Demonstration #FAUrespect – One Step Closer on April 25, 2024
**For the English speeches of the rally, please see below**
At the end of our campaign #FAUrespect Respecting boundaries – Reporting misconduct, we cordially invite you to set a demonstrative sign against abuse of power, violence and sexualized boundary violations together with us and students of the Master’s degree program Theater – Research – Transfer under the motto One Step Closer.
WHEN? April 25th, 2024, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
WHERE? Erlangen Castle Square (Schlossplatz)
You can expect a varied program with rallies by the the student initiators of the WISHING WALL and Vice President People, Prof. Andreas Hirsch, as well as the Office of Equality and Diversity, Dr. Magda Luthay and Harriet Ziegler. In a multi-dimensional presentation, the collected wishes of FAU members are presented and handed to the university management as orders for action.
Finally, we want to celebrate a demonstrative end to our campaign and set a sign against violence towards FLINTA persons by dancing together to One Billion Rising. One Billion Rising is an action format that stands up for freedom and against discrimination and oppression through dancing together. Public space is being reclaimed and attention is being paid to this important issue, true to the 2024 motto “Rise for Freedom”. No previous dancing experience is required, everyone is welcome to dance along!
Anyone who still feels the need to rehearse the choreography beforehand is welcome to attend the training sessions with Bettina Beck, Erlangen’s initiator of One Billion Rising, on April 19th and 20th at 4 p.m. in the Experimental Theater (Room U1.027 (UG), Bismarckstrasse 1, 91054 Erlangen).
**The speeches of the rally**
The speech of the student initiators of “One Step Closer”:
“Hello and welcome and nice to see you all here! [Hey, hi and welcome! We are so happy you’re here! If you want to follow this event and the speeches in English, then get all the contributions in text form in English on your smartphones via the QR codes on the screens].
It really means a lot to us to have brought this project to this important and critical point and to be able to publicly celebrate this moment! If you haven’t been able to join in the dance yet, you can look forward to the workshop with Bettina Beck from One Billion Rising Erlangen. One Billion Rising is a worldwide campaign for an end to violence against women and girls and for equality, but she will tell you more about that later. Nice to have you here Bettina!
Today we are mainly here to take the Office for Gender and Equality’s ‘#FAUrespekt – respect boundaries, report violations’ campaign to the next stage. As students at this university, everyone in our group has experienced first-hand or at least second-hand how sexism and gender-based discrimination are present in the university context in recent years.
Nobody expects university to be a fairytale land – but unfortunately it has inherited some patriarchal structures from it. It wasn’t so long ago that women were denied access to higher education. In Germany, more girls than ever before are now graduating from high school and more women than men are going to university. (This is according to figures from the Federal Statistical Office.) In fact, women also make up the majority of the non-academic and academic workforce as a whole. However, the presence of more women as well as non-binary and queer students and staff alone – which make up about 10% of the university! – within once purely male spheres is not in itself sufficient.
Universities must actively address gender-based issues in order to create a more equitable and inclusive educational environment, we can all agree on that. The willingness to engage in this debate is the least we can do. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect. And every grievance that can be named should be addressed in an interventionist manner. To this end, regular, open dialogs must take place in order to enable this naming of grievances on an ongoing basis. The WISHING WALL, to which you could address all your wishes and needs, should only be an introduction to this process.
Under the motto #FAUrespekt – One Step Closer, everyone was able to express their wishes and ideas for more appreciation, recognition and safety at FAU online. All submissions were checked against our guidelines: A posting should not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the person behind it or other people and should also not be discriminatory itself. This is why we did not post all of the almost 200 submissions on the website, but saved all of them and prepared them for submission to the university management.
On the topic of the #FAUrespect campaign alone, the Wishing Wall received almost 150 wishes in both English and German. Dozens of others also felt the need to express their views on other topics such as language accessibility, barrier-free access, mental health, racism and religious practice.
We heard some of the wishes in the introduction, others can be found in excerpts on the walls around us and will soon be available in edited form on the Wishing Wall website.
There is a great need for action and many ideas are actually easy to implement. The most frequent was probably the wish for respect, for recognition, for more sensitivity in the use of language – a wish that is likely to have become even stronger after the current bavarian restrictions – we love and need our asterisks! – and for the respect of boundaries.
Then, on a structural level, the desire for gender-neutral bathrooms and quiet rooms as safe spaces. Employees frequently expressed a desire for training opportunities for staff on how to deal with experiences of discrimination and crises in their own department or among their students, as well as a desire from all sides for more transparent processes in dealing with cases of harassment and discrimination.
It is also noticeable that some men perceive themselves to be threatened by demands for equal rights if it means that there are opportunities to promote women in science. Such requests show that much more education and awareness-raising is needed around the issues of equality and gender justice, because ultimately everyone – FLINTA and cis-men alike – benefits from such structural changes.
We don’t want to sit at the table on the same terms, we want to change the table, make it bigger and better and then sit at it together. This will take a long time, but it can succeed if we keep at it.
Solidarity events like these should not be underestimated. For any development and any chance of improvement, visibility and attention are needed as catalysts for empowerment and solidarity.
A university is also a social institution. And behind each of these wishes is a person who has clearly stated their needs or the needs of others in order to do justice to this institution. This goes hand in hand with the expectation that the institution will also do justice to them. As a consequence – and yes, it sounds like a repetition – the university should actively create the opportunity for its students and staff to do justice to each other. The wishes contain a vision for a university as a place and space for joint and equal action. We are grateful for the confidence that speaks from the wishes for the future of FAU and for the trust that was placed in our initiative by expressing the wishes.
By tackling sexism and championing equality, universities are creating a safer and more respectful environment, thereby shaping a fairer society in the long term. Therefore, the wishes should not stop there. In the coming weeks and months, the Office for Gender and Equality will work with the university management to process the wishes so that they can grow into concrete implementations. We will continue to support this process wherever possible.
Dear Mr. Hirsch, if we could ask you to join us?
We hope that you, as Vice President People, will take the wishes and suggestions of students and employees as an opportunity to set processes in motion. Open dialog is one thing, but working with and on the structures requires increased attention from those who have an influence on the development of an institution like this. There is a lot of accumulated potential in this book that needs to be released. Thank you for being here – and don’t wait too long for the first results.
For non-discriminatory living, learning, teaching and researching for all!”
The speech of Vice President People, Prof. Andreas Hirsch:
“We at FAU see ourselves as a community full of opportunities for individuals with creativity, expertise, and exceptional skills. We aim to provide a platform of freedom for innovative thinkers to all members of our community.
Our aspirations and self-image demand respectful interaction among each other. Harassment, discrimination, or any form of violence have no place at our university.
To prevent and address cases of discrimination and harassment, we have established guidelines with the UKER (2021) and enhanced our structures. Our goal is to inform and raise awareness. We aim to collaborate with our students, and today’s demonstration is intended to demonstrate this collaboration to the broader community and make it tangible internally.
To this end, thanks to the Office of Equality and Diversity, we have engaged all of FAU’s stakeholders through various event formats: workshops, lectures, training, and information sessions. Through these activities, we have clearly communicated our stance and aspiration for respectful coexistence.
Despite our various efforts, we have observed that harassment and abuse of power remain significant concerns, particularly among students. Many feel unheard and unsupported despite the structures and measures in place at FAU. We regret this deeply.
A particularly vulnerable group are international students, who often hesitate to address these issues due to fears of repercussions such as academic disadvantage, poor grades, loss of scholarships, or even expulsion from Germany/visa cancellation. This must change. We must scrutinize this issue closely, and much needs to be improved.
The campaign and the wish wall have made a significant contribution by drawing attention to these problems and enriching the discourse within FAU. Thank you for this excellent initiative!
It’s evident that our work is far from complete with the conclusion of this campaign and the submission of wishes. On the contrary, it’s just the beginning.
To this end, the Executive Board will maintain close collaboration with the Office of Equality and Diversity, women’s representatives, students, and all other stakeholders committed to combating harassment, discrimination, and abuse of power. A debriefing of the wish wall results with the students and the presidium is already scheduled.
FAU staunchly opposes all forms of sexual violence and discrimination. There is zero tolerance for harassment and discrimination of any kind. While we’ve made progress at FAU, there’s always room for improvement. More needs to be done because we want FAU to be a welcoming place.
Thank you for your attention!
I would like to express gratitude to our Office for Gender and Diversity, specifically Magda Luthay, Harriet Ziegler, and their team, for organizing the FAUrespect campaign in collaboration with students of the Master’s program in Theatre – Research – Mediation and their professor, Bettina Brandl-Risi.
Once again, I extend my appreciation to my colleague, Brandl-Risi, for her dedication, and lastly, to our students who have brought this project to life.”
The speech of Dr. Magda Luthay, Office of Equality and Diversity:
Dear students,
Dear members of FAU,
Dear Prof. Hirsch,
Thank you for all coming today. Standing here together with you on the Schlossplatz in Erlangen is a very special, happy and at the same time emotional occasion for me.
No-one, not even we, were able to predict the momentum that would develop in the context of our campaign over the current months.
Just about a year ago, we at the Office of Equality and Diversity decided to raise visibility across the campus of topics that we are confronted with again and again in our position as a central institution for equality, diversity and anti-discrimination at FAU.
Our intention was to make it quite clear that sexual harassment, discrimination or abuse of power must not be accepted at our university. Each and every one of us has the right to work and study without fear and without being subjected to discrimination. Hierarchies and existing positions of dependency of employees and students can be exploited for crossing boundaries, making undesired advances, and discriminatory behavior.
We wanted to provide information, raise awareness and address as many status groups as possible in the first instance: students, research and administrative staff, professors and also those in management, who are in a particular position of responsibility vis-à-vis their teams.
This was the motivation for us launching our campaign #FAUrespect – Respecting boundaries – Reporting misconduct in various different formats at the beginning of winter semester 2023/24.
In February 2024, we handed the campaign over to the students, as we were keen not to create a traditional “top-down format”, but rather to offer an interactive campaign, although we at the BGD were happy to provide our backing and support all along the line. I would like to thank my colleague Harriet Ziegler for all her efforts and for managing the project.
I am impressed by the amazing creativity and dedication shown by the students from the Master’s degree program in Theater – Research – Transfer and the wonderful support of their professor Bettina Brandl-Risi, who never hesitated a moment before agreeing to contribute her valuable expertise to our campaign. Thank you. Without your efforts, we would not have been able to incorporate this innovative approach into our campaign.
One Step Closer – that is the motto of our major event on the Schlossplatz in Erlangen marking the conclusion of our campaign.
Please all join us in taking one large step closer to our goal: In our capacity as the Office of Equality and Diversity, it is extremely important for us that the existing structures at FAU are made more professional, at the same time as establishing new structures, expanding our options for providing advice and support, and increasing transparency in communication. But we can only achieve that together with you.
By the way, we are the first university – at least in Bavaria – to have focused on the topics of harassment and abuse of power in a campaign lasting several months. And we will of course continue to focus on these topics in our work from now on, as our goal is to introduce structural improvements at our university. Initial meetings with the Executive Board are already planned for the coming weeks, as our campaign #FAUrespekt is not the end, it is just the beginning.
Dear Prof. Hirsch, I would like to thank you, as Vice President People, and the whole of the Executive Board for your open attitude, your constructive support and for listening to our concerns. You have supported us every step of the way, given us free reign to pursue our own ideas and were always available to discuss matters with us. Thank you for this positive commitment.
And now I would like to hand over to my colleague Harriet Ziegler, who will give you an overview of the various tasks covered by our office in the areas of anti-discrimination and diversity management.
The speech of Harriet Ziegler, Diversity Management:
Dear students,
Dear Professor Brandl-Risi,
Dear Mr. Hirsch,
Dear FAU and external guests here today,
First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere thanks for the courageous, creative and important work of the students of the Master’s program “Theater – Research – Mediation”, without whose impressive commitment we would not be gathered here today – especially in view of the indecisive April weather, which almost put a spoke in our wheel. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank you all for remaining loyal to us and for gathering with us for this important event in the heart of our city and symbolically in front of the heart of our university here on Schlossplatz! Together, we are taking a stand against violence against women, girls and all other people who experience discrimination, harassment and abuse of power in our society.
Unfortunately, these experiences also exist here at FAU. As Diversity Manager, part of my job is to be the contact person for cases of sexual harassment and discrimination, to support those affected, advise them and work out the next steps together.
So I know directly and first-hand that all of the problems mentioned today also occur here at FAU at the work and study level, and that – even if it is often presented as such – these behaviors and the views behind them are by no means a question of educational level. Universities are not seemingly enlightened places that are above such problems. On the contrary, the hierarchical structures and relationships of dependency mentioned before actually encourage them. That is why we at the Office of Equality and Diversity are working tirelessly to improve the situation with the support of numerous committed partners within FAU, from students to the Women’s Representatives and colleagues in the faculties to the university management, by creating awareness, sensitizing, training and optimizing protective structures in order to strengthen those affected and to fully uncover and sanction violations. We are also supported in this by external partners ranging from various advice centers to the police. We do not tolerate discrimination and harassment, and we do not look the other way!
We are also very grateful to the students who initiated the One Step Closer project for the Wishing Wall. Its valuable feedback will help us to take concrete action and initiate the next steps. For example, we will implement a new awareness concept to make university interactions in a wide variety of events and everyday situations proactively sensitive to discrimination. Soon, anti-discrimination officers are to be implemented at the faculties as low-threshold contact persons. And we want to cast our shared understanding of values at FAU in a binding Code of Conduct.
For an FAU where everyone can feel safe and valued, regardless of their gender, origin, religion, sexuality, age, physical and mental abilities or social status, we wish for the support of all FAU members and the society around us – for a diverse FAU in a diverse Erlangen!