By Taylor Dobbs

Fellow students, I am so very glad to see you exercising your First Amendment rights.  After Hurricane Sandy hit, washing away homes, families and livelihoods, you did a courageous thing: petitioning the university administration to cancel classes for a second day in a row.

It took strength, I’m sure, to be that first one to sign the petition, to put yourself out there as the leader of a movement, protecting your fellow students from those downed branches and leaves. Oh! The leaves. There were thousands. We could have slipped.

The change.org petition bearing 604 brave names stands in proud defiance against the oppressive administration that sought to force you back into your classrooms in order to render unto you the services you pay them thousands for. But never mind that, it was dangerous. Reckless, even.

Just think of poor Allie B.: “There was so much flooding a hobo had to come stay in my apartment and now i have to stay up all night in fear.” The horror.[sic]

It is an outrage that Northeastern University would seek to further educate someone so intelligent as to invite a total stranger into her home despite fear for her own personal safety.

Or poor Patrick Landayan: “I’m not tryna fail this quiz.” I imagine Patrick had a sentence structure or spelling quiz last Tuesday and needed about three more months of study time.

You, fellow students, stood up for Maria Garcia, who lives in Cambridge and didn’t want to get “hit by thunder” on her way to school.

You 604, you know who you are. You are defenders of our liberties. You won’t stand to just skip class and stay home, no. Reality itself must be bent to your will. Because, really, who can walk to school on a 58 degree day with winds up to 22 miles per hour?

You protected students like Sara Benson: “I’m really small and don’t want to get blown away or fall into a puddle.”

This piece of student advocacy shows just how far we’ve come since last spring, when only 66 people signed a petition to keep Chick-fil-A out of Northeastern. At the time, the food chain denied having anti-gay leanings or giving millions of dollars to “pro-family” groups. That turned out to be nothing, right?

With 604 of you, imagine what we could do. We could combat the hate-filled misinformation campaign assailing the university from Charles Jacobs and his “Americans for Peace and Tolerance,” the small fraction of students who helped Chartwells workers join a labor union last year sure could have used you. You could have made a statement at Occupy Boston last year.

But then you’d be wet, cold and living with hobos.