01-11-16 Setting the record straight on New Democracy’s  graduate programmes statement

The SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government is not averse to dialogue. On the contrary, it believes in dialogue, excluding no interested party and exhausting every institutional opportunity to conduct it.

Regarding the draft law on graduate programmes, New Democracy hastily issued an announcement accusing the government of a lack of dialogue and brandishing the threat of a collapse of graduate studies.

To restore the truth, the ministry notes that the dialogue began last April in an extraordinary Conference of Deans, called by Alternate Education Minister Sia Anagnostopoulou, who attended.

Pursuant to that meeting, the draft legislation was opened for public consultation on 25/9/2016. The consultation period was extended to give more time to the Conference of Deans to submit written observations, most of which were incorporated in the draft law.

As for the “definitive end of graduate studies, every time there is an attempt to restore lawfulness, New Democracy brandishes the threat of collapse.

With the bill it tabled, the political leadership of the Ministry of Education, Research, and Religious Affairs is creating the necessary legal framework for compliance with decision 2411/2012 of the plenary session of the Council of State.  It states that it is up to the legislature to impose tuition for graduate students to cover the cost of graduate programmes, and that the amount should not be so high as to “render impossible or burdensome the participation in Graduate Studies Programmes of students with financial limitations, as such a measure would violate the general, free access to education”.

The competent minister sets the level of tuition, not the universities.

Given the debate over respect for judicial decisions, let New Democracy tell us what its governments did to create the conditions for compliance with the spirit and letter of the aforementioned court ruling, which stated that facilitating students with limited finances to register in graduate programmes is a constitutional responsibility.

It seems here that compliance with court rulings is selective.