“It is indeed my great pleasure and emotion to be with you today. When we decided to take the big step and establish by law the possibility of establishing branches of foreign universities in our country, equal to Greek public higher education institutions, we always had in mind modern units of extremely high academic standards, with excellent infrastructure, with care for students, with studies linked to work, with a view not to the present, but to the future and to the cosmogenic changes that artificial intelligence is already bringing not only to education but also to our lives. In other words, we had in mind higher education institutions that would be open to the world and aligned with the challenges and opportunities of our time,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said at the opening of the University of Nicosia’s branch in Athens.
“Our aim was to now give a lot more choice to young people who want to study and don’t want to or can’t go abroad, but of course also to be able to turn our country into a regional one, why not, let us think more ambitiously, into a global educational centre, with foreign students who will be able to come to study here, in the first instance from the Balkans, from Europe, from the Middle East, but tomorrow from India, from the United States, from the Far East, from Africa. Executives who under certain conditions could be trained here and why not then work in our country and strengthen the national economy,” the Prime Minister added.
Then he stressed that the government did not back down from the opposition’s entrenchments which, he said, unfortunately keeps causing difficulties where great opportunities are formed.
“Unfortunately, by continuing a rhetoric of the 1980s, instead of turning our gaze together to the Greece of 2030. Progress, however, does not come with fixation on yesterday, but with knowledge, planning and a quick stride on the road of tomorrow,” he said.
Completing his address, the Prime Minister referred to the review of Article 16, saying: “An important step has been taken, but another one must follow, which will seal the institutional, the absolute institutionalisation of such initiatives in our country and I am referring to the revision of Article 16 of the Constitution.”
“As you may know, Mr President, Greece is a European exception to the strict constitutional restrictions on the provision of higher education services. The time has now come to put into practice what has been discussed for many decades in the context of a constitutional review, which will be launched in the coming months. We should consider Article 16 to be revisable so that there is no longer any institutional question mark over the operation of such institutions in our country as well,” Mitsotakis said.
