Neither of these are big stories, but each of them gives a glimpse of the large changes that have taken place in higher education in California in recent months, and the effect that those changes are having on the students of the state:

Two days before Christmas, internet access went out at the Verano Place graduate student housing at UC Irvine. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time, of course, but this time is different — Irvine’s IT staff is on furlough until January 4. One laundry room in the complex has functioning WiFi, and an Engineering building nearly half a mile away has six computers available, but the students staying in Verano over break are apparently out of luck otherwise.

Meanwhile, over at Fresno State, the university is mounting a slate of intensive courses during the January break in an attempt to repair some of the damage done to students’ academic progress by the fall’s massive cutbacks. Students who saw required courses cancelled last semester may be able to make up that lost ground by coming back to campus early and taking intersession classes that meet four hours a day, five days a week, for three weeks. There’s a catch, though — the classes are being run on a revenue-neutral basis, so tuition is nearly double what the university usually charges.

In each of these cases, politicians’ and administrators’ failure to maintain a functioning university is wreaking havoc with students’ lives. Grad students at Irvine who planned to keep their research moving forward during the break are being denied the chance to do so because there’s nobody around to reboot a server, while undergrads at Fresno are scrambling — and paying hefty premiums — for the privilege of disrupting their holidays to take courses they should have had access to last semester. These are real barriers to students’ academic progress, as real as the fee hikes and library closings of the fall.

Higher education in California is crumbling, and students are getting clobbered by the falling debris.