Higher education and state legitimation in Cyprus

Abstract

This paper will investigate the state's utilisation of higher education policy as 'compensatory legitimation' within the Cypriot context in the late 1980s. It argues that not only the establishment of the University of Cyprus in 1989 - after thirty years of strong nationalist opposition during the British colonial administration and another thirty years of state hesitation and postponement during political independence - but also the character of the established University (state-based and linked to the international community of scholarship) can be explained mainly as the result of the state's decision to utilise higher education in order to make up for its serious deficit in legitimacy. It also maintains that the state used the policy strategy of expertise and to a lesser extent the policy strategy of participation in order to legitimate the process that determined the character of both the University and the knowledge that it was expected to produce.