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Following the past two weeks of tumultuous protests on campuses across the University of California, two students at UC-Los Angeles have spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to the California legislature. Students are protesting large university budget cuts made by the state legislature as well as one of the Board of Regents methods to deal with the cuts—a 32 percent tuition increase. The students are working to get  at least 1,000 people send letters to Sacramento detailing how cuts to the UC system would affect them.

UCLA students Thomas DeGravel and Omar Qureshi got the idea for a letter writing campaign from the massive student protests against the UC Regents on their own campus beginning Nov. 18. They felt that the protests offered only limited expression of student opinion.

“I think that having a mass protest, you have that collective consciousness, but you don’t really have the individual voice. [Writing letters] gives people the opportunity to…acknowledge the personal effects of the fee hikes,” he said.

The two created a Facebook event—“Angry about the UC Fee Increase? Write to Your Congressional Leaders”—that got 9,000 people to sign on.
 
“My concern was that people’s approach to dealing with the fee hikes should be about the regents, the state legislature and the governor not advocating for students,” said Qureshi, a fifth-year economics student.

Qureshi explained why they thought a letter-writing campaign would be effective.

“Essentially, elected officials care about one thing, and that’s getting reelected. If a good number of students who are registered voters show they’re concerned about an issue, state legislators are going to do what they can to get their vote,” he said.

More from the Daily Bruin at the University of California-Los Angeles