short résumé to squatted academy

On October 22nd the Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna signed a budget agreement with the state that severely contradicted the democratically formulated position of students and teachers.

The result was the occupation of the Academy’s main hall, supported by many students and staff from other universities as well other groups and individuals that then also initiated protests, actions and occupied their own universities. Currently 10 universities in Austria are occupied including Linz, Vienna, Graz, Klagenfurt, Innsbruck and Salzburg. Recently there are a lot of occupations taking place in Germany. The protests have received a lot of support from a variety of different groups and political organisations, and many demonstrations and actions have taken place with many more being planned.
Our demands are not only about educational problems - access restrictions or inadequate financing - we also try to show and include a broader social context; discrimination, marginalization, precarious work conditions, non-democratic and arbitrary selection processes, and claim unconditional basic income as well as a minimum wage of 1500 euros for everyone (the demands themselves fill pages).

One of the rallying points of the protest here has been the Bologna Process and subsequent changes in the law that have introduced stricter top-down power structures, and worsening study conditions.
It has also been important however to see this as part of a broader, global trend to privatize social institutions and adapt them for the purposes of producing profit; this includes schools, hospitals, and universities with devastating effects on most areas of social life.
The student today is not just connected to these effects in the university; they are connected, like most other people, to worsening health care, exploding debts, bankruptcy, unemployment and hyper exploitation. The university is no longer a site separate from society; it is but one terrain where the struggle against private profit, and the power of finance is being waged.
It is this broader struggle that we hope to open up and connect to.

The SQUATTING TEACHERS work-group has also been formed, they occupy rooms themselves and try to formulate, realize and establish alternative ways of lecturing without access controls for students as well as for non-students. Besides all the positive developments and effects there are still students that critically position themselves against the occupation and also criticize the utopian character of the demands. They view the protest movement as a disruption of their own studies. The reaction of the press has also been problematic, in the beginning they tried to infantilize the protests and define the protesters as lazy, beer drinking, partying, apolitical students. By now this has changed as we worked very hard at communicating our theoretical demands, opinions and backgrounds and can now be said to be rather positive.
Finally we can say that an end of the occupation is neither planned nor foreseeable. By now we’re in the situation where we start to notice the problems involved in demanding utopias – although I think that the only things you can demand is necessarily utopian. That doesn’t mean that there’s going to be a relativization of our theories, goals, wishes and demands but it means that there are many things left to be talked about and that there’s loads of theoretical work still to be done.

We don't want a piece of cake – we want the whole fucking bakery!
"our demands" (german)

Bilder: