Well, one can ask about the reason of this essay… Ms. Borde gave it reason by asking us to attend a conference. I decided to join the International Drug Conference organized by Caritas. I somehow feel called to write about the way conferences are aligned at the ASFH. If you are a student you are hardly informed about all those kind of meetings and conferences going on. You simply get to know when you enter the front door one morning and all of a sudden you will find an information counter in front of you and a lot of signs guiding you up the way to the AudiMax. But wait, it isn’t you being guided. It’s all the V.I.P.s.
You will easily recognize them by the business look, Mrs. Labonté-Roset not being far, and the press taking pictures. While you keep on asking yourself what is going on and if you did enter a wrong train at some point early this morning, someone is asking you in a foreign language where he can find the buffet. Buffet? Which buffet? We do have one? What happened to the Mensa with the extreme healthy food without any taste but flavor enhancer? You simply excuse yourself by shrugging your shoulders and walk up to find your seminar. By walking up the stairs you realize that you did not take a wrong train and that there is something different that day. In front of the AudiMax tables are put up in a line covered with red table cloth and a whole bunch of cups waiting to be filled with coffee. So there must be something going on. Something important. But what? You couldn’t even finish answering that question to yourself as a constant flow of well dressed stimulated talking people flood to the corridor. Their need for a quick coffee makes it absolutely impossible for you to get to your class room so you decide to take the loop up the stairs through the second floor. That is exactly the point where you know that there is a conference going on. Well, you could have detected that online, maybe even written on one of those thousand posters all over the place. But to be honest, who does read all of them? The second chance that you knew before about that event is one of your teachers being involved in the organization of the conference told you. And if you are really lucky you even got invited to come. If the question didn´t appear until now that´s the point where everyone keeps asking himself why a University like the ASFH tends to such elitist events giving the feeling to students that they are not invited or even excluded. In that first scenario you took the loop, got to your seminar, and for the rest of the day you will try to avoid passing by the AudiMax because the atmosphere makes you feel inappropriate and interrupting anyway.
The second scenario would be that you knew before and for some reason decided to join that big important event of international impact. So you enter the front door and walk strait to the information counter, get your nametag and the conference documents and walk up the stairs. Enter the Audimax and listen to what is contributed while taking notes for the essay you are supposed to present next class. Until now everything went fine. Now first coffee break. You join the flow aiming for the prepared coffee on the red clothed tables.
When you are about to fill your cup with the blessed brown liquid one of those well dressed person asks you if you are allowed to do so because it is just for participants of this conference. Being taken by surprise you don’t manage to give an adequate answer. You just try to defend yourself by saying that you are a student and a teacher invited you to come and that you are a registered participant of that certain conference. Your counterpart not realizing the hierarchic act of exclusion he simply did laugh responding that he didn’t know that students are allowed to participate. Could this really be? By some twisted line of logic, you believe that it's Ok, even if you know that it’s absolutely not. For one second you want to tell him that this building is a University and as that kind of institution thought for students. But as you know that it would be absurd you just leave him in his feeling of importance sipping his coffee.
Being back after that snarely meeting in the break your thoughts keep on digressing. For some reason the negligence of your vis-á-vis in the break shot of a whole lot of thoughts about University, studying and conferences in general. Reviewing briefly the last few weeks you strongly feel driven by that strange duty of passing a lot of exams. Exams that do not necessary make sense. Exams that are just to grade you in order to make achievement comparable. A picture of a factory emerges in your mind. The knowledge factory. Knowledge being filled up in brains and asked to be spitted out in a certain exam.
We are living in a modern, engineered time. There is no time to take a step back, to really comprehend what you heard, connect it with the experience you made and in the end draw your own conclusion. No time to think of consequences that would go along with this or that approach, conclusion, concept. That is not asked. Not wanted. Not? During studies it does not appear as an important ability. But how to connect that to the demand of the job market to reflected, creative, flexible employees? There is a big contradiction in the way of knowledge being needed and the way it is taught. And what about the responsibility that goes along with the free access to education? While you are still trying to get to a point in this whole discussion the lecture of a guy called Gregor Burkhart draws your attention. He is telling about the consumption rate of heroin, cocaine and several others. While giving you more information than you could possibly cope with he is running through endless power point slides brimmed with even more information as there is a competition to be won. Was he ever forced to attend a course as Propädeutik and Mentoring? Or is this a construct of bachelorization? Did no one ever tell him that it does not necessarily help to fit as much information as possible in every single slide so the audience has a tough time to read and listen at the same time?
Those questions get my thoughts to the point where I start challenging that whole idea of holding conferences like this. What exactly is the sense? Isn’t it always just a lot of talking without really naming the uncomfortable facts and getting to the point where something can possibly change? We tend to meet in fancy Universities as the ASFH to exchange with a lot of intellectual people about problems they hardly ever had but pretend to understand even better than those who are directly involved. We tend to seclude ourselves from reality in order to solve real problems. Did that ever change something? Of course it is important to address problems to expound the problems of the world. And also exchange is one of the most important factors in order to cooperate to achieve changes. But what if it stays with the talking? It is quite comfortable to settle back in ones chair and search for solutions for the problems of someone else. That creates again a certain hierarchy and inequality.
Inequality we want to avoid but we produce it at the same time. What’s the way out of that dilemma? People who have the possibility to exchange in conferences like this carry a lot of responsibility for the whole world. Responsibility can also be seen as the ability to respond. But what kind of respond is needed? Does it help to provide theoretic answers to all phenomena, problems and whatever we discover in the world? Do we really believe that we could ever find an answer, a solution in the halls of a University while talking and exchanging? Isn´t the answer rather out there somewhere? What is the sense of all this talking?
While the V.I.P. are invited to a special V.I.P. room for lunch to relax a little I am going down into the crowded and noisy mensa, recognizing that it is not as cold as it use to be during wintertime. So it seems to be possible to heat this aula. A detection that brings me back to the thoughts I had earlier that day. Questions about the function of a University. I cannot get rid of the thought that the real sense of a University is to provide an opportunity to learn, study, experience in order to qualify people to be able to carry responsibility and have the strength to cope with the contemporary tasks. Do I have the feeling I have this chance to actually grow here? The system that is established here and in a lot of other institutions of education is so narrow that it does hardly allow someone to have a look besides what is asked in all those exams and tests, presentations and essays. We keep ourselves so busy with fulfilling those requirements that we are in the end too exhausted when there is time to actually create and participate. Not only the students, but also the professors follow those rules without questioning them anymore. How will we be able to take on the responsibilities that are waiting out there in the world if we are hardly able to change or even question things in a smaller context? If we even don´t manage to create, for example, a system to vote for our seminars that is suitable and acceptable for every group that is involved. How do we want to solve conflicts and problems with hardened fronts if we keep on fronting each other in discussions for instance the „gemeinsame Belegen“? How do we want to learn to really cooperate if our daily experience is that a certain kind of cooperation is not possible because the power structures are not flexible enough? How can we as students feel that we are taken seriously if we find ourselves in a situation of justification when we are attending a conference as the international drug conference which is arranged in the ASFH? How can we feel as taken seriously if the only reason for a written test is that the professor wants us to write it even if it does not make sense at all because there is no learning effect on writing a test?
In the end what is left after a whole day of conference are a lot of open questions on a lot of different things but about drug policy itself. Being unable to answer those questions one last thought emerges before I fall asleep that night: Why are we so eager to find answers? Isn’t it sometimes much more important to be able to live with these questions?
Maybe it's even more important to live the question itself in order to find answers. But questions do not seem to be accepted in our reality.
- written by Claire Lerner -
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