Open letter calls for crackdown on campus violence

An open letter published by five respected Greek academics and politicians calls for the abolition of a law preventing police from entering university grounds and an end to tolerance of campus violence.

"Tolerance of violence has turned into complicity," Paris-based Byzantologist Helene Glykatzi-Ahrweiler, political historian Thanos Veremis, former education ministers Marietta Giannakou and Anna Diamantopoulou, and ex-Onbudsman Nikiforos Diamantouros say in the letter, which was made public on Wednesday.

The university asylum law, they argue, stems from the Renaissance and was not created in order to protect "pernicious behavior" on campus, as self-styled anarchists running rampant at Greece's universities "like to claim," but in order to "grant professors complete freedom in their teaching program choices by forbidding any form of intervention by church or politics."...