst of a lockdown, the passing of a law that, among other things, allows hydrocarbon mining in areas protected under the “Natura 2000” network, while at the same time, it was keeping the universities closed to the students so that the corresponding research might not be challenged or hindered.

Besides research, which comprises the most important part of the entrepreneurial activity in the universities, the latter is also highlighted by a series of subcontractors that operate in the universities (see subcontracting of the can- teens, restaurants and security), but also by the introduction of the industry of postgraduate courses with tuition fees and international masters or undergraduate programs. And let us not forget: the “Europeanization” and the policing of the universities was one of the main stated goals of the (currently ruling) New Democracy party, before it even came to power. Moreover, all of what is heralded now, has been a long-standing goal and pursuit of all previous governments – though perhaps not in the same rough and hasty way. At the present time, the government is cunningly reviving the “theory of the two extremes”, in the aftermath of the conviction of the one “extreme” (i.e. Golden Dawn trial) and the “fight against lawlessness in the universities”, taking advantage of the almost non-existent social resistance in the universities (due to remote learning) against the state management of the pandemic on the one hand, and of all the political speculation around a collective act of aggressive mockery towards the rector of the Athens University of Economics and Business (ASOEE), in the aftermath of a recent squat eviction in the premises of this specific institution.

Finally, the entrepreneurial character of the university is also highlighted by the efforts to discipline the students through the planned enforcement of the “n + 2” rule, which postulates the elimination of the student status 2 years after the formal curriculum duration. The “n + 2” rule, like all the other characteristics of the entrepreneur- ial university mentioned above, forges tomorrow’s obedient worker who has to be fast and productive, capable of combining work with studies without any time to do anything else, ready to enter the intensified, competitive and casualised labour market. So, it is not enough that we work in universities unpaid, this will now have to be done at the pace and intensity required by the state in a space monitored by cameras and enclosed by cops.

So, while the bosses are jumping on us from all sides…

…today, we have to take advantage of the crisis for the benefit of the working class; we have to fight, in conditions of the suspension of formal, constitutional legality, for the satisfaction of our immediate needs!

– Assembly Against Biopower and Confinement, 26th November 2020.