May 2010;

One of my favourite malapropisms.

And since this is a site's beta-test, let's see how this site fares with a wall of text for a picture description of "historical context."

________

While I had been too youthfully ignorant to join any kind of social protests before 2003, I entered the field of educational protests from then on. With the growing awareness of EU-wide blatantly obvious, yet largely ignored, lobbyism, I got much more involved with other social protests,too, but mostly stuck to the educational protests which pretty much like all other forms of open protest seem like exclusive events to the so-called "Circle of the usual suspects." I had been protesting when the protests of the second movement had been funneled by the SPD nd Greens to support their more covert neoliberalism over the CDU's and FDP's much more obvious neoliberalism. And I was protesting when we the participants of the protests finally understood how we had been played for the furthering of the neoliberal agenda. And as more and more of us demanded things which were not neoliberal in nature, the media coverage got greatly reduced to covering only the forms of protest such as obstructing railways, but no longer saying what we wanted our universities to be like -other than "without student fees."

By 2008 this second movement was dying off because you can postpone your career for social activism only for so long, and in 2009 a third movement by the name "Bildungsstreik" arose, largely starting from zero as far as the lessons go which its predecessors had learned, since this movement had just entered the field. Although this time with the power of the Internet there was a larger awareness of the neoliberal actors. And as a result the non-neoliberal demands and reduced media coverage came about much sooner.

The SPD and Greens were nonetheless clever enough to understand in 2008, that the neoliberal campaign in the education field could no longer be pressed on the same way as they had done so during the Schröder years. As such, they merely resort to abolishing student fees where they get to be the ruling parties while leaving all the other neoliberal "achievements" of the recent years untouched.

And because the student fees were the most unifying element of the protests and without student fees as a looming threat and/or active element of monetary exclusion, the more "radical minority" ideas can be much easier ignored, such as the big question of what is considered Regelstudienzeit, whether it is such a good idea for civil universities to work together with the military, or just how exactly will the power of the invisible hand of greed further our knowledge when we according to its teachings have to pit researchers against each other in a battle over petty amounts of money for their research funding.