Repo(we)r Greece takes Columbia by storm (or rather, by blizzard!)

My travels to New York City last week included a visit to Columbia University for a symposium for the Repo(we)r Greece campaign. Despite the blizzard it proved to be a great success.

 Here I am with my friend Eugenios Kornaropoulos listening intensely.

We would like to thank the Modern Greek Studies Department faculty and staff for their assistance in obtaining a space for our event. I hope you are all able to appreciate the irony that the only department that was able to provide us with an event space was the German department.

I would also like to thank Demetra Atsaloglou, the President of the Graduate Hellenic Students Association, for her great efforts and support throughout the planning of this Symposium, as well as all of the volunteers who have assisted with our preparations today (especially Christina Constantine, Malvina Kefalas, Melina Iacovou, Kristen Moustakas).

Our Hellenic Student Associations exist with the purpose of establishing a community and network for students of Greek descent and Philhellenes.  Through our cultural events and scholastic conventions, we strive to promote Hellenic culture and heritage in the community at large, and to help each other succeed.  It is our objective to mobilize our members and create a positive impact on our communities, acting as ambassadors of Hellenism.

When Melanie Graf, of the Repo(we)r Greece team, first approached Columbia with the idea for an event of this kind, we were very excited to accept the opportunity. There are many initiatives that have recently been established with the objective of somehow rebranding or restructuring Greece—at our university, as well as at many universities across the country, there have been countless panels and events featuring individuals who come and lecture on the problems in Greece, and how they ought to be solved. Although these have been very informative, we appreciated the opportunity to coordinate a student-driven event—an event that asked community members to apply what they have learned through their lessons and experiences, and offer up a proposal, not to fix Greece per se, but to seek out its best features, and design a plan to optimize the benefits that can be derived from them.

In his funeral oration for the Athenian dead after the first year of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles said, “Our citizens attend both to public and private duties and do not allow absorption in their own affairs to diminish their knowledge of the City’s business. We differ, ” Pericles said, “from other states in regarding the man who keeps aloof from public life not as ‘private’ but as useless.”  Together with Repo(we)r Greece, we have called on these citizens to attend to their public duty.

We have asked community members to examine a situation that has been discussed every which way and approach it from a new perspective, to draw up proposals and not simply observe public life, but engage in it.  These presenters here have drawn from their individual and diverse academic and professional backgrounds, and also just their personal interests, and they have set forth fascinating programs and initiatives that may be used to Repower Greece. Their vision is inspiring.