STUUR members asked to leave Theil building during protest

Two board members of the Rotterdam student union STUUR were sent away from the Theil building on Wednesday 3 April. They were protesting in the hall against the reduction of the basic grant. They were sent away because they were not given permission for an action.

Together with fellow board member, STUUR president Jasper Schut stood in the Theil building with a banner on Wednesday afternoon, 3 April. The banner featured a graph on the rise in students’ living costs versus the reduction in the basic grant. The union is not satisfied with the current basic scholarship and wanted to draw attention to it.

“But within ten minutes the security guards were already approaching us,” Schut says. They were kindly asked to leave the building. “Otherwise they were going to call the police. We didn’t want to make a fuss about it, so we obediently left the building,” he says.

Request rejected

According to a university spokesperson, STUUR had submitted a request, but it had been rejected. “For this kind of meeting, an official location has to be booked. The request for this can only be submitted by an internal organisation from within the EUR,” the spokesperson says. So as an external organisation, STUUR does not meet the requirements.

The EUR then suggested organising the protest just outside the campus grounds. “There they would have had a lot of reach, both from Erasmus and Hogeschool students,” says the spokesperson.

Schut knew the application had been rejected. According to him, the university is referring to permission for meetings or events and not protests. “My understanding is that you don’t need permission for a protest. We had submitted a request, just to inform that we were going to hold an action,” he says. He decided to stage a protest after the rejection anyway. “We wanted to go and see if it worked out. Unfortunately, it was not the case.”