Introduction

During the academic year 2020–21, the Greek right-wing party New Democracy (henceforth, ND) put forward a series of political decisions as part of an extended, aggressive (post)liberal reform platform (Mylonas, 2021), with ideas about the marketisation of education and efforts to make Greek education more ‘effective’. Previous attempts had been made to introduce similar (post)liberal reforms in higher education, especially in 2005–11, as a result of the so-called ‘Bologna Process’ (2005), with the target set by the European Council in 2000 (the ‘Lisbon Strategy’) to make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world. We saw it in 2011, the year the Greek Parliament voted in favour of the Framework Act for Higher Education. The Act introduced ‘changes to [the] management, to the structure of degrees and courses, to funding, and accreditation and quality control’ (Traianou, 2013) of universities, signifying that the high degree of autonomy traditionally enjoyed by Greek universities was now radically changed.

Nowadays, we see this economic authoritarianism expanding with measures in place to marginalise any criticism, preventing the lower strata of society from accessing higher education, and creating a police force within universities as part of implementing reforms for modernising Greek education. These changes were inaugurated with the removal of sociology (Malagaris, 2020) from the prerequisite subjects list in the humanities cluster of the Panhellenic Entry Exams to Higher Education. Moreover, ND introduced, among other things, radical changes to the higher education admission system with stricter admission standards as well as further time restrictions for the completion of studies (Tzanaki, 2021). As a result, for the first time in academic history, in 2021 more than 40,000 candidates (40,229) were excluded – due to stricter admission standards – from the country’s universities (Andritsaki, 2021). Not surprisingly, however, there has been a systematic effort to legitimise such measures by mobilising a powerful rhetoric of the devaluation of the public university as ‘unproductive’ and as a ‘topos of anomie’, well within the official political discourse of ND.