The Greek state is at a turning point because of deep reforms in the organizational culture and the infrastructure of the public sector towards practices of performativity. Economic crisis and the dependency on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have operated as the catalyst for rapid, if not violent, convergence to the global standards posed to national agencies for low-cost human recourses, high productivity and accountability.

Higher Education (HE) can be recognized as one case in the Greek public sector that efficiency and practices of quality assurance have been formally instituted (Law 3374/2005) and enacted earlier than the apparent onset of changes due to the financial crisis. This is because of the dissemination of European Union policies for Higher Education, the European Higher Education Area (Bologna Process) and the operation of specialized agencies on quality assurance in HE, that is the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA, 2013).

The process of implementation has been very slow and fragmented due to controversies and resistance emanating from within the academic community and various social and political groups involved, concerning the official implementation of evaluation practices as an integral part of the operation of Greek HE Institutions (Stamelos & Kavasakalis, 2011). Recently, the pressures for broad reforms of the Greek State have greatly accelerated the implementation of quality assurance policies and have led to its generalization in all Greek H.E. Institutions. According to statistics, 47 evaluations have been completed from 2008 to 2010, 147 from 2011 to June 2013 (HQA, 2013) and 143 evaluations from September 2013 to February 2014.    

The agencies for quality assurance in H.E., officially operating since 2005, in current circumstances appear more active than ever before. Hellenic Quality Assurance and Accreditation Agency (H.Q.A.) acts at the national level as an independent and specialized public agency supervised by the Ministry of Education for the development, the realization and the coordination of an evaluative and accreditation framework for H.E. (National Qualification Framework, Level 6-8). The processes of quality assurance at the institutional level are realized by the “Units of Quality Assurance” (MODIP) that is an administrative body based at each university and supervised by the Vice-Rectors of Academic Affairs. “Committees of Internal Evaluation” (OMEA) operate at the level of the Departments.

This multilayered structure of agents serves the idea of combining and coordinating the two strongly interrelated processes of the current quality assurance framework that is, the departments’ internal evaluations and their external evaluations by committees of experts from foreign universities. Results are presented through internal and external evaluation reports, respectively. These documents are publicly displayed and constitute powerful representations of departments’ identities. They concern their teaching and research practices, achievements and future strategic goals as knowledge institutions, having to operate and being successful in highly competitive global environments (Robertson & Dale, 2008, Seddon & Levin, 2013).    

I argue that policies and processes of evaluation and quality assurance, as enacted today in the Greek H.E. sector, constitute a direct intervention of the regulative policy discourse into the pedagogic discourse of the institutions, pressing for the reconstruction of academic practices and identities (Bernstein, 2000, Sarakinioti et al., 2011, Garcia et al., 2013). Evaluation rules appear to dominate the discourse, reconstituting the boundaries in the processes of the production, recontexualisation and distribution of knowledge at the University sector. The analysis seeks to reveal the conditions of knowledge and the forms of power relations in the operation of agents involved (academics, students, external evaluation committees) as they are articulated in the internal and external evaluation practices implemented in the H.E. sector (Foucault, 1980, Singh, 2012).           

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