As student leaders have planned a series of walkouts recently, some have raised questions about the efficacy of the decades-old form of protest.

Last February, more than 300 students convened at a walkout on Low Plaza to protest the War in Iraq, and last Monday, more than 120 students walked out to protest both the racist graffiti at School of International and Public Affairs and the arrest of six black students in Jena, La., which some have called the result of racial bias.

“I normally approve of protesting, but when it comes to walkouts I get a little bothered because for my family, tuition for Columbia is not a minor deal, and I feel if my parents are going to pay this much money to attend an Ivy League university, that to not attend class is disrespectful,” Samantha Reitz, CC ’10, said.

While Monday’s walkout was relatively small compared to the thousands of people who came out to watch President Ahmadinejad’s speech one week before, those who were there said they felt strongly about the need to hold a walkout rather than another, less obvious form of protest.

Jamie Chen, CC ’09, said walkouts served as powerful statements.

“Being able to get up and walk out of class ... other people see it, and it’s a visual thing,” Chen said. “People coming together for a specific purpose in a public place is an amazing thing.”

One issue that often gets considered is the amount of publicity walkouts get, both through advertising before the event and media coverage surrounding it.

David Judd, CC ’08 and a member of the Columbia Coalition Against the War, which held last February’s walkout protesting the War in Iraq, noted that he did not see any problem with students missing class to attend a walkout and that much of the success of such a protest depends on the actual mass of people who choose to participate.

“I do see a potential downside of a different kind if the walkout is very small,” Judd said in an e-mail. “Failure is demoralizing. Walkouts require a certain amount of support and a lot of work and shouldn’t be called without a realistic expectation of success.”

From 2003 to 2005, graduate student instructors held a series of walkouts and strikes to get the University to grant them collective bargaining rights. In 2003, 2005, and 2007, students walked out to protest American intervention in Iraq, and in April, 2006, there was a walkout for immigration reform. Today, there is no recognized union of graduate student instructors at Columbia, American troops are still in Iraq, and an immigration reform bill died in Congress this summer.

Other forms of protest have proven more effective on campus. Last year, when members of Students for Economic and Environmental Justice conducted a sit-in in the lobby of Low Library in protest of so-called sweatshop labor used to create University paraphernalia, administrators announced a new policy for who could create Columbia-logoed merchandise. After students created the Financial Aid Reform coalition which held a number of events including a speakouts in 2006, Columbia announced that it would replace loans with grants to students coming from families earning less than $50,000 annually.

In response to the Columbia University Concerned Students of Color protests in 2004—when students dressed all in black convened on Low Plaza and sat wordless in class wearing signs saying “I am being silenced”—the University created the Office of Multicultural Affairs. And the 1996 student occupations of Low Library and Hamilton Hall led to the creation of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, though many students in recent years have called on Columbia to devote more resources to the program and to create an ethnic studies department.

One feature common to many walkouts is submitting a list of demands as the aim of the protest, which is later used to measure effectiveness. In the anti-war walkout last February, for example, CCAW issued a statement that called upon the “faculty and administration to set aside business as usual, join our strike, and issue statements of support.”

“If the thing you were protesting was the administration or a value that was taught to you in that class, by all means, walk out,” Reitz said. “But if the thing that you’re protesting is not represented by the teacher that is standing in front of you, I don’t know what kind of statement you are making towards your teacher.”

David Alade, CC ’09 and a member of Black Students Organization, which co-sponsored last week’s walkout, said, “The way you value something is the amount you’re willing to give up. If you pay a lot of money to go school, you really value education. The choice we’re making on how to spend our time shows how important the issue is.”

Jacob Shapiro contributed to this article.