State and Universities in Greece (1974-2018): From the Demand for Democratization to the Constellation of Neoliberalism

This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the current developments in higher education in Greece. Towards this direction, it offers a historicized overview of the relation between the state and higher education in Greece over the last forty years by situating it within a broader context, that is, by taking into consideration both students’ protests from below and the wider global transformations from above. In order to conceptualize the historicity of these dynamics, we propose a periodization in three temporally discrete, though dialectically interlinked, phases as we set to explain the substantial penetration, through specific policies, of neoliberalism in the Greek university after 2008, a project that until that time had not been successful.