Higher Education in Foreign Countries (Day 86)

Not Usually This Blue
The Danube (Donau)

“German is the most extravagantly ugly language - it sounds like someone using a sick bag on a 747.” ---- Willy Rushton quotes (English Comedian, 1937-1996)

Things that they don't have in foreign countries: Liberal Arts Colleges

So I am currently attending the University of Vienna (the UniWien) a behemoth of an organization made up of some 72,000 students. This would make it some two times the size of Penn State, dwarf UT, or to put it more clearly, makes it 48 times as large as a liberal arts college a la Swarthmore. Yet it somehow manages to run most of its classes out of two (appropriately sized) buildings. One of which (the Hauptgebäude : the "Main building") features rows of marble statue of old professors in its interior courtyards. Positioned next to the state hall in the north-east corner of the inner city, the Hauptgebäude is a fairly impressive thing to behold.

Notably, the university lacks dormitories. Students live in apartment complexes (known as a "Wohngemeinschaft") which are independent from the University. Lacking a well defined campus, an athletic sports culture like a Big 10 school, and dorms, most of the students remain independent from the institution except for their classes (which they dubiously attend).

Viennese Bureaucracy Applied to Trees
Park in the 2th Bezirk

The classes themselves are organized into an almost indecipherable network of letters which one must acquire in order to progress in their studies. Tack onto this the fact that state funding never seems to be enough (the state pays tuition for students for the amount of time its deems necessary for one to get a bachelors or beyond) and one can begin to see how the riots of '68 began.

The Student Spirit (Note: Octopus Bad!)
Sign found in the U-bahn

So, my adventure with European higher education begins here, in the oldest German Speaking university in the world.

Registration was its own nightmare, after a process of giving information to an Austrian contact so that we could receive an identification number, which we could use to get another number, which we could use to set up an account for the university, we began choosing classes.

One notable experience here was when I mistakenly attempted to talk my way into a course on European integration. Unfortunately what I didn't know was that it was designed to guide PhD level candidates in carrying out their dissertation topics, a department in which I was notably lacking. Somewhat depressingly, the entire first day of the "Seminar" (50 students in the room?) was spent figuring out ways to lobby for more funding in the department (sad, because one would think that the PhD candidates would be getting the money) and discussing various ways of annotation literature reviews, a subject I haven't covered since the ripe old age of 17.

Nonetheless, figuring I'd play to the strengths of the institution, I made sure to make one of my courses a whopping dose of vaguely-socialist-theoretical musings on contemporary capitalism and aesthetics, all taught in an appropriately large lecture hall. The resulting course, which consists of visiting German speaking intellectuals waxing intellectual on such topics as "the coming crisis of time in capitalism", "the economy of attention," and "art" has been a rousing success, both in terms of the material is covers, and its role as a lens into European thought. For those interested the homepage is here.

The Capitalist Aesthetic at Work
Construction by the Danube (Donau)

Oddly, my courses haven't proved too much of a challenge in terms of the language barrier. The professors have speak clearly enough and in an academic enough language that I can understand it. My linguistic skills remain lamentably bookish. Discussions on "third wave capitalism" I can take, but when hooligans took over the local grocery store when I was trying to buy some oranges, I had no idea what anyone was saying.

As such, Vienna remains an adventure....

All You Ever Need To Learn
Graffiti in an Anti-Aircraft Tower (Flakturm)