Ellington

“No cuts, no fees ­— education must be free.” This was the chant that caught my attention and drew me to Red Square last Thursday afternoon. When I arrived, I saw that a large group of students and campus employees had come together with signs, banners and megaphones to protest the recent budget cuts and tuition hikes that have financially crippled many students and long-established UW workers.

Though I agreed with much of what the protesters had to say — the recent changes in the UW’s budget have absolutely made life more difficult for the students whom the UW is meant to serve and for the workers it employs — I became concerned over the course of the demonstration that some of the protesters didn’t intend to deliver their messages by exclusively peaceful means.

The UW branch of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which participated in Thursday’s protest, handed out brochures titled “Fight Back,” which seemed to encourage violence: “We need mass militant struggles to compel the politicians to meet our needs — to make them put the burden of the crisis on the rich, not the poor, students and workers.”

While I can appreciate the need for rousing rhetoric in times of social upheaval, the idea that, in this day and age, any group hopes to gain supporters with a platform that encourages “militant struggle” is almost laughable. Where were these people last Monday, when we all celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy of peaceful change?

And while this is, one hopes, nothing more than a case of exaggerated diction — there was certainly nothing militant about the peaceful, thoughtful and articulate demonstrators who assembled on Red Square — it emphasizes the fact that we are entering a time of social upheaval, which may bring profound changes to this campus. As groups like the ISO and the UW Student/Worker Coalition continue to protest the budget cuts and gain more supporters, it is likely that protests on campus will increase in size and frequency and that, eventually, they will be rewarded with a response from the legislators and administrators, who rationalized the budget to begin with.

Until that day comes, we can look to other universities for inspiration.

The ISO’s brochure cites California’s recent budgetary gains for higher education as achievements worth emulating.

“In California,” the brochure says, “protests have been successful in forcing Schwarzenegger to propose redirecting funds from prisons to education.”

However, the brochure does not mention what California protesters did that was so successful and goes on to suggest “militant struggle” as an appropriate means of protest.

The truth is, faced with cuts to higher education in September, students, employees and faculty at California’s public universities utilized peaceful strategies. According to CBS, protesters in California relied on “rallies, teach-ins and class walkouts” during protests at “eight of UC’s 10 campuses.”

We can learn a great deal from the protesters in California, whose persistence generated solutions for budgetary problems very similar to those currently facing the UW community. Peaceful protests that demonstrate opposition to budget cuts in an organized, articulate manner are more likely to have an impact than violent protests or stubborn displays of anger. We need to enter into a dialogue with Washington’s decision-makers and propose reasonable solutions to the problems the state is using our tuition and wages to solve.

Reach contributing columnist Rebecca Kuensting at opinion@dailyuw.com.