Sapienza Pirata

Mobilized Investigation , 14.02.2003 10:00

for an EU-free and self-governing European university

February 27-28, March the first

0.

There is something that keeps tormenting our minds from the moment we have become rebels in the Italian University: equalization, alienation, to be "in synchrony" with the other European education models. They will say that indeed our universities are able to provide valid knowledge, but unproductive, there are fewer Italian graduates than European ones; speed, functionality and flexibility must become the new standards of the Italian education system (as in other European countries).

It started with the Delors "White Paper", to continue the entire decade of the 90's: a pedantic reformist illusion consciously pursued an attempt to link and synchronize the world of work (the 'new economy' and the economy of human resources) and the world of education. But it was mostly an ambiguous and unsuccessful enslavement.

The last Italian university reform, called 3+2, and the three-year period in particular, were propagated as definitive solutions to create an university really adapted to the needs of the flexible labour market, a university founded on innovation and communication abilities. But it already shows it's first problems: too much three-year period courses with little assistance and the two year specialisation period are still uncertain. Not to mention the forced persecution of knowledge with no creativity, mobility, continuous changing of epistemological and technological patterns, or relation unforeseeability, of cooperative problem solving, or rather the contemporary way of production, is doomed to fail. Since quite a while a quite real danger presents itself: precariousness and obsolete abilities!

1.

The European university -not only the Italian- has been devastated and turned upside down by this reformist illusion, of course in different ways and in different times, leading to not at all coincident models but similar and often homogeneous philosophies. As everybody knows Italy arrived late and unprepared, with public spending reduced to a minimum and with a social and cultural model that keeps on producing students becoming little adventurers looking for work or idle parasitic and rebel youth: both of them living in any case at family's expense, without private income and without public services.

So the way of life of European students are absolutely different, as for their desires and material conditions: in northern Europe students rarely live with their parents until they're 30 and have a degree, most part of them have an
income, dignified services, support for research. But in Italy and Spain, instead, things are completely different.

The Italian reform is on the road to uniformalisation of didactics, study times, ways of learning, with the problems we already saw: the university courses change into high-school classes and general and critical knowledge disappears.

A positive and important component of the way of teaching, learning and of doing research in most parts of northern European universities is the prominent part assigned to communication, to cooperative production (not only to transmission) of knowledge, to relations between students and teachers and between students themselves. A tendency to seminar instead of lecture, to laboratory experience, to continuous development of writing, to self-governing research courses.

Sometimes all this can produce a knowledge without theoretical and central patterns but it settles surely a progressive ethics for learning and cooperative production, components completely vacant in Italian university.

2.

Even though this idea came forth of the European comparation made possible by the the apologetic euros of the academic reformists or with the fortunate Erasmus experiences of some of us, our actual intention consists of giving life to a European University as anomalous as inedited, founded on the relations, the desires, the knowledge, and the conflicts of those groups that experiment with new forms of investigation and cooperation in the European universities. Those groups that make struggles for knowledge and income and new ways of living in not only the university, but of the European capitals and their conflicts. In effect, we believe that the possibility to create a political Europe of movements is based upon ability to make of Europe, in the first place, a free space for circulation of ideas and investigation, a place where there's income for those that live in the streams of permanent education.

To begin with constructing it, we want to try to build with others a Free European University, starting with a three day (27-28 February and 1st of March) meeting where researchers and students coming from Madrid, Malaga, Berlin, Paris, Lubljiana, Copenhagen, Helsinki, London will gather in the "Escape Faculty" of La Sapienza university in Rome with groups of Italian students and invesitgators that have little to do with the reformist euphoria and that demand an income to live and study.

We see this meeting as a first step to give life to an new form of relation between the European students, to a sort of autonomous and permanent Erasmusthink that this meeting can be the beginning enduring Erasmus that could be the basis for a new praxis of investigation and self-education in the European space, producing connections for the creation of common struggles for knowledges.


Provisional Programme
February 27-28, March the first


Thursday 27

h 11:30: "What is the Escape Faculty, what is the EU?" introduction by SapienzaPirata

h 15:00: "University, knowledge, conflicts" to make a map of European education models, resistances, self-education experiences (Berlin, Lubiljana, Copenhagen, Birmingham)


Friday 28

h 10:00: "basic income, access to technologies, services" comparison between ways of life, old and new rights between knowledge and production, students and cognitive work; services and material rights to production and circulation of knowledge (Paris, Helsinki, Madrid-Malaga)

h 15:00: "research and copyright" research workers and students, public and private research, absence of public funds and new statute of property; subversion and new conflict against knowledge's enclosure (research worker
Laser, Madrid)

night: pirate party

Saturday 1

h 11:00: and the afternoon: "disobedients of knowledge: that a thousand faculties may escape!! practices and common action in the European metropolis. Intervention by different European student groups.