Despite warnings from weathermen that a new assault by the nefos was imminent, over seven thousand Athenians turned up at the Panathenaic Stadium on that Sunday morning to participate in the 11 % kilometer race. Although Adidas and Nike sportsclothing sells briskly in Athens, it is usually worn as lounging wear, but on May 9, the avenues became filled with sprinters in brightly colored uniforms. Whether due to lack of practice, the effects of pollution, or the fact that, according to statistical evidence, Greek smokers consume more cigarettes per capita than any other nationality in Europe, there were a good number of early dropouts. These, however, did not lack exuberance since they, in turn, became the spectators along the way who enthusiastically urged on the ones coming up from behind.
There were men and women, old and young (some carried on their parents’ shoulders and one 3-month-old pushed in a stroller), whole families together, groups of people holding hands, all of whom completed the circumference of the city’s center. Although the well-known long-distance runner Kourtis came in first, and famous singers, actors and painters participated along with the General Secretary of Athletics himself, the great majority were just anonymous city-dwellers enjoying an environment which they spend the rest of the time complaining about with good reason.
Mayor Beis sat out the race in the Stadium and then gave prizes to the winners in each of the many categories which had been entered. The race was judged a successful and happy event, and most believed that it should be repeated regularly. Athenians should have longer winds the next time around and perhaps the event, as in other cities, can be used to publicize and support a specific, worthy municipal cause.
Pruning the Groves of Academe
In upper education the winds of change are being felt in the new draft law prepared by the Ministry of Education and tabled before Parliament on May 21. The new law aims at reforming certain practices which have attracted growing criticism in recent years. These involve the issues of tenure and professional moonlighting in particular. The law also takes up matters of university government and autonomy.
Although the granting of asylum to university premises has been legislated in the past, it has been infringed upon at times, or blatantly violated, as in the notorious 1973 Polytechnic affair. The new law sets up a mixed committee of students and faculty which, in consultation with the Rector, will decide, as the occasion arises, whether or not an outside power will be allowed to enter Universitygrounds. It also ρro vides for a liberal system of self-direction within each institution and establishes an academic council which will regulate relations between university and government.
The draft law states that professors will not be allowed to pursue private careers and must live in the city where they teach. It also does away with seats holding prolonged tenures and establishes sections, rather than seats, as the basic units of university placement. This will allow for a more mobile system by which teachers may rise (or fall) through the ranks.
It seems, then, that university teachers in the future will be required to teach (rather than sell their lecture notes to students at a fee). They must work full-time, and they will be put on probation if they are absent more than thirty days in an academic year. In some instances, the students will decide whether their professors are competent or not. With the abolition of the time-honored and glorious system of the tenured seat, whereby professors could cling on to their posts while slipping into senility, the new system with four degrees of professorship allows a young upstart to rise purely on the merits of his talents. Gone is the era of the “air-borne” professor when university teachers living in the stimulating world of Athens and Thessaloniki could fly out to lecture in Patras or Ioaruiina a few times a month.
The ban on professors’ holding down two jobs at the same time may hurt architects and lawyers, but it will agonize a host of doctors who hold positions in the faculties of medicine. How are they going to rearrange their lifestyles on a flat professional wage? Or, how are they going to attract a lucrative Kolonaki clientele without their pedagogic titles emblazoned on the plaques set in the doors of their private offices? If the new law seems to make a university student more privileged than his professor, it may also make a patient more enviable than his doctor.
Evangelos Papanoutsos
Evangelos Papanoutsos, 82, who died in Athens on May 2, was the leading educator of his time. In a career spanning over sixty years, he was the key figure in public education for pro-mulgating studies in the demotic language.
Born in Piraeus in 1900, Papanoutsos taught for ten years at the noted Averof High School in Alexandria, Egypt, before returning to Greece where for over two decades he became a teacher of teachers at various institutions, mainly in Northern Greece. Immediately after the war, Papanoutsos became general secretary of the Ministry of Education in the provisional government of George Papandreou, and again in the latter’s 1963-5 administration. At this time he drafted the law that established a free, mandatory nine-year course of study for all public school children, instituted a full program in demotic, introduced the study of ancient texts in that language, divided the six-year secondary education system into the gymnasium and the lyceum of three years each, and created an independent body of vocational schools.
After the fall of the junta, he collaborated with other educationalists in new reforms which led to the legislation that formally adopted demotic as the country’s official language.
A polymath who studied at the Universities of Athens, Berlin, Tubingen and Paris, Papanoutsos published, in over twenty volumes, works in ancient philosophy, theology, aesthetics, ethics, logic, law and politics, which he wrote in French and German as well as Greek.
