This post was written by Greg Capillo, a student at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky

On Friday April 2nd, the Benefits Committee at Western Kentucky University (WKU) called an emergency meeting and reversed 2 previous decisions; it extended benefits previously reserved for spouses to "other qualified dependents" including gay and lesbian couples. In the faculty email, the committee head mentioned "feedback" that the committee had heard regarding the decision.

That feedback was in actuality a movement 5 years in the making that united people from all levels of the university community; faculty, staff, and students stood together to strive for justice. On Friday, we achieved that.

When people first began petitioning for partner benefits at WKU, we knew we had a challenge. No president of a state university in Kentucky would want to stick their neck on the line and make an executive decision about this issue. After all, we live in a state that overwhelmingly voted to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Yet we also knew that we didn't have a progressive base on our Board of Regents that the more cosmopolitan universities like NKU, UK, and U of L, schools that already passed domestic partner benefits, might have. The issue was placed squarely in the lap of the benefits committee, and on two separate occasions, the benefits committee had voted to deny benefits. If this was going to happen, it was going to involve direct action from the bottom up of the university clamoring for change.

After the second hearing, we began organizing in earnest. The faculty began a continuous Gandhian nonviolent demonstration, where one faculty member, staff member, or student would sit outside of the Wetherby Administration building with a sign that read "Domestic Partner Benefits It's Just It's Fair It's Time." One person with the sign for one hour a day, every day, reminded the president and the benefits committee that we all wanted this.

As that action began, several of us began planning something larger. We had a date set, April 2nd, where not only would the Regents be in town but so would Senator Mitch McConnell. We talked about direct action and nonviolence and we decided that it would be best to start out with something quiet but powerful. We would all have signs that said "Equal Benefits for Equal Work" and "Fair Treatment for All" and we would file into the building where the president, the Regents, and the Senator would all be having lunch. They would be eating in a room with large glass windows and would have to walk through us to leave the building or go to their meeting. While we were not targeting the Senator, we were targeting our President, Gary Ransdell. We know Gary pretty well and we figured that all he would want to talk about with Mitch was how pumped he was about the new robot that Mitch just bought him with federal earmarks. He would not want explaining away 100+ protesters outside on the agenda.

We left that day and set up a facebook event. By the end of the first 24 hours, we had close to 100 confirmed guests. Now, it’s been my experience that anytime you organize an event on facebook, you take the number of people who say they're attending and divide it by half. So we also decided that we would each go and talk to 10 people about the action.

We also started a direct email campaign to Dr. Ransdell. We're a small enough university that we know that someone definitely reads and responds to his emails, if he doesn't himself. We started getting cryptic responses at first that eventually became more and more explicit. Dr. Ransdell said that he was not satisfied with the committee's decision and that he knew when this issue would be resolved.

By Wednesday, we had great fliers to post and hand out to people we passed on campus. I spent last week wandering campus talking to friends, strangers, and anybody else who would listen about fairness and equality on campus. I know several others were doing that, too, because by Thursday, people I'd never met before were looking at the posters and enthusiastically saying that they would be there. That night we got together to call people we thought would be interested in coming. Our facebook event stood at 205 members. Even if we halved that, we would still meet our goal, and it seemed certain that if we timed our reminders right, we would see the turnout we hoped for.

Yet weird things also started happening on Thursday. Word got out that the one of the staff on the benefits committee wanted to change her vote and wanted to call the issue back up. By 10 A.M. on Friday, an hour and half before our demonstration was scheduled to begin, we had to cancel it. The Regents lunch had moved and police were set up to count heads "for some protest or something." None of the information on the website was secret, we were very open about what we were doing. It seems obvious that at least the location of the Regents lunch was moved because of our efforts, and while we may never know, it seemed that we had also moved some votes on the committee.

I have always known that while Bowling Green may be more socially conservative than my hometown of Lexington, people here are fundamentally loving and want to do the right thing. Friday was not only a demonstration for equality; it was a demonstration of our community’s strong bond to each other. Very rarely does one get to participate in a movement that achieves its goals so fully that the campaign itself stops. We celebrate small victories along the way; an extra vote picked up here, some motion in committee over there, and we piece those together to remind ourselves that what we are doing is worthwhile even in the face of stonewalling and temporary defeat. You see, we know in our hearts that Dr. King was being truthful when he said "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice." We know, in the words of Sam Cooke, that a "change is going to come." On Friday, we saw it.

Now this was a specialized instance, I realize. It was one university with one policy obviously not in its interest. This situation was bound to change sooner or later. What makes it beautiful is that it changed sooner because we spoke up. The people do have the power. In reality, though, Western is just a microcosm of the larger forces we're struggling against. The policies we are fighting are not in the long term interest of the places we live. They will change. And while there seems to be too much resistance to our efforts from the powers that be, they will change sooner because of us. I can say that I know this for a fact. That is probably the most important thing any university could have taught me.