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Today it was reported that, over the past 15 years, there has been a boom of appointments to administrative positions at major universities, which were made on the basis of nepotism or party membership. This has become clear in connection with the need for lists of the names of the 1,349 employees in eight universities who will be included in the mobility programme. Until Wednesday 9 October, these eight universities must submit to the Ministry of Education lists of their administrative staff in order for it to determine on the basis of the criteria of the supreme council for recruitment the persons who will be involved in the programme. If they do not send the lists, the rectors and the heads of the administrative departments will be subject to sanctions for breach of duty. On the other hand, the mobility programme has provoked controversy among different categories of administrative employees, the main issue being the manner in which each category has been permanently appointed. However, the data of the Ministry of Education show that in the remaining 14 universities and technical colleges there are 646 vacancies for administrative employees (182 in universities and 464 in technical colleges), which some of the 1,349 employees included in the mobility programme could fill. At the same time, the schools have to deal with the problems which are the result of the strike of administrative staff.

In particular, 4,232 administrative employees of a total of 6,171 administrative staff in 22 universities have been permanently appointed without being certified for the relevant position. 3,494 of these (or 82.5%) have been appointed in the eight universities to which the mobility programme will be applied. The employees in question started working at the universities on a contractual basis as researchers and subsequently were permanently appointed to administrative positions by a presidential decree. The appointments were made at the time of Ministers Anastasios Peponis (1993-1994), Vasso Papandreou (1999-2001) and the majority of them at the time of Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos. There were no open procedures for the appointments and they involved relatives of teachers or people with party protections. "Some university teachers have appointed their close friends to work on research programmes, promising them that they would appoint them in the teaching and research staff at a later stage", a university teacher told Kathimerini newspaper. There were even cases of researchers who had reported on paper the number of hours worked within programmes financed by the European Union and the Greek state. This was because in order for a person to be permanently appointed, he or she should have worked a certain number of hours", adds a female teacher at Athens University.

Thus, the researchers have been appointed to full-time administrative positions. In the beginning, these employees worked on the programmes in the offices of the teachers who had helped them enter the universities. So there were complaints from the administrative employees who saw that "the persons appointed on the basis of a contract for the rendering of services are paid as administrative employees without setting their feet in the offices to help the permanent employees", says the teacher. "These employees were involved in the research process and produced a scientific and educational product. There is a discrepancy between the employment and the position occupied. But it was a decision of the leadership of the Ministry of Education and of the universities to appoint us to administrative positions within the context of transformation of our contracts", said Nikos Papandreou, president of the union of postgraduates appointed in universities on the basis of a permanent contract for the rendering of services.

Now universities have reached an impasse. A few days after the start of the new academic year on 1 October, the classes have not yet begun, the deadline for first-year students to enrol has been extended, and the schools are not issuing diplomas. It is expected that the problems will be clearer when all resume their duties during a school year, which is particularly important in connection with the final clearance of the universities’ registers of the "eternal students". Data show that every third student in the major universities is of the "eternal student" type. "The libraries of Athens University, for example, will work with reduced hours and without security guards", states Anastasia Papadia - Lala, a teacher in the University’s Department of History and Archaeology. "The assessment of our university has uncovered a shortage of 59 employees but it has been decided to include 33 people in the mobility programme, although the Ministry of Education has granted us two new departments this year", rector of the University of Thessaly Ioannis Messinis told Kathimerini newspaper, stressing that the programme does not affect only the central universities.