About 40 students gathered silently outside a Hotel School faculty meeting Monday in protest of the faculty’s recent decision to change Hotel Administration 3305: Restaurant Management from a required core class to an elective.

“This is extremely exciting,” Prof. David Patel, government, said. “I’m giddy, but also scared. We don’t know what is coming next, what it is going to look like.”

Donning signs reading “Mexican-lookng,” “Sub-human” and “Alien,” members of El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano  de Aztlán protested Arizona’s recently-passed immigration reform bill in an ILROB 1220: Introduction to Organizational Behavior class this Wednesday.  

As the afterglow of their success against Russell Athletic fades, University activists now face the prospect of dealing with what they view as a larger workers’ rights crisis with the corporate behemoth Nike.

“I’ve read a column by a seemingly conservative white student explaining what is and isn’t acceptable protest (as if a conservative white student in this era would know about the interests of the black community in the 1960s and the means to attain those objectives).”

— “Running the Risk of Whitewashing History,” Opinion, The Sun, April 14th

Over the last few weeks, there has been broad discussion about the Straight Takeover of April 1969. The Straight Takeover was a protest by Cornell’s Afro-American Society (AAS) against the treatment of black students on campus, and April 19 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Takeover. The AAS students occupied the Straight for two days before ceremoniously emerging from the building armed as the Takeover officially ended. This is the source of the famous award-winning photograph of Eric Evans, a member of AAS, walking out of the Straight with a gun.

On April 28, 2005, eight Cornell students occupied then-President Jeffrey S. Lehman’s ’77 office in Day Hall, protesting the construction of a parking lot in the so-called Redbud Woods area off West Campus.

Last week, dozens of student members of an organization called Take Back NYU! (and their supporters) occupied a dining hall inside New York University’s Kimmel Center demanding several things — most prominently additional transparency in NYU’s administration and endowment.

At first glance, I think most would agree that the NYU students engaged in the more meaningful protest of the two.

But if you look closer, you’ll know that the Day Hall occupation by the “Redbud Eight” was much more successful and will likely have a more prominent and long-lasting effect.

Last week in Washington Square Park, New York University learned that its students were no longer content with forming Facebook groups and holding discussions to enumerate their complaints with the university. NYU students took hold of Kimmel Student Center, engaging the campus in a protest that included, at times, roughly 70 demonstrators, to promote the idea of socially responsible investment.

According to endowmentethics.org, “Socially responsible investing (SRI) empowers shareholders to use their assets for positive change. SRI encourages investors to consider the social and environmental consequences of a given investment, as a factor equally important to, and reflective of, the investment’s financial performance.”