Students around the Bay area have taken action against the budget cuts to education, but have those actions helped their cause?

University of California at Santa Cruz and Berkeley and San Francisco State University have recently been hotspots for student activism.

Students, and in some cases faculty, have taken over buildings and barricaded themselves in, thus preventing the use of the building by others.

Take a step back to think and ask what these people are doing, and if it’s the right means of getting that message across.

In the case of the occupation of the Business building at SFSU, students barricaded themselves in the building, while at the same time, making a list of demands via a site on Blogspot.com. The list of demands included, but was not limited to: “Student loans be forgiven, education (from kindergarten through PhD) be free of charge, prisons are closed and defunded, multinational corporations and oil companies pay 50 percent in taxes.”

As much as some would like all of these things to transpire, how much is realistically viable? According to SFSU President Robert A. Corrigan, “the demands listed by the protesters demonstrated how far from the very real needs of students and the campus they had strayed.”

The current state of small groups coming together and taking action by occupying buildings on campuses for undetermined periods of time will only draw attention to the action, and not the message.

Actions such as the recent vandalizing of the UC chancellor’s home on Cal’s campus will not help the cause the students want to build. The people involved in those incidents only detract from the message and make those championing for education look like nothing more than common everyday hoodlums.

My suggestion: students around the state have to mobilize together in numbers; only then will administrators and people at the State Capitol take notice and listen to our concerns and worries about the cuts to education. The impractical demands tarnish the message attempting to convey through the sit-ins. Not only does the message become garbled, the credibility of those involved in the action suffers as well.

Take charge and mobilize people to demand an alternative to cutting education; all students must come together with demands that are not only concise but also offer solutions that are realistic rather than idealistic.

Only when our numbers grow will politicians, administrators and those who make the decisions on your education take notice and act in a manner that will change the path education in California has been going down for far too long.