Students shut classes in tuition protests

BERLIN, Germany — Students occupied seminar rooms. Banners hung in front of lecture halls. Students tacked 95 demands on the door of the school’s president.

After months of tension, tens of thousands of students and community members took to the streets last month to protest tuition hikes across the country.

Protests in Potsdam, Cologne, Munich, Dresden, Tubingen and other cities pressured the government to change its policies on increased student fees and restricted study and field opportunities.

At Freie Universitat and Humboldt University — two of the largest here — students slept in tents and sleeping bags. Normal university order ground to a halt.

At least 6,000 students and community members demonstrated peacefully through the city’s heart with signs reading “Bildung Statt Banken” — “Education Instead of Banks.”

“We won’t leave until our demands are met and the standards of education are raised,” one student said, standing in front of a row of comrades camping out in a Potsdam University lecture hall.

In a nationwide education strike, following on the heels of similar protests in Austria, students and university workers are demanding a stop to the privatization of education, a raise in student-aid monies, and an increase in the percentage of students accepted into master’s programs, among others.

Protests took place in 35 cities and seemed to make an impact on government leaders.

In a reversal, Education Minister Annette Schavan vowed to raise the BAfoG — Federal Education and Training Assistance money — which students receive when they can prove their parents can’t afford to pay for living costs. Previously, she said a higher BafoG was out of the question.

Newspaper commentaries have been harsh. An opinion column from the Tagezeitung newspaper calls the plan to raise student fees a “poisonous gift.” The new, more conservative coalition government elected in September “will soon have a new lucrative customer base,” reads another column, of "the parents who want a good education possible for their children.”

Young Die Linke (The Left) party members ran a gag at several universities in which a man wearing a white jacket and sunglasses randomly entered lecture halls and “ex-matriculated” a student for not paying her student fees.

“Education is a commodity,” says the actor sardonically, “and you have to pay for it.”

Students are adamant about keeping education a public resource, available to all, independent of class or income. Many students and educators warily consider the student Gebuhr — the  $730 per semester student fees introduced a few years ago — as just the beginning of a for-profit, commodity-structured education system, as in the U.S., where the average student graduates with some $20,000 in debt, according to the Project on Student Debt, a watchdog organization.

Protests are also blossoming in California, where paycuts paired with tuition hikes of up to 32 percent are being proposed.

Students here are also rallying against the folding of bachelor’s and master’s degrees integrated into the German system over the past few years. What once took five years now takes four, and many students find it hard to get jobs with the "turbo-degree," as its spitefully called.

“The bachelor study track was meant to be a magic bullet for education policy, but the German version has proven to be a flop. Here, a lot has gone wrong,” according to a public news spot started last weekend.

“We want better education conditions. We don’t want to have to sit on the floor during seminars,” said Jotam Felmy, a student at Humboldt University who occupied the school’s auditorium with dozens of others over the weekend.

“I want to see action. I want to see concrete steps forward.” Until then, he’s sleeping in lecture halls and taking to the streets.

This report comes from a journalist in our Student Correspondent Corps, a GlobalPost project training the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.