In the last few weeks, students from the University of São Paulo, one of the 100 best universities in the world (according to some ranking last year), started a strike. The strike started in the São Paulo campus, but has now spread to the Lorena campus and a few parts of the Ribeirão Preto campus.

The students on strike are demanding a few things, including the hiring of 1400 new professors (to reach the same student/professor ratio as it was in 2014), more financial assistance for low-income students, and a quota for trans students.

The university leadership (I forgot what “Reitoria” means in english, lol) said they will hire 800 new professors, but students think it is not enough, since there are people who are close to graduatinng without having some mandatory classes because of lack of professors.

Also, about the quota for trans students, there are already quotas for students from public high schools (I’m one of them) and for black/mixed race students, so this wouldn’t be really without precedents.

My campus (São Carlos) will vote about whether to go on strike next tuesday. There is some resistance to the idea, but it seems like we’ll end up going on strike too.

Here, we have two main areas on campus. One of them was the first one to be built, and is on the center of the city. It is where most of the courses happen. My course is on the second area, which is quite far away fron the city center. We always take an university bus from Area 1 to Area 2, which was privatized (it is not operated by the university anymore, but is still free at least). There is literally nothing to eat here other than the subsidized R$2,00 lunch (also privatized) which we can only eat at lunchtime. As such, improving the bus and placing some cafés here on Area 2 will probably become one of the demands of the strike on São Carlos.

So, what do you guys think about this?