Why don’t we do like the Germans do—and strike?

Nika Knight

As the recent country-wide student strike swept through Germany, it was hard, as an American, to think of similar instances of student activism in the States. As the already-exorbitant price for a college education rises faster than the inflation rate—my own college joined the ranks this year of those private colleges whose yearly tuition has risen above the $50,000 mark—students in America seem either more accepting of their fate or unaccustamed to the protest culture that so dominates European socialist societies such as Germany.

But despite the relative calm in American institutions of higher education, there have been several instances of student protests in the past year, and strikes this winter at two schools in New York I think shed some light on the differences between ourselves and Germans when it comes to student-led movements for education reform. In looking at these strikes, I hope to explain why we, as Americans, have failed to revolt in response to the injustices of our own education system.

The New School

One evening this last December, 75 New School students barricaded themselves in a dining hall to call for the resignation of the school’s embattled president and several other senior members of the administration. The number of students occupying the building varied over the 30-hour “occupation” (as the students called it), and at one point the number of students was as high as 200.

The protester’s demands were ultimately reduced to voting to agree to four terms negotiated with the president—namely, amnesty for the students involved, more study space to replace a library slated for demolition, more student participation in selection of the provost and establishment of a student committee to oversee socially responsible investments of the university’s endowment.

30 hours after the protest began, dumpsters and cafeteria tables were shoved aside as the 50 remaining occupiers spread peacefully into the street—some shouting in jubilation.

The strike was seen as successful and notable, not only for that but for the very fact of its occurrence. Student strikes are relatively scarce in the States, especially at private schools like the New School, where, it can be argued, students can just take their tuition money elsewhere if they feel dissatisfied. The strike was reported on by the New York Times and other major media outlets, and provided a framework for a second occupation two months later at NYU.

NYU

The New School protest is useful in understanding American student mentalities, if only to compare it to the relative failure of the NYU student strike—modeled almost exactly after the New School’s—in which 15 students were suspended for barricading themselves in a school cafeteria for two days, calling themselves members of a protest organization called “Take Back NYU!” (A recent graduate emphasized that "a lot of [the protesters] weren’t even NYU students. They don’t represent NYU under any circumstances. No one knew what was going on. No one knew any of them.”)

For two days, the student strikers barricaded themselves in a cafeteria, and published a list of demands that included amnesty for themselves, more financial transparency from the board of trustees, public access to the NYU library, scholarships for Palestinian students and for extra school supplies to be sent to the Gaza Strip.

The strike, at first glance, is not so different than the New School’s. The wider and far-reaching scope of their demands, however, along with a fairly embarrassing (and widely-circulated) youtube video made by one of the strikers first elicited scrutiny, then ridicule.

The video was published by nyulocal.com and spread from there. The video is condemning—at one point, when the videographer is cataloguing the protesters’ belongings in case of their confiscation, he picks up a water bottle and tosses it back in the bag, remarking with disdain, “[NYU officials] probably don’t want a water bottle. They probably drink corporate water.” He then moves on, listing aloud, “Macbook…Macbook charger...iPod…Macbook charger…” The irony, clearly, is lost on him. It was not, however, lost on the Internet.

In comparison to Germany—where, as Braden and Alli noted earlier in this blog, the student strikers in Bamberg last week respected regulations like the maximum allowable time in which to hold up traffic while crossing the street—the NYU student protesters expected not only attention and capitulation from those they addressed, but before, and perhaps more than that, they expected a fight. Their behavior looked dated—like they were taking their cues from a movie they saw once—and it made me wonder, if, without a general protest culture like that in Germany, the few of us who raise our fists against the man just don’t quite know how to do it.

Responses to the NYU strike

Gawker.com, a blog ostensibly about the New York media scene and infamous for its near-constant stream of unfiltered snark, especially loathed the protesters:

…while student activism in decades past was at least defensible as going after one pillar of establishment power, academia in 2009 is just a finishing school for rich kids and a playground for people who'd really like to spend their professional careers wrestling with the least important but most dramatic office politics in the world, so they can someday net that $300k salary and the reduced mortgage, only to get shit on by Politco and the rest of the world for making a living with their book-learnin' elitism.

So our advice to these kids is to go have a fucking cigarette and then Drop Out. Tell your parents to put the tuition money in a trust fund so you can continue living the life to which you were born accustomed as you volunteer to build some fucking houses somewhere, and then when that runs out why not get your degree at CUNY or something so you can sleep better at night.

More than anything, this sort of scornful dismissal seemed to show how little support there is in America for protests of this kind. The venom and speed with which bloggers responded to the protests seemed to express a widely-held belief that protests are generally ineffectual, and even that protesters themselves are entitled (of course, the actions of the NYU protesters themselves didn’t exactly help their case).

Perhaps the most telling response to the protest was that of the NYU student body. While it was happening, and especially after it, the strikers’ fellow students seemed overall to try to distance themselves from it. And if any student body has a right to protest, it has to be NYU’s. The cost of the school, including room and board, is just over the $50,000 mark. Add to that the day-to-day expense of living in New York City, and you’ve got yourself a very pricey undergraduate degree.

The school itself is notoriously stingy with financial aid. Clarissa Wallace, a recent graduate, told me that she owes over $40,000 in loans—from four different lenders, no less, and in the current crisis she has found herself unable to consolidate them—but that compared to some of her classmates, she has it easy. “I know people who owe $120,000 for a degree in acting,” she told me with disbelief.

The protesters, while by any account justified in many of their complaints, somehow failed to key into the general discontent of their fellow students. They acted alone. I think the small number of protesters and the derision aimed at them by their fellows points not only to the failures of the NYU protest, but also to a general belief held by students in America, in which we see ourselves not as collective bargainers, but as individual achievers.

Rather than depending on the state help support our family, to pay for college, to give us a house, a job, health care, in our capitalist nation we’re inheritors of the proverbial American Dream. And I think this is one of the most essential differences in explaining the differences between American and German student activism. In America, as we strive hard to achieve individual success, it’s hard to imagine expecting from those in power as much as German students do from their government. This core conviction—the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality—is, I think, why so few American students have taken to the streets. And ultimately, I think that it’s for this belief—that we can make it on our own, that we should make it on our own—that we stay at home, and leave the protesting to our European counterparts.

Strike snapshots

American-Canadian perspectives on Germany’s educational strike movement, Part II

Braden Goyette and Ali Brunn

The dust has settled from the educational strike’s week of action, and different media organs are already pronouncing their verdicts. But let’s rewind a little bit. We were in Bamberg the day of the main strike, and though the week played out differently all over the Bundesrepublik, some themes and tensions came out in small exchanges throughout the day that are worth re-visiting - particularly the generational antagonisms that emerged, the role that leftist parties played in the strike, and a lot of talk through the megaphone about student fees and relatively little about the structural problems within the system.


Show me the money – generational takes on the students’ demands

Bamberg's medieval market square was filled wall-to-wall with students Wednesday morning, pressed in around the stage in the cobble-stoned space between rows of fruit stands. Signs above the crowd bearing the slogans "Rich parents for all"; "It's too bad my school isn't a bank,” and the recurring chants of “Education for all, and it should be free,” put the issues of tuition and funding center stage as the most prominent rallying points, over the strikers’ many other demands (which include, among other things, greater student representation in the educational system's decision-making bodies, the elimination of the three-tiered secondary school system and the Bachlors/Masters system in its current form).

Many older people present in the square and surrounding streets expressed skepticism about the impetus for the protest. “You all just don’t want to work!” yelled a man in his fifties or sixties to a college student sitting behind a table stacked with literature from leftist parties supporting the strike.

Two other observers, Wolfgang and Therese, who identified themselves as a retiree and homemaker, resented what they saw as the students’ sense of entitlement. Everything the two of them had gotten throughout their lives, Therese said, was earned through hard work and “radical saving.”

“The students are above, you know, and us ordinary folks, we get pushed under.” In her experience, she said, “you’re always hearing about the poor students. The cafes are always full of ‘poor’ students. But when could I ever afford to sit in a cafe and drink coffee? Everything I had, I put towards my children.” She believes that many people feel the same way, she added, particularly in the more rural areas.

A couple who looked about the age to have been part of the 1968 student protest generation had a different take on the situation. “I think it’s great,” Fritz said of the protest, watching the crowd from his bicycle with his five-year-old son on his lap.

“[The three-tiered school system] is obsolete.” Employers, he said, increasingly look for students who have completed an Abitur, the exit exam from the top-tier, university-track high school, the Gymnasium. Students from the Haupt- and Realschule, who earn degrees that should set them on vocational and professional tracks, have a hard time finding employment under these conditions. “It’s nothing new,” he said, though the economic crisis has aggravated the problem.


Where systemic problems figure in

When asked, individual students expressed concern about structural issues, though these didn't figure as prominently in the way the students presented themselves. Few seemed to doubt, for instance, that the three-tiered system is a problem. “Of course it is,” remarked Denise and Andrea, high-schoolers in the 10th and 8th grades, respectively. “Students at the Hauptschule should learn more, they should have better opportunities. But this [strike] won’t accomplish anything,” they concluded, referring to similar actions that hadn’t had an effect the past. The two had nonetheless skipped out of class to catch a glimpse of how the protest was going.

A group called Schule ohne Rassismus was present with a banner at the march to draw attention to the discriminatory character of a system that disproportionately sorts out children from migrant backgrounds, explained Eva Musslein, a member of the group from Bamberg’s Franz-Ludwig-Gymnasium. The group has chapters at 580 schools throughout the country.

For Anna Kathrine, a high-schooler involved in the strike organization, the major issue at stake was equality of opportunity. Students are placed in the different high schools as of the age of 11 or 12, after which point changing tracks is very difficult. “The tests are extremely hard– it almost can’t be done,” she said.

Four girls outside the University of Bamberg gave us their take on the issues with the Bachelors/Masters system, citing increased time pressure caused by the short duration of study in ways that echoed students’ concerns at the FSU in Jena – though they did say that a Bachelor’s from Bamberg would be recognized as equal to one from Munich or other universities. Nonetheless, “we still don’t know how the job market will react to [the Bachelors’], how it will be recognized in comparison to the Diplom, for example,” explained Sophia, who studies English and political science.

Financing their studies came up as an important issue for all of them. “The main issues for me are student fees and the introduction of the Bachelor/Masters system,” said Katharine, a 2nd semester German literature and political science student. Sophia had recently started a side job at a bar where she works Friday nights and weekends, something that’s cut into her quality of life. “But it doesn’t work otherwise – you need to earn money somehow to fund your studies.”


What are the leftists bringing to the party?

An editorial in the University of Bamberg’s student paper framed the strike in grand terms as a generational struggle. We are the generation who’ll have to live with the consequences of this financial crisis, with the consequences of global warming – so the editorial goes – “and no one is really worrying about this generation’s education. Instead, every generation of politicians tries to perpetuate themselves with new reforms, and those sadly remain piecemeal.”

But to what extent is the motivation of the leftist parties supporting the strikers similarly self-serving – particularly in Bavaria, where leftist parties have long had difficulty gaining a foothold?

A marcher waving a flag for Germany’s Left Party, which has its roots in the remains of East Germany’s socialist ruling party, would not say whether the party was providing the strikers with financial support or give her name, though she emphasized that the party was behind the students ideologically.

Anna Katharine, meanwhile, confirmed that the Left Party, the Green Youth, and the socialistic students’ federation were among the groups who’d provided funding for the strikers’ t-shirts, banners, and other materials. Flags from the German Communist Party (KPD) as well as the more mainstream Social Democratic Party (SPD) could be seen waving above the crowd.

There was a good deal of literature produced by the various parties, particularly The Left, specifically for the strike and aimed at young people. An Andy Warhol-esque rendering of Karl Marx graced one pamphlet, while a newsletter put out by Solid, the Left’s youth organization, included articles with titles clearly appealing to the frustrations of high-school aged kids, like “Why school is shit and what we can do about it.”

It’s difficult to determine who might be using whom in this relationship – whether the students were being indoctrinated as a future voting base, or whether the students were being pragmatic and taking all comers when it comes to getting funding.


We’re here, we’re loud, we’re…ambivalent

Watching these strikes as an American can give you a hefty feeling of cognitive dissonance. The three-tiered school system is a totally new concept and is easy to perceive as scandalous, while the university students’ grievances are all about things that would be seen as totally everyday back home – working a side job to pay for school, for instance.

And though the nation-wide action was novel in a sense, we got the feeling that protesting is more like a mechanism of routine maintenance of systems here in Germany. The regulations read out before the strike – which established, among other things, what counts as a weapon, that the wearing of political uniforms is forbidden, and that traffic can be blocked for three minutes maximum -– made it seem like it’s a familiar, almost institutionalized form of furthering public discussion.

The push-and-pull between students’ near-utopian demands and the Economic Miracle generation’s resentment of those demands shed light on one of the challenges facing the 60-year-old federal German social state: the tension between providing for the populace and enabling the populace to get too comfortable with being taken care of.

Towards the end of the rally, a girl at the podium talked about how she should be able to decide what she learns and when she learns it, and that everyone should be able to go at their own pace. A middle-aged woman with a blonde beehive hairdo looked on skeptically from the cash register of her flower stand, muttering “Sure, sure. We’ll never get there.” She turned to the kids crowding her stand and shooed them away, telling them some of us are working here.

Photo Dan Antonaccio