By Leah Pine

From lobbying to lying down, thousands of students across the country last week used tactics new and old to take legislators to task on funding for higher education. Organizing under the banner of an official National Day of Action, students held walk-outs, teach-ins, rallies, and demonstrations. The day marked the first hint at the power and number of angry and cash-strapped students on a national scale.

By the end of the day, hundreds of students across the country were handcuffed, the main UC Santa Cruz campus was shut down, and a major highway in Oakland had been blocked with shouting protesters.

Angus Johnston, author of the Student Activism blog, compiled a Google Map of 124 actions planned for March 4th, the largest chunk of them in the Western part of the country. Public protests made up the most visible face of the day’s events.

California was the epicenter of the protests, riding on a wave of momentum that began this past September 24th, when faculty and students organized over 7,000 people to walk out of their classrooms and gather in public quads on the different campuses of the University of California.

Johnston, who wrote his doctoral thesis about student activism, offered his analysis of why the Golden State had the biggest events.

“In part that’s a reflection of the depth of the crisis facing California higher education right now, but it’s also a reflection of the head start that California’s campus organizers have compared to the rest of the country,” he wrote. “Almost every campus reporting huge demonstrations today has seen multiple rallies and protests over the last few months.”

Indeed, the rallies and protests in California have carried momentum since September. And though at times peaceful pickets lapsed into violence or destruction of property, they did help students get something they were looking for.

In his State of the State Address in January, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger pledged to renew California’s financial commitment to higher education. One of his aids cited the size and ferocity of student protests in Schwarzenegger’s decision.

But Thursday, students went beyond civil disobedience and embarked on civic participation to voice the pain of rising tuition.

For months, disparate student governments and other student groups around the country have been running individual letter-writing campaigns or lobby days at their state capitols. Especially in the University of California system, multiple groups of students have channeled their anger towards the state capitol, showing up in suits, writing letters, making phone calls, and working with UC administrators to garner allies and political power.

And while last week’s events featured more on-campus rallies than anything else, fresh thousands set their sights anew on their state capitols, a hint that lobbying and political organizing might be the next wave of what Johnston is now calling a movement.

Thousands from Denver, to Montgomery, to Tallahassee descended on lawmakers en masse, with megaphones outside and button-up shirts inside. Some organized through their state student associations, others through their student governments, still others through local labor unions, and some just worked off the cuff.

Since last semester, there have been two distinct messages students have taken to their state capitols. The first is a profile of the struggles of studenthood—students telling legislators their personal stories about the number of loans and jobs they have to take on, and the difficulty of focusing on schoolwork while juggling nearly full time jobs.

But recently, students have been arguing their point with a focus on producing an educated workforce for their home state.

“The bigger picture is to diversify Florida's economy,'' said Nick Autiello last week to the Miami Herald. Autiello is a 19-year-old sophomore at Florida International University. “The quality of the programs are going to suffer; the best brains are going to leave.''

A student lobby day in Sacramento last Monday earned few firm commitments from legislators, and many students on March 4th reported a similar impasse. Legislators are citing multi-billion dollar deficits in their state budgets—the state of Arizona is nearly bankrupt—and many view higher education as just another one of many public services that are being reduced.

Colorado State Senator Bruce Whitehead told students that the only solution to Colorado public universities’ budget crisis is a tuition hike, a song many legislators are singing.

Many students ran their events Thursday as kick-offs for future campaigns, but few of the organized events or lobbying efforts touted student voting power as a means for getting what they want from lawmakers.

The vast majority of yesterday’s lobbying actions addressed state-level decision makers.

Lobbying or not, students acting yesterday worked under a common theme, one that UCLA protesters shouted to the rooftops of Murphy Hall.

“Education should be free—no cuts, no fees!”


More from Student Activism’s Google Map of actions