Michael Kelpanides (18 July 1945–29 February 2016)

On 29 February 2016, we lost Michael Kelpanides. Born in 1945 in Thessaloniki, Greece, Kelpanides studied sociology, philosophy, psychology, and musicology at the Universities of Vienna and Frankfurt, and from 1968 to 1973, pursued graduate studies at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Under the aegis of the latter institution’s Department of Philosophy, he received his PhD in the field of the Epistemology of Social Sciences for his thesis Zur Problematik der logisch-methodologischen Einheit von Natur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Eine Verteidigung des Objektivismus in den Sozialwissenschaften (‘The Problem of the Logical and Methodological Unity of Natural Sciences and Social Sciences. An Advocacy for Objectivism in the Social Sciences’).

Beginning in 1972, Kelpanides worked as a research assistant and co-researcher in the departments of Philosophy (1972-74) and Social Sciences (1974-77) at Goethe University and, from 1977 to 1985, at the ‘Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung’, also in Frankfurt. In 1985, he was elected Assistant Professor for Sociology of Education and Methodology of Educational Research in the Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and moved home to Greece. He became Associate Professor in 1990 and full Professor in 2000 in this department. He was twice elected Director of the Section of Education and once Vice-Chairman of the department. He also served as Visiting Professor in the Department for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University during the 1996 summer term, and during the summer terms of 1997, 1998, and 1999 was Visiting Professor at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, as part of an exchange between the universities of Thessaloniki and Klagenfurt. He was invited to lecture at the universities of Tübingen, Salzburg, and Cologne and at the ‘Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung’. In 2012 he became Professor Emeritus at Thessaloniki.

His main academic pursuits were in the sociology of education and the methodology of educational research. His research interests were centred on the welfare state and education (in industrial and postindustrial societies), sociological theories (functionalism, marxism, theories of social exchange), the methodology of social sciences, and the sociology of education. Exploring and contributing to the debates within these research fields, he published eight books, in both Greek and German, and about fifty studies and articles in Greek and international scientific journals as well as collective volumes, gaining him recognition both in his home country and abroad. A brief analysis of his most important works provides an insight into his academic productivity and significance.

In his PhD thesis, Kelpanides investigated a major epistemological and methodological problem: are natural phenomena explicable and social phenomena understandable, or must the scientist apply in both fields the same approach, derived from the natural sciences, i.e., description, explanation, prognosis? Kelpanides’s view was one of methodological monism, and this orientation determined the methods of his subsequent research.

Kelpanides contributed decisively to the development of the field of Sociology of Education in Greece. In his book ‘The welfare state and education’ (in Greek, 1991), he analysed the expansion and transformation of the welfare state in advanced industrial and postindustrial societies and its impact upon education. He concluded that the expansive dynamism of the welfare state is both the main cause of major educational problems and the result of the demands for greater state intervention articulated by the student movements that formed in the politicized mass universities. In the second part of the book, sociological essays by Daniel Bell, Hubert Blalock, James Coleman, Torsten Husén, Mancur Olson, and others support further analysis of the issues presented by Kelpanides.

In his 1999 monograph Das Scheitern der Marxschen Theorie und der Aufstieg des westlichen Neomarximus. Über die Ursachen einer unzeitgemäßen Renaissance (‘The Failure of Marxian Theory and the Rise of Western Neo-Marxism. On the Causes of an Outmoded Renaissance’), Kelpanides asked why sociology and neighbouring disciplines such as political science and educational science have favoured Marxism since the late 1960s even as prognoses about the development of socialist societies indicated their failure (and were eventually borne out by events). He concluded that sociology had retreated from trusting empirical methods and instead preferred dogmatism. His was a plea for a return to empirical sociological research.

In 2002, he published ‘Sociology of education. Theories and reality’ (in Greek), in which, in the words of John Pyrgiotakis’s preface, ‘he attempts a renewal of the field of Sociology of Education in Greece, since the majority of the relevant books were republications of books published in the 1980s or earlier’ (15, translation from the Greek, D.P., as are all quotations below). In this book, Kelpanides criticized the lack of a ‘theoretically and methodologically well-established sociological tradition in Greece’ (17) which ‘has the negative effect that the majority of scientific work in Greece in the field of Sociology of Education is confi ned to the sterile reproduction of anachronistic, compared to social development and social demands, sociological doctrines formulated in the 1960s and 1970s’ (19). He analysed major issues in the field of Sociology of Education concerning the social prerequisites, structures, functions, and consequences of the educational system in general, then proceeded to a presentation for the Greek audience and an empirical evaluation of the main sociological theories relevant for the field of Sociology of Education.

Examining the central role of theoretical knowledge in postindustrial societies, he wrote in 2004, together with Calliope Vrynioti, the book ‘Lifelong learning. Social prerequisites and functions. Data and conclusions’ (in Greek). Here, based on empirical evidence, the authors asserted how, in order for people to successfully cope with the social and professional challenges of postindustrial societies, they had to understand and accept the need for lifelong learning. The authors also referred to the political choices that contribute to the fostering of the concept and practice of lifelong learning.

Kelpanides’s theoretical and epistemological orientation led him to use empirical research methods to explain the static nature and inefficiency of the Greek educational system. His expertise could have contributed to educational reform, badly needed in Greece. Early in his academic career (1978) he had taken over a respected research project (‘Social Development and Reform in Secondary High School Education in Greece’) at the ‘Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung’. This project examined whether the educational reform laws 309/1976 and 576/1977 succeeded in developing vocational and technical education schemes; it must be said that in Greece technical and vocational education was considered inferior to general education and remains so. The research data confirmed that the educational reform of 1976 in many respects was unsuccessful and perpetuated several anachronistic characteristics of the Greek educational system.

The problem of the Greek educational system reproducing itself in a static manner dominated Kelpanides’s work. Throughout his career, he conducted research projects and produced empirical data concerning a) the inadequacy of general education offered in public schools, especially the preponderance of Ancient Greek over the spoken New Greek; b) the dominance of private cramming courses; c) the absence of teacher evaluation; d) the frequent occupation of school buildings by students, which not least revealed the extent to which students reject school as a social institution; e) the peripheral status of foreign languages in the secondary school curriculum; f) the routine promotion to full professorship within the same department, characteristic of Greek universities.

When the Treaty of Maastricht was signed in 1992, heads of states and governments set out to establish not only monetary union among the signatory nations but to pave the way for a political union in Europe. The eurozone was widely perceived, or at least constructed, as a success story until October 2009, when the Greek government acknowledged that the country had taken on excessive debt. Despite the ‘no bail-out clause’ in the Maastricht Treaty, Greece received financial assistance from its partners in the EU on a conditional basis. Structural reforms, including austerity measures, were intended to increase Greece’s competitiveness and enable the country to once again gain access to capital markets that had been closed to it. As we know today, these assumptions about reform were highly optimistic.

The crisis, whether regarded as a crisis of debt or of the euro, provoked Kelpanides. In his 2013 book Politische Union ohne europäischen Demos? Die fehlende Gemeinschaft der Europäer als Hindernis der politischen Integration (‘Political union without demos? The missing community of Europeans as an obstacle to political integration’), he analysed the process of European integration in political, historical, and economic terms, addressing questions on identity, governance, and common foreign policy. His empirical basis here was provided by the European School in Luxembourg, supported by the European Union, where pupils from different member states are taught. His findings resulted in scepticism towards the development of a European demos, a perspective that remains highly topical when we consider how the EU has been dealing with the ongoing refugee crisis. Upon the book’s publication, he was invited to participate in a debate about the consequences of the First World War for Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, held after German president Joachim Gauck opened the event ‘1914-2014. Hundert europäische Jahre’ (‘One hundred European years’).

Südosteuropa, in this issue, publishes Michael Kelpanides’s final essay, the synthetic study ‘Greek Education. Explaining Two Centuries of Static Reproduction’, on which he literally worked until his final hours. On 11 November 2015, he wrote to his co-authors concerning this study:

‘This project, which as a scientific analysis is axiologically neutral, will exert sharp criticism on the insufficiently modernized and multiply problematic Greek educational system. I emphasize that to stress the fact that scientific analysis is not necessarily a tepid approach but may result in negative judgments and comparisons, which can be seen as aggressive by third parties, who have personal interests in opposing these judgements.’

Indeed, while he insisted throughout his career on the principle of axiological neutrality and the centrality of objective methods, he never hesitated to put forth sharp criticism when his empirical results permitted it, especially towards the inadequacies of the Greek educational system and the political choices that contributed to their preservation. It was this stance and his profound sociological knowledge which gained him international academic recognition.

Michael Kelpanides was also an exceptional teacher. His courses dealt with the methodologies of educational research, the sociology of education, lifelong learning, the family, IT tools in the social sciences, ethnocentrisms and Europeanization, and quantitative methods. He was committed to helping his students explore the controversial nature of their research endeavours. He supervised thirty postgraduate candidates and was a member of fifteen postgraduate committees. In addition, he supervised eleven doctoral candidates and was a member of twenty-one PhD committees.

Michael Kelpanides was married to Calliope Vrynioti, and he was the father of two children. His colleagues and friends characterize him as kind, honest, meritocratic, respectful, and an overall admirable man. In his leisure time (‘As if scientific work were not “leisure” time’, he used to say), he cultivated interests directly associated with sociology, including social history, economics, and the sociology of music. With music he nurtured a special relationship, and especially enjoyed playing Beethoven’s works on the piano and the violin. With his death, Greece’s academic community has lost an outstanding scholar.