The Right to University: the Question of Democracy in the Polis at a Time of Crisis
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The Right to University: the Question of Democracy in the Polis at a Time of Crisis Asimina Karavanta
Received: 4 October 2012 / Accepted: 15 October 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Abstract What is the task of the university and the role of the humanities at a time of economic and political crisis? This article attempts a response by turning to Socrates's Apology, a text that narrates the division of philosophy from politics and, by analogy, of the university from the polis. The historical context of the Apology symptomatically foreshadows the contemporary crisis in the humanities over the past two decades, the current debates about the future of the university (especially the public university in Europe) in the wake of the new educational policies implemented as a result of the Bologna Process, and the waning of democracy made worse by the current economic crisis. By drawing on the works of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, and Jacques Derrida and their respective readings of democracy and the polis, this article presents a case of how philosophy can make the university relevant to democracy and the polis which are in crisis. The article ends with the proposition that the university should promote interdisciplinarity and develop into a postnational and “trans-modern” (Mignolo) institution that resists the processes of corporatization that drain the university of one of its primary functions, to teach critical thinking and to contribute to the remaking of the democratic processes in the polis. Keywords Apology . Arendt . Democracy . Derrida . Philosophy . Polis . Rancière . University
The University in Crisis Athens, January 2011. Three hundred immigrants with no documents traveled from Heraklion, Crete, to Athens to protest against the government for taking no measures to change their status as illegal workers, although they had been working in Greece for over a decade. To make themselves visible in the polis, they occupied the A. Karavanta (*) National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, School of Philosophy, Faculty of English Studies, Panepistimioupolis, 157 84 Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected]
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renovated but still empty buildings of the Law School of Athens located in the center of the city, in Sina Street, where they kept their hunger strike going for over a month. Protected by the university asylum law that the new bill on tertiary education was to abolish a few months later in August 2011, they left of their own will when a shelter was provided to them by the owners of the Hypatia Mansion, a short distance away from the university. During their occupation of the public university building, the university became a site of contest and contestation: did they have a right to be there? Is the public university a site where the conflict between citizen and denizen,1 the polis and the communities transforming it, and between national laws and human rights should be fought? This event provoked a debate about the role of the public university, the crisis, and the ques
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