On April 28, 2005, eight Cornell students occupied then-President Jeffrey S. Lehman’s ’77 office in Day Hall, protesting the construction of a parking lot in the so-called Redbud Woods area off West Campus.

Last week, dozens of student members of an organization called Take Back NYU! (and their supporters) occupied a dining hall inside New York University’s Kimmel Center demanding several things — most prominently additional transparency in NYU’s administration and endowment.

At first glance, I think most would agree that the NYU students engaged in the more meaningful protest of the two.

But if you look closer, you’ll know that the Day Hall occupation by the “Redbud Eight” was much more successful and will likely have a more prominent and long-lasting effect.

Sadly, the NYU students took what might have been quite a legitimate gripe and turned it into a ridiculous spectacle of epic proportions.

At the time that the Redbud Woods controversy was going on in 2005, I was the managing editor of The Sun and therefore had a front row seat to students living in trees and chaining themselves to the ground and to each other. I was holed up (along with a couple of other Sun editors) in a Day Hall stairwell for an afternoon during the aforementioned occupation of President Lehman’s office.

Although I didn’t wholly agree with the construction of the parking lot on that particular piece of land, I generally disagreed with the strategy taken by the protesters. They fought the construction of the lot on environmental grounds (“save the trees!”), which didn’t seem to galvanize the rest of the student body. Their arguments were infuriating, especially because they had a perfectly-legitimate historical argument at their disposal —the land called Redbud Woods was (at the very least, arguably) a Cornell landmark — and they frequently failed to raise this issue.

By the time the Redbud ordeal was over, I became more-or-less fed up with the whole controversy. And so I didn’t shed many tears when the parking lot construction commenced.

But I see now that I should have given the Redbud protesters a little more credit. Compared to Take Back NYU!, they really did coordinate an excellent opposition campaign — even if I didn’t agree with their strategy. They knew what they wanted, and they went for it. And most everyone respected them, at least for that.

As I said above, prior to the beginning of their cafeteria takeover, the NYU protesters had the more sympathetic list of demands. They wanted a student on NYU’s board of trustees. They wanted a public disclosure of NYU’s operating budget. They wanted a public disclosure of NYU’s endowment. All of these are reasonable, if not logical — especially for a protest-hungry student group.

The problem with their protest isn’t with what they originally wanted; it was the extra demands with which they weighed down their original requests. In addition to the above three demands, they also insisted that, for example:

- NYU allow T.A.’s and student workers to engage in collective bargaining with the university (this is a legitimate demand, but these students should have known that decisions like this aren’t made unilaterally by the university. Additionally, are we sure that all NYU student workers really want to be part of a union? I seem to remember graduate students at several colleges — including Cornell — voting down unions within the last few years).

- NYU establish scholarships for Gazan students and send extra supplies and other aid to to Gaza (never mind the fact that the situation in Gaza has absolutely nothing to do with their other demands).

- NYU stabilize its tuition (never mind the fact that with the current state of the economy, it might just not be practical at this juncture).

I can’t really say that any of these extra demands are particularly bad ideas on their face. The problem is that Take Back NYU!’s original purpose got lost in a sea of convoluted arguments and Middle East politics. And, in creating this mess of an occupation, they destroyed any credibility they might have originally enjoyed.

As a result, not only did the student group end up a laughingstock, but NYU is likely to suspend many of the students involved, and other people that might have sympathized with them were likely driven away.

In short, they got greedy. And they looked stupid.

So, after seeing a relatively-successful occupation about trees and a disastrous occupation about important local and world issues, I’ve come to a conclusion: The success of a student protest must really have nothing to do with the actual goal of the protest. It’s about asking for limited items and sticking to those items. It’s about knowing what you want to accomplish and streamlining your efforts to meet that goal. It’s about not inconveniencing the rest of the student body. It’s about knowing what it’s possible to achieve and what it’s not. It’s about understanding how to lead a movement and not repel everyone away.

It’s about making yourselves look like you’re fighting for a legitimate cause — and not making yourselves look like morons.

Take Back NYU! has a lot to learn from the “Redbud Eight.”