Students occupy Vienna art academy over planned budget cuts

Students have occupied the assembly hall at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, an art university, to protest planned cuts to university funding, ORF reports. The university student union says the cuts would mean fewer courses and services and worse study conditions, putting students under greater pressure.

“Education should come first. Education is our future and progress,” student union chair Ertuğrul Bayraktar said in a statement. He called for barriers such as tuition fees to be abolished, not increased.

The federal government is discussing the university budget for 2028 to 2030 this weekend, with a decision due by the end of October. A total of 15.5 billion euros for all universities is currently under consideration.

University of Vienna rector Sebastian Schütze told the APA news agency that any budget below 17 billion euros would force a major retrenchment. He said 16.5 billion euros would roughly match the universities’ current budget for 2025 to 2027, while 17 billion would also provide some inflation adjustment.

If the budget stays at 15.5 billion euros, Schütze estimates cuts of 12 to 15 percent, assuming moderate inflation. Since staff costs account for about 70 percent of university spending, he said, reductions on that scale would require drastic job cuts. Expiring contracts, including those of early-career researchers, would be among those affected.

Schütze also called for a larger share of the funding to go to the University of Vienna. He said it accounts for 27 percent of academic degrees in Austria while receiving 15 percent of the total university budget, and is the country’s only university in the top 100.