On Wednesday, students and faculty at UC campuses are walking out of classes again.

A shortage of funding for higher education doesn’t stop with the UCs, so it’s our responsibility as community college students to take action alongside activists within the UC system.

Since many of us want to transfer into the UC or CSU system, the results of issues being tackled will become directly and irrefutably ours within the next few years.

And it’s bound to get worse if we don’t kick up a fuss now.

That fuss has to be big, but it also has to be informed. We can’t just cross our fingers or pray that public higher education becomes affordable again.

If we decide that we want to protect this resource, we have to know whom to address.

Part of the problem goes back to 2004, when presidents of the UC and CSU systems made an agreement with Governor Schwarzenegger to shift government funding toward basic functions.

As a result, higher education funding needs were met with private funds and annual fee increases.

Today, it isn’t just a lack of money, but the way that lacking money is being divvied up by the UC Regents.

A recent Regents minutes report inspired some pretty heated open letters responding to the extension of executive terms, including their handsome salaries.

Yet, as UC Berkeley Professor Catherine Cole wrote in a Sept. 1 open letter, faculty and staff have had their pay cut by 4 to 10 percent.

In the meantime, instructors have to deal with furlough days (two a month at CSUs) that some say can’t be taken on class days in order to preserve the quality of education for which students pay.

In essence – executives keep their jobs and salaries, while faculty have to maintain the same quality of education they offer while their own salaries get slashed.

What can faculty (and students) do about it? Other than protesting through walkouts and open letters, options are becoming limited.

Since the Regents granted President Mark Yudof permission to declare a state of fiscal emergency, the system of “shared governance,” in which each UC campus has an academic senate that includes members of all sections of faculty, has been suspended. Yudof is turning the UC system’s focus toward business rather than education, placing emphasis on programs that can get the most private funding (think graduate-level research).

The element of democracy seems to be secondary in Yudof’s business policy – after all, he is a man with money woes on his mind, and those are clearly taking precedence.

Like Yudof, we all have money on our minds. Specifically, how will the faculty that make California public universities great be able to provide the same quality of education to transferring community college students if their pay gets cut and they are forced to take days off?

If the public institutions that valued integrity and knowledge fifteen years ago are turning into profit machines, what’s to stop their distinguished faculty from walking out permanently in the near future?

De Anza College should join this protest.