This is what students in Chile are doing to protest. Hundreds of thousands of students chant “¡Y va a caer, y va a caer! ¡La educación de Pinochet!” (It’s going to fall! It’s going to fall! Pinochet’s education will fall!) and form well-coordinated marches that included creative theater and dance skits.

“Kiss-a-thons” where young–and not so young– people kiss for 18 seconds, with their regular partners, or kiss with volunteer strangers. Many have run 18 times around La Moneda, the Chilean equivalent of the White House. The number 18 refers to the sum of $1.8 billion dollars per year that are considered necessary to overhaul the Chilean educational system and make it public and free. Although it is hard to envision THAT occurring here in the U.S.

As a teacher at SF State, I find myself admiring those Chilean students and their leaders and wishing that our own students would believe to be capable of organizing a huge, militant and creative response against the demeaning way with which they keep on being charged more and more money for their tuition.

In the past decade, CSU tuition fees have risen 300 percent, and a full-time undergrad today pays $6,422 a year. The response? Mere whimpers, generally speaking.

Of course, some students and the faculty union are always vocal and militant in expressing their rejection of the unfair choice of balancing the CSU budget mostly on the students backs, but the majorities barely rumble and simply acquiesce to the latest fee increase, making it easier for the CSU administration.

So, why not just the students, but faculty, staff and parents band together in protest? In fact, why don’t the administrators themselves take a principled stand against the budget cuts applied regularly by the State Legislature? Is it because it is so much easier to simply “stick it” to the students?

Maybe the students –and the rest, but I will mention the students first– do not fight because they fear that they have already been defeated? It cannot be that! Look to the south of the American continent! ¡Si se puede! It can be done!