College Students Across the U.S. Protest Budget Cuts

As colleges and universities across the country plan budget cuts and tuition hikes to offset the economic downturn, students in states such as Arizona, California, and Nevada are fighting back with protests.
Here’s footage of one such protest at the University of Arizona:

So does this kind of protest work? When I was a student at Rutgers University in the late 1980s, students protested against tuition hikes. During my freshman year, 73 students were arrested for barging in on a Board of Regents meeting and refusing to leave. (I wasn’t one of them. I missed most of the protest because I was taking a political science exam, which I consider very ironic.) A few years later, students continued the protest by taking over one of the dean’s offices and camped out there.
None of this was particularly effective. The methods used by the protestors were viewed by other students as juvenile and radical, and the movement didn’t really take off. But that doesn’t mean that tuition hike and budget cut protests can’t be effective.
College affordability has become a nationwide crisis. If enough students, faculty members, and others speak out against it and many different schools, change might happen. A problem with student protests in general is that they are often perceived as being for radical students who are way outside the mainstream. With this issue, though, there’s absolutely nothing radical about it, and millions of students are affected.