Below, you will find more details about who we are, and why we do it
There are several things, both intellectual and social, that we try to achieve in this school:
Doing 'intensive intellectual work' is not hard since most of us spend inordinate amounts of time working anyway. The feel nice part less obvious in academia, and mostly means ensuring a relaxed atmophere.
To favor this, we have two simple rules, which have proven pretty succesful up to now: (i) minimise the barrier between "teachers" and "students". We all stay in the same hostel for instance (many nice parties have resulted from this!), travel reimbursments are pretty similar for teachers and students, informal participative teaching style is encouraged, etc. (ii) spend as much time partying as we spend in the classrooms. Which means a lot of time ;-)
One prominent goal of the school is to be useful to places where generative grammar is only emergent, or non-existent yet; focusing on Central and Eastern Europe for the time being. A big part of this is financial: most conferences and schools are simply unreachable for a student from central or eastern europe.
Surprisingly, we discovered that many western students - including distant american students - also feel the need for an affordable summerschool. There are other cool schools (almost ;-), but they are terribly expensive. So it is often easier for
someone to fly to Eastern Europe rather than spend a huge budget on these other
schools.
School is boring. Ideally, we would want a place where research happens rather than 'being taught'. We try to do
that by bringing
together top notch researchers and making them interact in public in a calm and stimulating setting. The idea here is twofold: on the one hand provide great conditions for intellectual sport and creative research; and on the other hand provide mid to advanced participants with a great stimulant: live research done in a didactic way. (The difference between 'teachers' and 'advanced students' is of course largely artificial in this context).
The intention of the advanced track is thus to present live but accessible research & debate to students who
already have a grasp of the basics, but not necessarily of the topic under discussion.
We also have a more contentive agenda: one of the greatest thing about generative linguistics is that it encourages you to use your brain. It
calls for explanations rather than resting content with descriptions. Since this aspect is underemphasised in the linguistics, we try to provide much space for it.
Since it is an important goal of the school to be useful to places where generative grammar
is only emergent, or non-existent yet; it is important to us to provide excellent intro classes.
The intro classes are thus very accessible and presuppose almost no technical knowledge.
it's a well-known platitude that much of the novelty of research comes from people who are new to the field, typically graduate students, post-docs, etc; but also researchers newly converted from other fields. In sharp contrast with most (all?) other schools, we're not squeamish about inviting (very) junior staff, when we sniff promising content. Notice that we do have rich-and-famous established scholars teaching, but the proportion is typically inverse with respect to traditional events. (I suppose it helps that most organisers are themselves pretty junior ;-).
Of course, the fact that the teachers organise the school themselves also helps a lot.
Our response is to organise a school which is entirely free: there are no admission fees, anyone can just walk in. Furthermore, we keep the hotel costs modest by lodging in student dorms, provided at roughly local prices. On top of that, we offer grants helping people to travel to the school. All the staff is involved in making this possible: all the teachers come teach for free (many even pay their own travel), the school is organised by volunteers, and the hosting university kindly offers the rooms.
The school is organised by a small group of friends who share the ideals expressed in the manifesto, currently we are: Tobias Scheer, Michal Starke, Hedde Zeijlstra. We can be reached at: summerschool AT auf.net.