The March 4 rally at Fresno State and the office occupation in Joyal that followed are parts of what is emerging as a major student movement that is international in scope.

There are two common themes in student actions from Athens to Los Angeles. First, there is a rejection of policies that shrink the public sector while promoting dramatic and rising inequalities in income and wealth.Significant tax reductions for the wealthiest Americans and deregulation, especially of the financial sector, have resulted in an unparalleled upward redistribution of wealth. In California, tax giveaways to wealthy individuals and corporations are locked in by supermajority vote requirements for raising taxes and passing budgets.

Given these facts it is not surprising that students reject the claim that money is unavailable to fully fund higher education. The reality is that student fee increases, firing faculty, canceling courses and eliminating or consolidating programs is the price we are made to pay so that hedge fund managers can continue to pay a 16 percent tax rate on “earnings.” For many in this movement, funding education through increased taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations as well as shifting money from prisons to schools are primary demands.

But the crisis in the university is as much a campus problem as a state or federal government problem. In tandem with the corporate monopoly of the economy a corporate mentality and power structure has come to pervade the university. This is evident in the explosive growth in the number, salary, and benefits of the administrative managers that have taken over campuses and in the erosion of democratic governance.

Elections that occur on campus are for committees and legislative bodies that have only advisory powers. This advice is rejected at will by unelected university presidents and trustees and a coterie of senior managers who make all meaningful decisions for the university. Few of these people have served recently in academic positions, and their priorities reflect that. Whether in the University of California or California State University, rising student fees are pledged as collateral for various bonds used to purchase real estate or build non-essential facilities. Addressing authoritarian campus governance structures is the second common thread in various student actions.

On the one hand, given the failure of dialogue between student activists and administrators, escalating tactics are to be expected. On the other, his criticism goes to the core of meaningful political participation. No effective social movement has ever achieved its goals without civil disobedience. The various statues in the “No Justice No Peace” garden attest to that.

But we dishonor the memories of Ghandi, King and Chavez if our dedication to them comes only in the form of annual garlanding ceremonies. Is this is the appropriate time for non-violent resistance? Thoreau, whose pamphlet gave rise to the phrase “civil disobedience,” left that decision to each individual: if, he argued, the law requires you to participate in machinery of injustice then, he said, “break the law. Let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine.”

Michael Becker, PhD, is a lecturer in the political science department at California State University, Fresno