The idea was ambitious, even noble: channel €300 million from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility into Greece’s public universities. The funding—touted as a counterbalance to the upcoming launch of non-state universities—was meant to strengthen research capacity, with a special focus on young scientists.
Instead, it has triggered what many in academia now call one of the most mismanaged funding drives in recent memory. Three separate projects were launched—Universities of Excellence, Research Excellence Partnerships, and Trust Your Stars. All three have faltered in ways that range from inefficient spending to accusations of sham evaluations.
Now, a group of 50 of the country’s most prominent professors and researchers is preparing legal action against the Ministry of Education, taking the fight to Greece’s National Transparency Authority, the Council of State, and possibly European institutions.
Fragmented Projects, Missed Opportunities
The Universities of Excellence initiative was supposed to fund high-impact infrastructure—think state-of-the-art AI labs or cutting-edge medical research facilities. Instead, the money was scattered in small chunks of €30,000–40,000 across dozens of minor projects. Even universities that submitted strong proposals now find themselves unable to maintain the equipment due to a lack of trained technical staff.
The grim prediction: much of this costly gear could end up unused, gathering dust in storage. Critics say the real beneficiaries were suppliers in the private market—not the universities themselves.
A Partnership in Name Only
The Research Excellence Partnerships program aimed to unite universities with private-sector companies. But a December 2024 statement from the Hellenic Federation of University Professors and Researchers (POSDEP) revealed that the evaluations—done by a single Greek reviewer—were “identical” in wording for multiple proposals, something the ministry later admitted was done “for reasons of time efficiency.”
These boilerplate reviews, often praising the proposals while still giving them inexplicably low scores, offered no real feedback. The scoring distribution raised suspicions of favoritism: approved proposals with scores between 70%–80% were half as numerous as those over 80%, while the bulk of rejections clustered suspiciously close to the pass threshold.
The Breaking Point: Trust Your Stars
The final project, Trust Your Stars, has become the focal point of outrage. Announced in April 2024 for 24-month projects, it was already doomed by EU rules requiring funds to be spent by December 2025. The evaluation committee—12 people in total—was tasked with reviewing over 1,000 research proposals in just two months, many outside their fields of expertise.
Veteran academics say that a fair review of just ten projects in one’s field can take 20 days. By that measure, the workload was near-impossible without shortcuts.
AI Evaluations and Lost Credibility
One of Greece’s most respected scientists, Professor Georgios Kollias, a full member of the Academy of Athens, publicly accused the process of being “scandalous, absurd, and degrading” to the scientific community. He claimed his team’s proposal in the biomedical field ranked near the bottom—based on an evaluation “generated via GPT” with no clear criteria, carried out by reviewers without the qualifications to judge serious scientific work.
Other researchers in biomedical sciences found that only one member of the committee had relevant expertise. Many received identical, vague comments, including incorrect translations of technical terms—such as “nanocarriers” rendered as “nanobuses.” AI-content detectors suggested some reviews were up to 80% machine-generated.
A Structural Failure
To outside observers, this may sound like a one-off scandal. But Anastassis Perrakis, director of Biochemistry at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and a professor at Utrecht University, argues it reflects deeper systemic flaws.
In a sharply critical op-ed, he described the program as “structurally, design-wise, and politically broken.” Chronic underfunding had already pushed Greek academia to find “creative” accounting tricks—delaying expenses, reshuffling budgets, and promising impossible project timelines to secure grants. When the Trust Your Stars call was announced, everyone applied—leaving no credible reviewers who weren’t also applicants.
The Unused Solution: HFRI
Perhaps the most baffling question is why the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) a joint venture between the European Investment Bank and the Greek government—was not used to manage the process. HFRI has established procedures and regularly involves international reviewers.
Insiders suggest the government’s own delay in paying its €60 million share has slowed HFRI’s operations. Even so, many believe it would have delivered far better results than the chaos now unfolding.
What Comes Next
The Ministry of Education has promised to shift Trust Your Stars into Greece’s NSRF funding program, which is not designed for research, to avoid a total collapse. For many in the scientific community, that’s too little, too late.
What began as a flagship investment to keep Greek talent at home has instead deepened mistrust in how public funds are managed—and ignited a rare, united front of academics determined to challenge the system in court.
If they succeed, it may set a precedent not just for Greece, but for how EU recovery money is safeguarded across Europe. If they fail, the warning is clear: in a country where research funding is already scarce, the brightest ideas may once again fade into dust—alongside unused laboratory equipment.
