30 US Universities to Explore Academic Cooperation in Greece

A delegation of thirty US universities will arrive in Greece in early November to explore the potential of new collaborations with Greek public universities and to build on existing collaborative programs.

The aim is to enable students, researchers, and professors from Greek universities to interact with their colleagues from, among other institutions, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins to conduct joint research, exchange knowledge, and receive double or joint degrees in the near future.

There is also interest for ongoing collaborations between universities from the two countries to further expand in the future.

Largest delegation to another country

Over seventy US university rectors, deans, and professors are expected to arrive in Athens, according to the cultural attaché of the US Embassy to Greece, Shanna Dietz Surendra.

“It is a really historic visit, [and] it will be the largest delegation of US universities to another country [so] this is very important,” Dietz Surendra told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (AMNA).

This is going to be a cooperation with all the Greek public universities, the American cultural attaché added, which amplifies the range of those who can benefit from the relations between the two countries’ institutions.

Ongoing collaborations of US universities in Greece

Several US universities already have collaborations of some sort with Greek public universities, and they are hoping to further develop these.

The oldest collaboration is the one between the universities of Cincinnati and Aristotle. It dates back to the 1960s; thanks to this partnership, dozens of American students have participated in archaeological excavations in Greece while their Greek colleagues have undertaken classic studies in the US.

Recently, students from the University of Cincinnati also attended the English-language philosophy course at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Moreover, a new collaboration with the biology department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is also in the works, according to AMNA.

Michigan State University runs a joint PhD program with Athens Polytechnic. The latter is among the three Greek universities which have signed memoranda of collaboration with the University of Kentucky, the other two being Aristotle University and the University of Western Macedonia.

John Hopkins University also has research collaborations in place with several Greek universities, such as the University of Crete, the Ionian University, and the University of Patras.