Columbia University in Greece: A Vote of Confidence With Emerging Opportunities

The establishment of the Columbia Global Center in Greece is a highly ambitious effort to make significant inroads in helping to make largely introverted Greek Universities hook up with Columbia University and other institutions to establish collaborations in a variety of areas – from medicine and technological innovation to finding the best ways to offer psychological support to migrants coming to Greece from war zones or situations where they have suffered torture, famine or other disasters.

The center also has the objective of organising important international collaborative conferences.

In early April a collaboration between Columbia and the Athens University Nursing School aimed to deepen and improve nursing practices.

In an exclusive interview with the ΤΟ ΒΗΜΑ International Edition (tovima.com), the center’s director, Stefanos Gandolfo, underlines the great opportunities for Greece’s excellent researchers in a variety of areas to spread their wings and to reap gains from mutually beneficial international collaborations.

Stefanos Gandolfo, Director of Columbia University’s Global Center in Greece.

Indeed, he notes that Greece’s large reservoir of top-flight researchers is a key reason that the Ivy League university chose Athens to establish one of its 10 Global Centers on several continents worldwide.

Gandolfo also stresses that a pivotal objective of the center is promoting innovation (including  the possible institution of PhDs in this area) so that it can play a critical role in linking Greek universities and researchers to the international market, turning the fruit of innovation into profitable products.

The center’s director also points out the need for restructuring Greek universities’ administrative framework, moving away from the current one-size-fits-all totally centralized model, where the administrative structure of Athens University, with its 20 faculties and tens of thousands of students, is applied to small provincial universities with just five faculties.

This will require legislation, but Gandolfo says that the process can already begin with willing universities petitioning for reform to cover their actual needs and provide the most effective possible educational offering.

He sees no reason why this cannot be approved by the legislature as on the one hand it in no way affects or crosses party lines, and on the other hand it can go a long way in advancing and bolstering Greece’s global presence in a wide range of critical areas.

What is the aim of the Columbia Global Center in Athens and what are your objectives as its director in terms of Greece reaping benefits from it?

Columbia has a network of eleven global centers around the world, one on almost on every continent. Aside from Athens, there are centers in Aman, Beijing, Istanbul, Mumbai, Nairobi, Paris, Rio, de Janeiro, Santiago, Tel Aviv and Tunis.

The Athens Global Center has three key missions and goals.

The first is to host students from Columbia to receive part of their teaching here. Columbia College has a required Core Curriculum – Contemporary Civilization (which begins with and stresses the ancient Greek philosophers), Art Humanities and Music Humanities – which has a heavy emphasis on ancient Greece. It would be an incredible opportunity for them to be able to do this here in Greece.

The second is for them to forge collaborations with local institutions – primarily with universities, but also with museums or NGOs, in order for then to collaborate in research and impact activities. Our motto is “Thinking and Doing”. Impact activity would be, for example, our discussions right now with the National Technical University [Athens Polytechnic] on having a lab-to-market program, so that a very good researcher can take their idea and transform it into an actual product.

Greece has quite a lot of expertise in biotech. We have great scientists but there has not been the right infrastructure and environment or ecosystem to support this kind of activity.

All the universities are very open to engaging in such kinds of programs with Columbia. The response has been tremendously positive and we’re looking to building that up.

The third objective is to participate in the broader social discourse through public events that help advance the conversation in various areas. The areas on which we are focusing at the center are the core curriculum– the classics, archaeology, and the humanities – but then there are several contemporary global issues like climate change, migration, public health, and innovation and entrepreneurship that are part of our goal here in Athens.

Statue of Alma Mater, Columbia University.

How can Greece in this context potentially utilise its vast cultural soft power to bolster and advance its global presence and interests – what is being done in that direction and what still needs to be done?

I can link this a bit with my previous work at the ministry of education [during the tenure of minister Niki Kerameos], where I was responsible for the internationalization of higher education. The ministry at the time had set as a goal for universities to become more extroverted, both toward other Greek and foreign universities and toward industry, in order to have things like industrial PhDs. That was part of the strategy. What the ministry primarily wanted to do was to develop strategic partnerships with universities in the US, China, and the UK, which is how they found me [Gandolfo has studied Chinese philosophy in China after his studies in philosophy and economics at Yale and speaks the language].

We developed these partnerships primarily with the US and we brought in 30 universities. This was during the time of Covid, and we brought in all of Greece’s 30 universities,

That created a lot of the partnerships that we have right now.

We have a partnership with the university of Ioannina. It’s a three-year research programme that’s funded by Columbia on understanding the mental health needs of migrant populations and what solutions are needed.

This collaboration came out of this trip that the American universities took in November, 2022. A good thing that Greek universities have, in comparison with other countries in the region, is that they retain a very large degree of research autonomy, intellectual freedom and freedom of speech is very well established in Greece. I would say this is one of the reasons that Columbia was attracted to the opening of a center here in Greece.

Students to participate in the “Columbia Summer Global Core: The Athens Experience Course” (late May to mid-June), regarding how particular spaces serve as sites for cultural and political vision, such as urban planning, nation-making, and democracy.

At the recent Delphi Economic Forum you participated in a panel entitled ‘Greek innovation: Moving Ahead’. In which sectors do you see opportunities for innovation, and what are the potential obstacles that must be surmounted, especially those created by the state, which can impede foreign direct investment?

In terms of the role universities can play in attracting this kind of talent and investment, having spoken to a lot of university rectors and faculty, there are two things that I think need to change. The first one is that there should be far more diversity in the administrative framework. They have a one-size-fits-all framework now.

That means that there is just one law for how 24 universities have to operate. We have one law for the university of Athens, which has 20 different faculties and tens of thousands of students all concentrated in one city.

The same law on how the university should be run applies to a smaller university outside of Athens that possibly has five different campuses in five regional cities.

This, I think. doesn’t make much sense. So firstly, we should have three or five different laws that apply to different universities in Greece, given their actual administrative needs.

It’s just a matter of a legislative initiative. It doesn’t seem to cut across any ideological lines. Their way of operation is still defined by the state. There are different models. Just as we have different administrative structures for different kinds of schools, we can do the same with universities. It has to start with universities themselves petitioning for that and I think there would be the appetite to do it.

Director Stefanos Gandolfo addresses Athens Columbia Global conference.

What is Columbia’s role in all this – offering teaching staff or curriculums?

It depends on the kind of collaboration. It could be all of these things, but it’s primarily about providing funding for these projects to happen. This is funded by Columbia. We applied as a center here and we got the funding in order to advance these collaborations. There are Columbia faculty experts in public health that are participating in advancing research.

In other programs that we have it’s about deciding the curriculum or the content of an international conference. We had a conference with the Athens Nursing School in the beginning of April to advance the nursing profession in Greece. That was very much a partnership between the two universities proposing speakers and deciding what the content will be.

We are getting a lot of financial and administrative support from the university in order to be able to operate here. The University of Ioannina collaboration [addressing the mental health issues and needs of migrants from war zones or escaping from torture and other difficult situations], for example, has a 250,000 dollar research grant. The objective is to understand what kinds of interventions are best for helping them to recover from this kind of trauma and then having them integrate into society. Here, learning the language is also a very important part.

Stefanos Gabdolfo (far right) with students from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, who engaged directly with key stakeholders shaping migration policy and refugee support in Greece.