Why the sustained attack again education budgets in the current rounds of austerity?
Here is an interesting thesis and contextualization:
In his book Democracy, Charles Tilly treats democracy not as an unchanging state of existence, but as an unstable balance between two antagonistic forces: democratization and de-democratization. The latter, in its most advanced state, prepares the failure of democratic regimes to open the door to dictatorships. The measures currently being applied are openly de-democratizing. They don’t seek to destroy democracy so much as to appropriate its legitimacy and use it for anti-democratic ends, such as neo-liberalism.
Excerpted from Carlos Delclós:
““Perhaps more than an anti-democratic imposition,” Raimundo Viejo tells me in an e-mail interview, “we should refer to the measures themselves as de-democratizing.” An activist, researcher and professor at Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra specializing in social movements, Viejo explains, “In his book Democracy, Charles Tilly treats democracy not as an unchanging state of existence, but as an unstable balance between two antagonistic forces: democratization and de-democratization. The latter, in its most advanced state, prepares the failure of democratic regimes to open the door to dictatorships. The measures currently being applied are openly de-democratizing. They don’t seek to destroy democracy so much as to appropriate its legitimacy and use it for anti-democratic ends, such as neo-liberalism.”
No matter what one thinks of the content of the reform itself, what has sparked the most outrage and ignited years of protest is Bologna’s brutal implementation, which, in the years prior to the deepening of the crisis and its consequent austerity measures, paralleled the violent repression we can see today in Greece, Spain, England and elsewhere. In 2009, students from the University of Barcelona came together to peacefully occupy the halls of their campus in order to denounce the lack of transparency and democracy with which they saw their degrees and curricula changing. On the morning of March 18th, they were removed from campus through the indiscriminate use of clearly excessive force which, once images began to circulate online within hours, was met with a massive, peaceful protest against police violence.
What was most shocking about these incidents was not just the even more violent police response to students, teachers and citizens gathering together near city hall and shouting, “We use books! You use batons!” Most outrageous of all was the fact that the brutality that started set everything in motion, the bloody removal of the protesters sitting peacefully on university property, was ordered by the president of the University of Barcelona, Dídac Ramírez. For, according to Spanish law, the police are prohibited from entering any university, and full responsibility for the decision to allow them in lies exclusively in the hands of the university president.
The tragedy of the current state of affairs for European universities is not just the renewed, violent imposition of a neo-liberal model of university education and the restriction of access to a more fortunate class whose membership is shrinking by the day. The sad punch-line is that university workers, teachers and students (both former and future) now find themselves in the awkward position of fighting to maintain the already excessively precarious situation they are in.
Yet a glimmer of hope exists. From Italy to England and Greece to Spain, the Bologna reform has been met by combative student protests that, while varying in the strength of their coordination, have demonstrated significant tactical creativity and enjoyed their fair share of small victories. And currently, in Catalonia, despite the underhanded tactics mentioned earlier in this article, extreme austerity measures were met with an unexpectedly strong resistance that drew its strength from the context of mass mobilization throughout the Mediterranean region. What’s more, Catalan universities used the opportunity to come together to form the Unitary Platform for the Defense of Public Universities (PUDUP), which unites students, faculty and university workers from all of Catalonia’s public universities in a concerted effort to ensure that the academic year begins with a very hot autumn.
The torch lit by the Chilean university protesters, whose burning light has spread to the rest of civil society in their country, is a major source of inspiration. They want a high-quality, free education and they are willing to fight for it. By demanding it all when they are told they deserve little more than scraps, the Chilean students show their neighbors that another world is possible and worth the struggle. And it is precisely because of how difficult it must be to tell the family of Manuel Gutiérrez Reinoso, the 16-year old boy murdered by the Chilean carabineros on August 26th, that it is up to all of us to make sure that his memory is honored with a better future for all.”