Four monthly online meetings on recent publications concerning universities, their history and their place in today’s world in Greece and internationally.

What do we know about the University and its evolution in the Western world in recent years? How can we understand the present and future of the university if we do not know its past? How can we understand the proposals for reform of the Greek university if we do not integrate them into the international debate? How much does the debate on higher education make use of an important literature around it, which has been produced in recent years in Greek, either original studies or translations?

The Historical Archive of the University of Athens, wishing to contribute to the debate about the university and to promote the current bibliographical and scientific production about the university institution in Greece and internationally, organizes a cycle of monthly online meetings. In these meetings, books of the current publishing production around higher education will be presented and discussed.

Second meeting

Thursday, April 14, 2022, 18:00-20:00

Presentation of the book The “Progressive Weeds” of the University of Thessaloniki from the anti-communism of the interwar period to the McCarthyism of the Civil War.

Discuss:

Georgios Kokkinos, Professor, University of the Aegean

Vangelis Karamanolakis, Professor of the University of Athens.

and the author Dimitris K. Mavroskoufis, Professor Emeritus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Moderator:

Anna Karakatsouli, Associate Professor, University of Athens, Greece

Meeting link:

https://uoa.webex.com/uoa/j.php?MTID=m9137bf19071c5cda46f24be7c5e419b3

The “Progressive Weeds” of the University of Thessaloniki

The book describes and analyses the dominant anti-communist ideology and the consequent practices of the state and the university authorities towards members of the university community who constituted a ‘threat’ to the political system, the social regime and the academic class. From the very beginning of the University of Thessaloniki (1926), anti-communism was dominant, while the persecution of left-wing and other progressive elements constituted a kind of normality which, through the royalist dictatorship of 4 August, the Occupation and the Civil War, crystallised in the well-known ideology of nationalist nationalism. At the University in particular, this ideology takes the form of McCarthyism, the traces of which are visible even after the 1974 post-independence period. The book is delivered as a due tribute and a memorial legacy to those who struggled in leap years doing their patriotic and social duty and remained forgotten and unjustified because they were “progressive weeds”. And this applies not only to the students of the University of Thessaloniki, but also to the seven professors who were dismissed in 1946 and who were never formally vindicated, neither by the State nor by the University. The State and the University simply forgot about them. (From the presentation on the back cover of the book)