Over the past two days, I attended the first of each of my classes. Much like at Mount Holyoke, we mostly just went over the syllabus.
I am by no means the only international student in my classes. Among the countries represented in my Social Anthropology class are Korea, Italy, and Belgium (Flanders), and my Philosophy class is mostly international students, four of them from Germany.
One phrase kept popping up again and again in all my classes. It caught my attention because I thought, at first, that the professors were saying "Wallonia," that is, the region of Belgium my paternal grandmother was from. By the second or third time, I caught on: "Bolonia."
The Bologna Process is an agreement between a number of European countries to streamline their higher education, so that, for instance, someone with a degree from a French university can bring that degree to Germany and still get a job. It also requires universities in countries that have agreed to it to abide by certain standards.
The professors at my university are less than thrilled by this. One of them declared, "Bolonia es la mierda!" He said that the only purpose of Spain's compliance to Bologna is to save money-- one change is the shift from 5-year "licenciatura" programs to 4-year "grados." "They want us to sap our students of their intelligence," he said, "so I'm going to teach you how to pretend you're less intelligent than you are." My impression is that many professors write up syllabi compliant with the standards, then teach whatever they'd originally intended to.
It's not just professors that are upset with Bologna. Not too far from my apartment is graffiti which reads, "Con Bolonia mas tasas menos becas"-- "With Bologna, more taxes and fewer scholarships."
I wonder how much of the anti-Bologna feeling is provoked by the very real issues Bologna creates, and how much is part of a wider, anti-European-Integration sentiment. Recently, Spanish paper ABC (I don't think it's the same as our abc News) began an article on Greece's economy with the sentence, "All of Europe is sick of hearing people talk about the big Greek tragedy that threatens to undermine the foundations of the common European project." It's not exactly brilliant journalism, but it does show that there's more to the Bologna Process than a few disgruntled academics. It's Part of the Broader Context™ of European integration.
They are writing editorials here saying that Europe is about to croak. The Greeks will have to default, they'll be pushed out of EU, and Spain, Portugal and Italy will follow quickly. The crisis is increasingly palpable.
ReplyDeleteI am imagining you heading to school down those narrow streets across plazas and past Roman ruins into debates about the very future of Europe.
ReplyDeletePhilip said to me: all this gloom and doom! The end of the euro would not be the end of the world. It's only been around for a few years anyway.
Your Dad is right about what the papers in the U.S. are saying. I feel it is also an attempt to divert attention from America's economic woes. Today, the IMF told the EU AND the U.S. to get off their butts and do something, otherwise their troubles would seriously destabilize the global economy.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the Bologna Process goes, it will help with Erasmus or study abroad programs. All courses will have to be accepted by the student's home degree standards, whether the university likes it or not. ULg has found roads around this in at least one instance, which has caused students to get a bad surprise after their parents spent several thousand euros on their child's foreign semester. As for degree acceptance, it will be nice to not have to quibble about equivalencies. The Wallonie Ministry of Education recognizes no degrees outside of Belgium, unless-of course, one has the right contacts...
Yeah they're probably worried about further integration when the whole integration project now seems in doubt. My gut sense is that Europe will continue unifying, and will not revert to the status quo ante Maastricht or whatever, but there are certainly troubling signs (e.g. Denmark quitting Schengen, Eurozone crisis, etc.), and in the broader context, the unity is so anomalous. Plus, it's only been 19 years since the Maastricht Treaty was signed, and things can change so fast in Europe. Few people in 1919 would have predicted that 20 years later all the interwar democracies would have collapsed to authoritarian coups and totalitarian revolutions, though they probably could have predicted another continental war, since that was business as usual. Not that I'm trying to imply things are the same as they were then or that bad, of course. I think there's a much greater grassroots-level support for democracy and European unity than there used to be, but it's also crested temporarily.
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