Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Education! And A Hard-boiled Egg!

[oloriel]

Yay, it's that time of the year again! No, not almost-advent - I'm talking about student demonstration/ student strike time.

My first class on Tuesdays is a lecture by a professor who reacts very, very badly when you're even a little too late to his lectures, even if it's just two minutes, even if it's not your fault. So when I arrive by bus in Cologne on time, then the tram doesn't come, and when it finally comes, it has to take a detour because the usual route is blocked by the above-mentioned demonstration, I am rather frustrated.

At a run, I manage to make it (huffing and puffing) to the lecture hall, through the crowd of demonstrators (among whom there are disturbing amounts of 12 to 14-year-olds) and arrive only three minutes to late, with an annoying headache and a lot of aggression boiling inside.

Prof K. just nods when I come in, and just nods when, five minutes later, some more people come too late, and when someone arrives fifteen minutes too late and stammers "Sorry, it's the strike", he only says "Yes, I understand". Andie - my last-semester presentation partner - and I are at that point wondering who that guy is and what he's done to our professor.

This is the professor who normally insists that neither doom nor death nor piggy flu glom of nit should keep students from attending their classes and arriving there on time, with their homework done and the entire system of Old English strong and weak verbs memorised, so to say. My brother lovingly calls him K. the Barbarian, though Prof K. has been overheard saying that he is in fact a lower demon condemned to work in this here limbo. At any rate, this guy has a Reputation with a capital R. Many students think that he eats first-semesters and wipes his ass with term papers that got handed in too late. (I like him because he does all the interesting classes on language history and he's okay as long as you don't piss him off, and he's quite fair in the exam preparation colloquium; but I have often found that most students at least mildly dislike him.)

So when the demonstrators storm our lecture hall, being embarrassingly unorganised, with two guys trying to deliver a flaming speech while their supposed supporters keep drowning their own leaders' words by constantly starting to chant ("Wir sind hier! Wir sind laut! Weil man uns die Bildung klaut!") instead of, like, waiting until after the speech or something - anyway, when the horde of the Unhappy storms our lecture hall, interrupting Prof K. in the middle of Why Adjectives May Sometimes Be Allowed To Be Used As If They Were Nouns, we expect him to call up a storm, single-handedly strike every single demonstrator down, and then wipe a fleck of blood off his collar while turning back to the class and asking for examples. Or something.

Instead he just steps back from the lectern and watches serenely as the flaming speech is drowned by over-enthusiastic youngsters. Teenagers take photos on their cellphones so they can one day tell their kids "Look, that was the time when we stormed lecture halls and saved suppressed university studenty and were totally heroic and stuff". The chanting turns from "Wir sind hier..." to "Aufstehen!" ("Get up") which, incidentally, sounds rather a lot like "Ausziehen!" ("Get naked") when chanted rhythmically by many untuned voices. Prof K. still watches serenely. The leader of the pack finally gets a few words in before the chanting overwhelms him again. Andie and I wonder who's going to give up first, they (who apparently intend to wait until we all pack our bags, don our coats and join the revolution) or we (who just sit and watch, waiting for Prof K. to explode and pretending to be immensely interested in English Syntax). Nobody gets up. Partly, I think, it's laziness; partly it's because everyone who absolutely wants to demonstrate didn't show up for the class in the first place. The demonstrators are now, of course, trying to recruit the opportunists who either don't dare or don't care but crack once 200 people chant at them to Get Up And Fight. But the opportunists have probably heard the stories about students who were taken off seminar lists for skipping classes in order to demonstrate (the Geology Institute in particular seems to be extremely nasty in that respect), and they wouldn't put it past Prof K. to do that to them, and thus fear of retribution by professor wins over peer pressure.
And some people, as Andie points out, would certainly support the revolution but are generally opposed to doing anything that a choir of 200 people tells them to do, and seriously, what's up with those adjectives that pretend to be nouns?

Eventually the revolution moves on without us, slamming the doors hard enough to make them swing open again, and switching the light off, because that kind of thing will never make you look immature and/or helpless. Prof K. calmly switches the lights back on and closes the doors, steps back to the lectern and studies our faces. And then the astonishing happens.
"You know," says he, "if you want to join the demonstration, feel free to do so. While I don't think the means chosen are appropriate, I do support the cause, so I certainly won't hold it against you if you leave. You'll have noticed that I didn't pass the attendance list around today, because I don't want anyone to have a disadvantage because they demonstrated. So if you want to get up and leave now, that's fine. I just have to do this class because otherwise I'll get into trouble with the dean and the rector, but I'll only do half the class anyway so you can also try and catch up with the demonstration later."

We are pretty much dumbfonded, because that's about the last thing we would've expected Prof K. to say; and his speech has the (I assume, gratifying) effect that some people applaud, and nobody leaves, even though this is a chance to skip English Syntax with impunity and let's face it, Syntax isn't that exciting.

The lecture hall has speakers so emergency announcements can be made, and apparently the demonstrators went to the control room and try to deliver further speeches. They're doing something wrong, though, because for the most part we hear nothing and sometimes we hear very soft, half-muffled discussions and laughter, which overall gives the impression that they've confused the On- and the Off-switch. One of the students in our class asks whether one can switch the speakers off entirely, and searches for a bit, but doesn't find anything. (Which really rather makes sense if these speakers are also meant for emergency announcements, no?)
"Oh well," Prof K. says cheerfully, "can't stop the signal!"

And continues with Syntax.

I suspect Prof K. may secretly be a lot cooler than even I thought.

Comments

[satismagic.livejournal.com]

Can I have the hard-boiled egg?

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

No! That's my eggy, that is! Besides, I already ate it! ;)

[fuchs.livejournal.com]

Oh man, wicked cool timing for *that* particular quote!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Isn't it? Oh, how I hope that it was actually intentional and not just coincidence!

[yueni]

=O That's an amazing quote!

Also, I learned a new German word today, yay! (While not exactly a word I'd find useful unless I was involved in strip-searching Germans, but hey!)

[independence1776]

Being American, I don't know why people are demonstarting, but your story made me laugh.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Firstly for tuition-free university education, which we used to get until a few years ago and which now no longer exists (in most parts of Germany, at any rate) - even though for you, being American, our "€ 500 per Semester" will look ridiculous ;)

Second, somewhat more recently the "old" German system has been reformed to vaguely match the Bachelor-Master-system of degrees other countries have (before that there were various different degrees depending on subject: for example, in the humanities you'd either aim for a Magister degree (roughly like M.A., but you didn't get to earn a Bachelor's degree first, instead you just had an intermediate exam roughly in the middle of your studies which, while enabling you to try for the Magister exam, didn't count as a degree in its own right) or - if you were aiming to become a teacher anyway - you could get a Teaching degree, which is different from the Magister. If you were studying law, on the other hand, that was something else entirely. Or medicine - totally different system again. Or technology, where you'd finish with a Diploma.
So this got scrapped, and now you have different Bachelors for everything, and optional (or not, depending on what you want to do) Masters.
While a certain equalisation of the weird system may have been a good idea, the overall effect was to turn university in some weird kind of speed school with lots of modules and obligatory classes that a) make it hard to find out what really interests you because there are so many rules and such pressure on you to get done quick-quick-quick so you usually have to opt for whatever fits in your schedule and your modular plan and what the evil online class registration system allows you to take in the first place and b) is just generally rigid, unwieldy and absurd, and as of yet nobody even knows whether it will in the end be of any merit for the students (because nobody can say, as yet, whether the industry and other employers will accept the Bachelor's degree in the first place, and whether Bachelor graduates will end up with lower pay than Diploma or Magister graduates, or whether they'll be paid the same even though Diploma and Magister people had to take way more classes and achieved a higher degree).
Moreover, while you're supposed to finish your Bachelor's degree in three years, which is only possible with non-stop university work if you don't have a job on the side (most students do because they have to) and never do any internships of more than a month - whereas most companies demand at least one - usually more - internships of at least three months PLUS a half-year or year spent abroad, since expectations have, of course, by no means adapted to the new system.
So except for the politicians who cooked the system up, everybody hates it. Especially as at the moment the reglementations are really, really absurd, and remove about everything that ever made the German system of education any good. >_>

There are probably better explanations to be had on the web, but that's the gist of it.

[independence1776]

*boggles* Yeah, I can understand why there's demonstrations now. Thank you for explaining.