The country’s ongoing financial crisis is hitting university budgets hard as the new year gets underway, and students across the United States are mobilizing to respond. Four recent reports from the National Student News Service paint the picture:

Students at UC Berkeley demonstrated last week in support of an upcoming faculty walkout. Faculty plan to stage the action on September 24, a week from this Thursday, in protest against state-mandated furloughs that will cut faculty pay for the current year without reducing their workload. Elsewhere in California, students at USC are scrambling in the wake of drastic last-minute reductions to their financial aid packages.

In Michigan, the MSU student government has appointed a Director of University Budgets to conduct an independent study of the university’s financial condition. The student government is meeting with university administrators to advocate for students’ interests in the budgeting process, and the DUB’s analysis will give them an independent student perspective on the numbers they receive from administrators.

Students also tried to roll back cuts at the University of Southern Mississippi, where administrators announced plans in August to dissolve the university’s Economics department and its technical and occupational education program next year, eliminating 12 tenured and tenure-track faculty positions. In that case, student and faculty protest led to a compromise in which five senior Economics faculty agreed to retire and four younger professors were found new homes in the university’s College of Arts and Letters. (The three affected profs in the technical education program were denied reappointment.)

The student fight for funding is shaping up to be the big campus activism story of the fall. More posts on the subject are in the pipeline, and if you’ve got news we may not have heard of, feel free to leave updates and links in comments.