There's been a lot of chatter about Thursday's episode outside Olin-Sang, where students staged a protest in response to the restricted emergency faculty meeting. Surprisingly, most of this talk gives too much credit to the student activists, casting them as heroically defiant by rising up and making a major point to the University. In reality, the "student activists" or "organizers" or "social justice seekers," whatever you wish to call them, failed to accomplish anything substantial. They failed to create an effective protest situation, thereby failing to let the University know that students absolutely must be a part of this process and not just an afterthought-a point that desperately needed to be made. It's time for Brandeis activists to engage in concrete action.

I was at this alleged protest. Initially, there was discussion among the eight or nine students assembled outside Olin-Sang of how to get the most people to the demonstration. They started frantically calling and text messaging all the Brandeisians in their cell phones. There was some urgent Innermost Parts blogging as well.

By the time some classes emptied and refilled in Olin-Sang around 4 p.m., students had posted flyers around the first-floor hallway of Olin-Sang. There were a bunch of clever phrases; a standard, pertinent Louis Brandeis quotation, "Sunlight is the best of disinfectants"; and, of course, plenty of exclamation points. But there was no one actually protesting.

In fact, there were no protesters outside Olin-Sang, either. The only student protesters were those standing around in the foyer outside of the Olin-Sang Auditorium, and there were only 20 of them.

I asked several students, unaffiliated with the protest, who were passing through Olin-Sang if they knew whether anything was happening. None did.

At the height of this protest, I counted 30 students, including the original organizers. When I asked one organizer, Lev Hirschhorn '11, how he felt the protest was shaping up, he told me that "this is a demonstration showing that students want to be a part of the discussion." The language of a large student protest was gone. This was just some demonstration.

According to Prof. Daniel Kryder (POL), it was mentioned and agreed at the meeting that students should play a greater role in the budget-cut process. But almost none of the faculty had any knowledge of the protest until after they left the auditorium-the protest had no weight on that consensus. One faculty member left the auditorium after the meeting and laughed in a friendly manner when she saw the students assembled so neatly.

Now, of course, Thursday's posts on the Innermost Parts blog portray a somewhat different saga. One post states that, "The protest was very, very valuable." Really? How?

However nice the prospect of our possible greater inclusion may be, it isn't feasible for now; the University has already established a pattern of disregard for our say in making changes, and that pattern has yet to be broken. If the University starts to let us in on what's happening with the budget, it will be nothing but a courtesy. It should be out of necessity, though.

The University must consult students before making major decisions. And that's a point that needs to be shouted, not merely discussed by a relatively small group of students in a foyer.

Student exclusion from important administrative meetings is nothing new. As such, students who consider themselves social activists should have anticipated their exclusion from this emergency faculty session. There should have been plans for mass protest of the faculty's secrecy before Thursday. The organizers waited until some of their representatives were personally affected by their encounter with the police at the scene of the meeting before they decided to protest at all.

And, even with short notice, it's the age of instant communication. All they needed was a plan. If you're in the business of being an activist, you should be ready to take some action once in a while. Cell phone chains, text message alert systems-anything would have been an improvement over the actual planning that occurred.

With all that's happened lately without our consent or consultation, student exclusion from Thursday's meeting should have sparked a big protest. But there was no planning structure, and any hopes or signs of true action consequently fizzled. I urge the people on the campus who consider themselves ardent activists and supporters of the Brandeis pillar of social justice to get their act together and make their mark in this crisis.