I think I may have turned a corner on my second student-hood?
I have been protesting about the changes to university institutions in Spain.
The issue surrounds the ‘Declaration of Bologna’ signed by 29 European countries in 1999 with the objective of facilitating the official recognition of university qualifications on a European wide basis and the free movement of lecturers and students around the European University system. The five universities most affected by the anti-Bologna protests are the University of Barcelona, Autónoma de Barcelona, Complutense, Sevilla and Valencia. These universities have 250,000 students which in total account for a fifth of all public university students in Spain.
One of the main reasons why students are protesting against the declaration of Bologna is that they believe that it will pave the way for the gradual privatisation of public universities and that study fees will inevitably go up (by 10 times) The university vice chancellors have attempted to deny this, and protests continue to grow all over Spain.
This particular protest involved camping out at the faculty all night, translating a manifesto from Spanish to English…goodness only knows if what I wrote was F.A.C.T., but it sounded alright! A meeting, some banners and a kip on the fourth floor outside my painting studio! I spent half the night when not translating making what became know as Nicko’s Balls! A an enormous pile of newspaper balls that blocked an entrance.
The evening was kicked off by the three wise men sporting compulsary beards, one with a mullet non-cut, two out of the three with a silver stud earring in one ear and a doting lady friend that gazed longingly and who bought copious amounts of beer and obligatory weed for our three hairy friends to smoke whilst talking quite frankly what sounded like a load of rubbish…for hours. Music blarred from tinny speakers, not the marching tunes of a revolution but the score from Dirty Dancing! Many pairs of doc martins slipped off to paint banners and a group of art students with blue hair in common teamed up to run the ‘blockades section’ The team office by 04.15 am was thick with smoke and several characters in dressing gowns. My eyes watered whilst putting the finishing touches to the manifesto which essentially said…we disagree. Perhaps in reflection I could have saved myself a lot of time with that summary?
The remainder of the night was then spent making more banners and causing general mayhem on the walls of the corridors. I was asked to make a banner in English so I wrote ‘we fight for our rights’ which covers all manner of sins in a protest you would have thought? However, it provoked some genius to write in Spanish,what are rights? A fair and honest question scrawled across a third of it! I give up, that’ s me and international co-operation done. I made a few paper balls and badly translated a manifesto. You win some you lose some and this one I think they will eventually have to accept as a lost cause.
The next day some students managed to convince our drawing tutor to cancel the 9am class that I had been waiting around for literally all night. Most classes got cancelled as a result, except for Mr Sauve and his springy step, who ploughed on in full glorious spanish prose. I need to learn some more Spanish.
