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Campaign: Save St. Petersburg’s European University!

Written by Mary on March 13, 2008 – 12:25 am -

Description of Campaign: Earlier this month, Russian authorities shut down the European University at St. Petersburg on the pretense that the building had fire code violations. Students and faculty saw this as a effort to shut down the school and are fighting online to re-open the university and maintain their academic community.

Digital Activism Tools: YouTube, LiveJournal

How These Tools Are Being Used: The goal of the campaign is to draw attention to the persecution of the university, a particularly difficult task since the mainstream media in Russia is all state-controlled and is ignoring the issue. For this reason, members of the university community are using alternative media to raise awareness of the situation. One professor, Ilya Utekhin, has started a blog on LiveJournal. (Unfortunately LiveJournal, which is Russia’s most popular blogging platform, is owned SUP, a company allied with Vladimir Putin.) Another LiveJournal blog, Save_EU, has become an online community for people who are fighting for the university.

students and faculty put on a theater production to protest the university’s closing

Prof. Utekhin told Radio Free Europe that the community actually began online. “That originated on the Internet,” he said. “People didn’t meet and then decide to create a website. Things happened the other way around — people formed a community on the Internet and then started interacting.” The students posted several videos on the blogs, many from www.youtube.com/ethnomet, the YouTube channel that they set up expressly for this purpose.

The university’s web site notes that they are working to bring their building up to fire safety standards and hope to re-open later this month.

It is unclear why the government is trying to shut down the university. According to Radio Free Europe:

Some suspect local authorities of trying to get their hands on the university’s building, an ornate, 19th-century palace in the heart of St. Petersburg.

Others see the closure as a politically motivated attack against the Western-funded university, which has close links with universities in Britain and the United States.

The Kremlin in recent years has waged an active campaign to oust Western NGOs and other foreign-funded entities from the country; critics say the European University may be a victim of this xenophobic trend.

Tags: education, europeanuniversity, livejournal, Russia, saintpetersburg, youtube
Posted in Blogs, Campaigns, Europe, Video |