Students participating in the blockade at the Faculty of Technical Sciences (FTN) in Novi Sad announced on social media that the graduation party for students from two departments had been canceled, blaming what they described as the faculty’s “official student representatives.”
On the “FTN se budi” (“FTN Awakens”) account, the students stated that on June 10, around 500 students from the E1 and E2 departments were supposed to celebrate the completion of their undergraduate studies, but that the event would not take place.
According to them, “instead of formal suits, dresses, and a well-deserved celebration, we were greeted by darkness, both literally and metaphorically.”
The graduation party was canceled, and the students accuse the faculty’s official student representatives, whom they claim have been taking a percentage from the event’s proceeds for years.
“Aware of the fact that for years ‘eternal students’ and political loyalists from the student parliament have been making enormous amounts of money at our expense, a group of final-year students decided to take matters into their own hands. We wanted fair organization, without markups and hidden costs. That’s when the persecution began,” the statement reads.
As soon as discussions about organizing the event started, the students claim, pressure followed insisting that only a certain group of people had a “monopoly” over organizing graduation celebrations. The students rejected this and chose colleagues outside the student parliament to oversee the event.
The students arranged celebrations at two well-known venues that regularly host such events. However, after some time, both restaurants reportedly informed them that the celebrations had been canceled because of “scheduled work on the power grid,” or because their electricity had been “suddenly cut off.”
“This is not a story about a canceled celebration. This is a story about the systematic extortion of students. When they realized that 500 students did not want to pay their ‘margins’ and finance their private whims, the ‘eternal students’ sitting comfortably in their chairs used all of their political connections and levers of power to cut off electricity in private venues,” the FTN se budi statement claims.
They added that this is “a direct slap in the face to every student who studied honestly, every parent who sacrificed to pay for their child’s education, and every professor who values the integrity of this Faculty.”
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Source: Nova.rs, Foto: N1