YEAR 2015. After years of gasping for breath, public education in Spain is pronounced dead.
University of Granada students, as well as their parents, friends and future classmates are taking to the streets to mourn over their loss.
DEP = RIP in Spanish.
18/12/2012: Plaza del Carmen, Granada, SPAIN
University of Granada's Restaurant Service is on strike—everyday, from 1-1:15pm, for the same reason as everybody else: austerity cuts. The cooks are not to be underestimated; they feed thousands of students of the University every day.
It means that everybody, literally, either has to be on strike or support it.
The whole Spain's been on strike today.
Gran Vía, Granada, Spain
University in the street: an initiative by #AsambleaUGR, students and lecturers, aimed at raising Granada's citizens' awareness of the critical state of public education and national economy; celebrated today on one of the main squares: Plaza Bib-Rambla, in the immediate neighborhood of the cathedral.
The location is more than symbolic: back in the 16th century, the Spanish Inquisition burned all the books from the Al-Andalus period, owned by universidad de la Madraza (the predecessor of today's Universidad de Granada) so that nothing was left from its Moorish cultural and academic legacy.
Inscription on the banner says: Québec and Spain together in favor of public quality school. Students' protests against higher tuition fees in Québec earlier this year reached their goal and involved the rest of the society, after Canadian government had tried to thwart them by means of establishing utterly anti-democratic laws
Concepción Sánchez, lecturer at the School of Translation & Interpreting, Universidad de Granada, giving her lecture with a following wind;)
20/09/2012, Granada, Spain; University of Granada (UGR) School of Science Main Hall –- The Committee of the First UGR Assembly
The event, by some considered historical, brought (for the first time into one venue) around 300 representatives of all three main parts of the University's community: students, lecturers and administrative staff. The reason for calling such a meeting originated from the disapproval of the Spanish government's austerity measures in education, reflected in Real Decreto 14/2012, a highly controversial act approved in April 2012 and applied eagerly by UGR authorities.
However, it is said that austerity measures are just a good excuse for a much more complex operation: to make public higher education fall into hands of big companies and submit it to the profitability rule, which would result in the extinction of independent scholarship, and a limited access to knowledge, impossible for the less wealthy.
Till the present day, 4 more Assemblies have already taken place in different UGR venues, as well as a number of street marches, pot-banging events, workshops and administrative staff's lockouts at a regular schedule—all against the direction in which .
The debate
Students fighting
Nightly occupation of Universidad de Granada's Facultad de Filosofía y Letras' main hall, against Spanish Gov's austerity measures, severely affecting public higher education
Right: Enrique Raya Lozano, the author of a public Complaint Form on the state of public education and lecturers' work conditions in view of austerity policies, read at the University of Granada's Senate session, and signed by 54 Senate members, addressed to the authorities of Universidad de Granada.
Personally speaking: occupations and marches, and so on, are dangerous at one point: they're easily converted into child's play, a festival of form, lacking of content…
