Άσυλα, δίκτυα και βία: ολοκληρωτικές δομές και τελετουργική βία στην ανώτατη εκπαίδευση

Abstract

The long and ongoing public discourse on violence within Greek universities focuses mainly on overt violent behavior against functions, persons and infrastructure used periodically by certain political groups of students and so-called ‘anarchists’ as forms of protest against government or police action. This view ignores the fact that violence has become an intrinsic feature of academic environments, at least according to the everyday experience of members of the academic community who report about pressure exerted on them and of administrative harassment (or ‘bullying’) on the part of the administration within the universities.
Under the present structural and cultural conditions of the academia, there are two major instruments for the exercise of psychological and administrative violence in universities: the establishment and reproduction of groups in the role of ‘majorities' in the institution’s decision-making bodies and the development of wider networks within the university and between universities, political parties and state administration for the control of the administrative power within each academic environment. When external and internal resistance towards such developments remains weak, totalitarian structures may arise which can reverse the scope and features of a traditional academic environment concerning the quality of teaching and research, the evaluation of academic quality and the culture of academic autonomy and freedom. The power-oriented culture created by these networks will use the political code (power-enhancing, power eliminating quality of any decision) to make academic decisions which will perpetuate their existence and secure a specific, politically motivated distribution of academic goods and services to the members of the network. Psychological and administrative violence (‘mobbing’) will then be used as an instrument of creating ‘conformity’ either through the exertion of pressure on ‘uncomfortable’ members not to say or do something or through retaliation in case of non-conformity.
This type of built-in academic violence is not threatened by the exercise of the amateur, rather symbolic violence of groups of students obstructing academic functions or by the periodical eruption of physical violence on the part of ‘anarchists’ within the universities. On the contrary, the undermining of the legitimacy of the traditional academic code through power networks within universities delivers the rhetoric for the legitimation of overt forms of violence against functions, persons and infrastructure exercised either by students or by other opponents of government or university policies. The interplay of covert administrative and network violence against political opponents of a network or ‘uncomfortable’ members of the academia and of overt violence exhibited by political minorities as forms of protest has a long history within Greek universities and will probably survive as long as the political elite (party system) maintains an explicit interest in the political control of the distribution of goods and services within higher education.