It’s a Saturday and I’m spending most of my time at the university. Why? Well, there are no courses, no lectures, nothing a student will get points for. Still, I’m far from alone. Some 70 students are in the audimax, the biggest lecture hall of the University of Vienna, even more outside and in several other rooms in the building. The spirit in the audimax is relaxed. Low-tuned background-music, people are talking, studying. Some walk through the lines with huge brooms and garbage bags, other use chemical means to remove graffiti from tables. Now and then the music is turned off for announcements from the podium. The securities started to lock lecture rooms for the weekend, please seize some to keep room for work-groups; there is a Gramsci-workshop in lecture hall number 21 hosted by two students; a guy working at the podium needs a charging device for his iPhone. In the big hallway in front of the lecture hall a couple of info- and food-desks are crowded by more chatting people. In lecture hall number 34 the work-group “plenum” debates organisational problems. After a while they are replaced by the work-group “finances” which tries to figure out how to finance the demands.
It’s not a normal Saturday at the University of Vienna. Since Thursday a group of students have seized the audimax to protest against the situation of students in Austria. It started as a demonstration against the Bologna protest organised by students of an Art-University but turned into a much broader movement, organised through facebook and twitter. This movement wasn’t organized by existing organisations and so no one really knows where all of this is going. But a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into figuring it out.
After three days the “official” list of demands looks like this (and was translated into several languages):
Unbearable conditions in the educational system have forced us students to mobilize!
The Bologna Process in Europe has lead a economization of education and universities are turned into educational institutions for private corporations.
We have squatted the main building and are resisting!
We call for following movements, solidarity campaigns and resistance by all European universities!
We claim:
-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!
We encourage all European universities to demonstrate solidarity -
For myself, I can’t say I would sign this without any reservations, but I do agree with a lot of it. And as a student at the University of Vienna I also see that a lot is going wrong right now. So I’m glad that something is happening here.
One last thing. The reaction of the responsible minister Johannes Hahn was something like that: “First I have to know what the problems of the students are.” The conditions of students in Austria are a media-topic for months already. So one of my personal problems is that I would prefer a minister for sciences that reads a newspaper once in a while.
