General strike and occupation of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna!
Come down to squat and join the party!
Tuesday 20.10.09 from 12.30.
Occupation of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Schillerplatz 3
At 12pm a press conference is to be held in front of the Academy of Fine Arts, followed by a symbolic evacuation of the university, and finally the occupation of the Academy.
Join us, take your friends and sleeping bags with you!
There’s food, music and ideas for further self organised programs.
The plan is to use the coming days in order to establish an
increased number of protest measures!
No study fees for nobody!
Free education for ALL!
Show solidarity! Lets use the state of exception to construct collective resistance
beyond the categories of teacher/student/worker or otherwise!
Yesterday at 4pm there was a general assembly in which over 100 people took part. Students, teachers, university personnel and people that are in solidarity with the demands, discussed and decided together, that from Tuesday on, classes will be disrupted and the university occupied.
One of the reasons for this is the meeting between the Rector and the
Minister of Education on Thursday, at which the Academy’s future shall
be decided.
The Academy is one of a few Austrian higher-education institutions that still resists the implementation of the Bologna process. The overwhelming majority of teachers, students and university personnel stand against the introduction of the bachelor/master structure.
On Thursday the ‘Service Agreement’ between the Minsitry and the
Academy should be signed, within which drastic budget cuts and an even
more precarious situation in teaching and research are to be expected.
Many teaching staff and uni personnel will be victim to budget cuts!
The situation of students and teachers will only get worse…
The atmosphere among the students and the teachers is one of a readiness to fight and leaves one with the hope for more to come!
Life is not for Sale! Education is not for Sale! Palaces for everyone!
“Resistance to the education cutbacks is part of the fight against capitalism! Luxury for all, instead of profits for the few!”
Demands
The Bologna process aims at extensive convergence with the Anglo-American education system. The goal is to enter competition in the global education market to strengthen its own economic position and increase research dependent revenues. The establishment of regulative norms and the harmonization of standards are its basis and at the same time its precondition: without standardization no measurability, without measurability no comparability, without comparability no competition. Economization and competition logic are imposed on every level of the knowledge landscape.
The result is intercontinental as well as inter-EU competition, within which single universities and their departments compete amongst themselves for the best results and statistics. The processes involved in the creation of an education economy with knowledge as the traded commodity correspond with the general ambitions of privatization and commodification in all spheres of life under neoliberal capitalism. They lead to educational institution’s increased dependency on their sponsors; cynically defined as the autonomization of the universities.
In this context autonomy is a euphemism for the new forms of governing institutions. The autonomized universities are not autonomous in the sense of self-determined at all. They are rather directed to fulfil the needs of economy and industry, as well as to subjugate themselves to market logic; efficiency, competition and managerial ruling structures. The democratisation of the universities, implemented in the 1970s, is successively abolished; democratically legitimized bodies are disenfranchised and replaced by top-down hierarchical structures.
In the composition of the Bologna 3-level study model, a paradigm change has manifested itself, in the last few years there has been a shift from a pluralistic education ideal to an economy orientated education. The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna has repeatedly and explicitly positioned itself against this degradation and the establishment of the Bachelor-Master system.
We refuse to subjugate ourselves to the logic of politics and economy!
We’re fighting to define learning, teaching and research for ourselves!
We declare solidarity with the education protests in Bangladesh, Brazil, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, Great Britain, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Croatia, Netherlands, Serbia, South Africa, USA!