University protests for the sake of protest

Today is International Students' Day and all over the world students are demonstrating against cuts in education budgets. The daily Die Presse compares today's student protests in Austria with the student protests against Nazi terror in Prague in 1939, which today is intended to commemorate, and finds few similarities. On 17 November 1939 the Nazis arrested thousands of Czech students in Prague and deported them to concentration camps:  "Right from the start it was obvious that, driven by a left-wing vocal minority, the demands of those occupying lecture halls go far beyond student concerns. And actually they are wide of the mark - as a recent survey conducted by the Institute for Youth Culture Research shows. 23 percent of the respondents actually supported regulating university entry, while the more general ideological issues - education instead of training (1 percent), socio-political measures (2 percent), democratisation of universities (3 percent), free access to higher education (7 percent) - are of little interest to the vast majority of students. Whereas the demonstrations seventy years ago were about life and death, today many students are protesting just for the sake of it."

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