On March 23, hundreds of students and trade union members demonstrated in Leuven. Their demand was to increase the budget for education and to stop the process of liberalizing higher education. The protestors chanted slogans and held banners that said ‘increase the education budget to 7% of GDP!’.

The protesters demand that the government carries out its earlier promise to increase the budget for higher education by 10 percent. Because of a new system of government financing, Belgian universities are forced to compete for subsidies in a liberalized and a market way. This financing system will lead to increased registration fees paid by students and to increased pressure on the academic and non academic staff.

In the wake of global financial crisis, the pressure is rising on governments for cutting expenditures. In Belgium, budget cut on social spending and education was planned by ministers, while for security, judiciary, police, and army, it was increased. Millions of euros were also allocated for renting prisons in Netherlands. Despite of the declaration given by Belgians Politicians in Lisbon Treaty to make EU a knowledge economy, the actions of member countries are proving opposite to this.

The Belgian student population is increasing annually. Slashing education budget in such circumstances means that the students will directly suffer. The quality and service of education as enjoyed by students in previous years will not be the same. Increase in fees will be imminent, something which is already being done over the years. The decrease in budget will also put pressure on employees (both academic and non academic staff) of the institutes and universities with less workforce and increased workload.

For academic staff, it means more students to teach and more PhD/Master students to supervise. Furthermore with more people to take over academic positions against few available, the periodic evaluations are becoming strict and ever more competitive. With fear of strict evaluation, the preferences shifts to giving more publications, participating in more conferences, developing more project for external funds - all in short time. The PhD researcher and Master thesis student for 95% of his time is supervised by co-promoter which a fresh PhD student or Post Doc student with limited research capacity. Under such circumstances, one can imagine the repercussions on overall research scenario. Focus is greatly shifting from fundamental research to short term application research.

Less time will be available for professors for teaching. Teaching hundreds of students in huge auditoriums is becoming common practice. Under such circumstances, the dream of EU and its member countries to become knowledge-based economies is far fetched.

All these grievances brought the academic world to protest. For the first time the student council of Leuven, LOKO, participated in social issues of students rather than having image of parties and event organizers. LOKO did a great job by participating in the event. Apart from LOKO, there were large numbers of protestors from Gent University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Katholieke Hogeschool Leuven. Political associations of students and workers unions were also present. The protesters marched from Ladeuzeplein to Centrum and then finished at Leuven station square with a fraternal meeting between students and trade unionists over a couple of beers. The only guarantee for a change in government policy is the united struggle of students and workers. |