Last Friday I slotted in California’s crackdown on student protest as number four on my list of the top student activism stories of the new year, and that story is already beginning to heat up.

As the invaluable blog Reclaim UC reports, Berkeley held a series of pre-hearing conferences with student protesters last week. By RUC’s account violations of Berkeley’s judicial procedures were rampant — administrators ignored a deadline for bringing charges, scheduled conferences in conflict with confidentiality rules, and adopted internally inconsistent policies as to which version of the code of code of conduct they were relying on.

These issues seem to have prevented the pre-hearings from going forward as originally planned, but a Twitter report from campus says that actual hearings themselves are beginning today nonetheless.

Update | Reclaim UC says today’s hearing has been canceled.