Oxbridge graduates may rule in Britain. But a different British university is making the running in GreeceOne consequence of Syriza’s victory in Greece has been a flurry of publicity for the alma mater of some of the new governing party’s most prominent leaders. Until Sunday, Rena Dourou MA (Essex) was Syriza’s highest-ranking elected official, as governor of the Attica region. On Tuesday, Yanis Varoufakis PhD (Essex) was named as Syriza’s economics minister, tasked with the daunting job of renegotiating Greece’s debt. Both are among nearly 4,000 Greeks who have graduated from Albert Sloman’s once famously non-deferential university in the past half-century. Publicity and Essex University are words which have not always sat happily together from the days when the future Lord Triesman BA (Essex) was suspended for trying to create the Free University of Essex there in 1968. All the above, though, are part of the rich social science tradition with which Essex has long been associated, from the time of the poverty guru Peter Townsend onwards. Today that tradition continues with Essex’s indispensable British Election Study and its authoritative Institute for Social and Economic Research. With exquisite timing, however, Essex’s new dominance in Greek radical politics coincides with the reign of a hierarchical new Essex university regime under the soldier turned vice-chancellor Anthony Forster which smacks more of the Greek colonels than Athenian democracy. First Greece, then Spain, they chant. But there may be a job to do in Colchester too. Continue reading...
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