As Goes Santa Cruz, so goes Vienna
One might think that the recent occupations at UCSC are an isolated incident. The method of students occupying buildings on campus is being tried in Vienna. I must say that the protest in Vienna is putting the UCSC protests to shame. I’ll talk more about that later.
To begin, I need to first talk about Bologna. Bologna is two things. First it is a delicious sausage that originated in a city with the same name in northern Italy. Second, and more applicable, Bologna is the city that holds the oldest University in the western world and is the location where sweeping EU wide University reforms have recently been proposed. The reforms, called the Bologna process, are a framework to standardize the educational system in the EU, making degrees and courses from differing Universities comparable, so a physics class in one University will teach the same thing as a similarly named class at another. It would also standardize degrees from various Universities as well, so different universities would give out similar degree types, like the bachelor/masters degrees given out in the US. For science and engineering courses, this would help people to transfer to other Universities since credit from one course would easily transfer to a new institution. For art institutions, this is a double edged sword. Creativity is not something that can be standardized, however requiring students to have a broad set of courses in order to get a degree could be beneficial.
Now that I’ve talked about both sausage and University reforms in the EU, it’s time to get to the protests. There are two protests/actions that happened in Vienna. Since most of the writing about it is in German, many of the bloggers and interpreters in the US conflate the two. The first one was at the Academy of fine arts, Vienna in Austria. If you click on the link for their homepage, you will notice the ]a[ logo that the University uses. This matches the photos from the demonstration that happened on Tuesday the 20th:
I can understand why an Art Academy would resist a program of standardization. It also makes sense why the website that describes the protests is called “paint by numbers” (malen nach zahlen), as a witty way of pointing out the difficulties inherent in standardizing art. The Academy of fine arts Vienna has a student body of about 900, according to wikipedia, making it about 1/16th the size of UCSC. Looking at the picture I would say that they had a phenomenal turnout. Unfortunately the second action has more images and press and I can’t tell what is still happening with the original Academy of fine Art occupation anymore.
Not wanting to be outdone by the Art Academy, students at the University of Vienna decided to stage their own protest on the 22nd. This protest started in ways that reminded me of the UCSC Occupation. Just a little bit of info about the University of Vienna: The student population at the University of Vienna is about 74,000, making it more than 82 times bigger than the Academy of fine Arts Vienna and more than 4 times bigger than UCSC. The reason I say it reminded me of the UCSC occupation is because of the series of events surrounding the Occupation of the University of Vienna. First there were marches and rallies which ended with the Occupation of a lecture hall. Various participants were encouraged to speak at the podium. After the speakers, participants broke up into groups so that a document could be formed outlining what exactly they were protesting. Since the Bologna process is less of a rallying cry for a University with a prestigious science program that has generated many Nobel laureates, the demands made were very general and overarching. The result of this process was the following list of demands:
-enough money for each university place
-free access to education
-all real democratization of the universities
-self-determined learning and living instead of pressure to perform
-no restrictions to master degrees
-independent teaching and research
-stop precarious working conditions
-no restricted extra curricula
-stop neoliberalism!
The first two demands are for more money and increased enrollment opportunities for future students. It’s not very specific and on a University campus is as controversial as stating your love of puppies at the humane society. The devil is in the details for a lot of these proposals, and it requires the support of the taxpayers or government to implement. The end of Neoliberal economic theory is a hilarious thing to tack on at the end. Anyone that hears these demands will not have the ability to end neoliberal economic theory. It’s as unrealistic as the UCSC occupiers calling on an end to capital. Now if this were a UCSC protest, the demands would get bogged down in the various Marxist/Anarchist theories of property ownership, and the message and demands would balloon and expand to unrealistic proportions.
The most recent list of demands to come out of the occupation in Vienna make a little more sense, spell out specifics, and are more practical considering who they will be negotiating with. It is a much better statement of purpose than the UCSC occupiers produced in both clarity and practicality. Let me highlight one statement:
-We oppose ourselves to the degrading transformation of universities and schools into training facilities oriented by the labour market. We want education as space for thinking, not training as the mere reproduction of workforce!.
So this sentiment, if written by a Marxist, could have been phrased as a critique of how the University acts as a wing of the capitalist system. Instead it is a statement about academic freedom. There are possible problems with the statement for the Vienna occupiers. Fist is that the argument is a bit esoteric. It is difficult to stay on message, but not impossible, since a larger audience is not interested in the inner workings of the University. The second difficulty in the statement is that counter points can be made of them. I must give a tip of the hat to the Vienna protesters for not making me wade through various Marxist rehashings in order to figure out what the point of the Occupation is (see here for an example).
There are quite a few students who see higher education as a great place to become prepared for a better and higher paying job. For them, a University as a form of training facility for the Job market is exactly what they want. A compromise solution should be possible for most of the complaints since the demands are not laced with Marxist rhetoric. Threats of escalation, riots, street barricades, and violent revolutions are not present in the statements from the occupiers. It will be interesting to see if this occupation, with a distinct lack of threats of violent escalation, accomplishes anything on the points that it has laid out. If it works, then the UCSC occupiers need to take notes. If not, then it will be yet another data point against the theory that occupations achieve their goals.
After looking at pictures such as the ones below I must say that I am impressed. There are no masked participants, they all appear to be students. The speeches are streamed on the video link below. There is faculty support. The second round of demands was an improvement on the first and the protesters are coalescing on to specific actions they would like to see taken. The Occupation has been going on for days and the number of students still participating is impressively large.
I’m going to go ahead and say that the Vienna occupation puts the UCSC occupation to shame. Even though I don’t really care about the Bologna process and its affects on EU Universities, I really want this occupation to succeed just because its methods and demands have a certain amount of practicality and rationality unseen in the UCSC protests. I’m sure there are some translating that needs to happen before I can grasp all the specifics of the Vienna protests, and I might not agree with them 100%, but they have the potential to alter protests at UCSC for the better, and therefore I support them. The question is, are any radicals at UCSC paying attention?
To keep updated on the Austrian Occupations see:
Painting by numbers: http://www.malen-nach-zahlen.at/
Our University: http://unsereuni.at/
Der Standard: http://derstandard.at/r3653/UniPolitik
Video: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/unsereuni
pictures: http://unsereuni.at/?p=245
3 Comments so far
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I strongly doubt that anyone with direct authority will point at the Vienna occupation and say, “that’s why I’ve changed my mind and now oppose the Bologna plan”. I’m sure the occupiers would like that, but their approach implies a more nuanced strategy. They’re both getting media attention and making sure the attention leads to a clear, sympathetic message. See, for example, the revised list of demands and how vague and only partially-related causes have been removed from the list.
dear people, academy of fine arts is still occupied. I’m writing from the office of the (former) student union. There a lot going on here at the moment, and its hard to get an overview. Just wanted to correct something, students and people from many institutions and organisations have been working together for a longer time now on analysing the bologna process, protesting the broader globlal commodification of education, and destruction of knowledge commons. This larger network, and many many others were heavily involved in the first days of the academy occupation, as well as in the occupation of the university of vienna, and still now in the broadening of the discussions and occupations. Both occupations were done with a great amount of solidarity between different student groups, the university of vienna occupation emerged as a result of a 2000 strong protest that grew throughout the day, storming lectures and dragging more people out of their chairs and into the march, and involved students from many universities. Theres nothing to be idealised in this movement, as a movement it has all that is wrong with society within its fabric, the task is to start putting those things on a platform and not to hide them in the backrooms of institutional politics.
Occupy Everything.
In solidarity
forgot we are in close contact with friends and inspirers in Santa Cruz, and in many other occupation movements as well. Also as a proposal maybe we should really start to think of the internet as a place to speak directly to movements, so instead of making assumptions, asking questions..
just as its quite strange to have someone talking about you, but to be listening to them at the same time. may as well just have a chat instead!