Big things are happening in Brandeis' backyard. With the Rose Art Museum's controversial closure and the Madoff scandal that crippled some of our donors, Brandeis has been hit hard by financial misfortune. As students pile on loans, it is natural for us to mumble under our breath as the burden becomes heavier. But it is necessary for all students at Brandeis, including prospective students and graduating seniors, to take the effects of this economic travesty into account. As Brandeis students, we should recognize the importance of these broader issues and how they affect us.As we have already seen, budget cuts can lead to professor layoffs, the reduction and combination of majors and a rise in tuition or fees. The Faculty Senate recently approved major changes to Brandeis' curriculum, including the Justice Brandeis Semester of experiential learning and the Business major. These are changes that directly affect us and give us great opportunities to speak out about how we feel. We deserve to have a voice in these big decisions.

When the Rose Art Museum closed suddenly, many students quickly responded by petitioning, staging sit-ins and appearing at question-and-answer sessions with University President Jehuda Reinharz and other members of the administration. These actions reflected a genuine interest in the state of affairs on campus. Students should commend themselves on initiating these endeavors. Since the responses reached the national press, I'd like to think our collective efforts worked to get the attention this major event deserved.

Recently, about 70 students at New York University took action on several issues dear to them, disregarding the potential repercussions. These students barricaded themselves in the school's dining hall with 13 demands, including budget transparency at the University and financial support of the education of residents from Gaza. Although their conduct was inappropriately violent and resulted in scuffles, broken doors and an injured security officer, the students' efforts to gain attention and bring change into the world were gallant. These students congregated on an issue and felt passionately enough to voice their concerns, and although several media sources mentioned the event only briefly, as Winston Churchill once said, "It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic."

On prime news chanels, the information that doesn't pertain to the major headlines floats in tiny print across the bottom of the screen. Valuable information is encrypted in these sentences, but it is only available to those who put in the effort required to simultaneously read and watch television. Although some of us are active enough to broadcast issues, write or sign petitions, and even ultimately protest, as college students we have our own personal loudspeaker to express our opinions on these issues that matter to us. We as students don't have to sit idly while the administrators make all of the decisions. Now is the time for us to attract attention. We do not have to remain behind, floating below the major news.

As we depart from the college lifestyle, we enter a busier, detached world. We focus on our salaries and conforming to the mold that society seems to demand of us, focusing more on our personal lives than on how world news will affect us. Maybe that's cynical, but the errors of the generation before us get passed onto us. If we blink and let their mistakes pass from us to the next generation, they will have to deal with them next.

The late Kenneth Rexroth, a distinguished and self-educated American painter, essayist and orator who traveled during his youth in the West to organize and speak for unions, noticed that the spotlight is flashing on us during our years at University. "When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too," he said. Thus, we have an inherent power in our hands to make news. Otherwise, it will just keep passing on a screen as a floating blurb.