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12. 11. 09. - 16:00

Students, give up the fight!

Comment by Thomas Hochwarter

Austria’s students are well advised to end their protests, the sooner the better, and focus on their careers before causing more damage.

It is three weeks now that students have been occupying auditoriums at institutions across the country to make people aware of the bad – and truly appalling - circumstances they are confronted with in their years of higher education.

The point when to say farewell to one’s high-spirited and idealistic ideas and hopes for a more fair, balanced and simply better situation at universities has, however, been reached.

The protesters need to realise their demonstration activities will – apart from hypocritical measures such as preliminary increases of the government’s spending on universities that will have little effect in the long run – lead to no improvement at all.
It is a sad fact that the educational system of Austria is outdated and far from being competitive in international comparisons. Global and European studies showing the quality of education at the country’s universities steadily worsening should not be given too much importance considering important factors like the significantly higher budgets top universities have – but do not brighten the perspective either.

Austrian politicians’ announcements of plans to improve the educational system by taking Scandinavian countries as role models are nothing less than hilarious, considering that it has been various government coalitions that have ensured that the overall situation at overcrowded and mostly dilapidated universities has worsened over the decades. Everybody with any realistic views will agree that the situation cannot be improved in a time span of fewer than 20 years.

Student protesters dominating the occupied auditoriums, blocking roads during demonstrations and – currently in a "heated" row with swine flu mass hysteria news – filling newspaper headlines need to realise they are facing three key problems.

The first is that their personal situations are deteriorating simply because of the time spent – wasted? – on demonstrating.

The second is that the way the public regards them and their activities is drastically worsening. The longer occupations of auditoriums continue, the more fierce the opposition in the form of the media like highly influential and best-selling daily Kronen Zeitung will get. They correctly point out soaring costs caused by the need to book venues to hold lectures set to take place at occupied classrooms and auditoriums – not forgetting their traditional habit of calling protesters "leftist anarchist" or the like.

Considering many obscure decisions by political leaders in the past were arguably often made having in mind a newspaper’s policies to ensure there would not be a fall-out with it, one realises how powerful the conservative "Krone" was, is and always will be in Austria.

And the third decisive factor that the demonstrators will eventually have to accept is that calling for free access to higher education on the one hand and complaining about overcrowded lectures and courses is a contradiction. The current state, as pointed out earlier on, is the result of decades of poor political decisions – and caused by last year’s abolition of study fees that had certainly kept the one or the other ambitious person from studying. Many forget in the debate that everybody who could not come up with the fees was exempted from paying them and that most of the countries with top higher education ask students to pay.

So where will all this lead us? The past has shown that a lame compromise that does not help any of those involved in a political or social conflict always stands at the end of every debate – something that is already known as "the Austrian solution" outside this country’s borders. Keep up the good work, beloved Austria…

Austrian Times

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