Wow. It’s been quite a year, both for the blog and for the world of student activism. Just going back over these stories reminded me just how much actually happened (and there was a lot of big stuff that didn’t make the cut, too).

Here’s the first half of my roundup of the ten studentactivism.net stories that got the most attention in 2009:

10. New Occupation Underway at the New School.

One morning in April, a group of activists from New York City’s New School took over an unoccupied building owned by that university. I heard about the occupation via Twitter not long after dawn, and liveblogged the occupation as it unfolded. This was the first American student action to be extensively documented on Twitter as it happened, and — for me, at least — an object lesson in how important it is for student activists to use social media to get their word out early and consistently. (More of my coverage of the New School occupation can be found here and here.)

9. UCSC Students Present 35-Point List of Demands.

This year saw dozens of American campus buildings occupied in California and elsewhere, but few of those takeovers incorporated the kinds of narrow, targeted demand lists that have been common in years past. Instead, knowing that universities were unlikely to negotiate on any substantive issue, activists tended to go in one of two directions — forego demands entirely, or shoot for the moon. The initial demand list from the November UC Santa Cruz occupations of Kerr Hall and Kresge Town Hall, which called for an abolition of the UC Regents and a total amnesty for all student debt, was an example of the latter.

8. Massive Student Protests in Austria.

With so much happening in the US this fall, I didn’t find the time to give Europe’s huge wave of student protest all the attention it deserved. But with a near-total American media blackout on that story, whatever I did write on the topic tended to find an audience through Twitter and Google search. This writeup, my first on the semester’s building occupations in Austria, is still drawing new links and significant traffic.

7. The UC Walkout, Campus By Campus.

November’s protests around the regents’ fee hike got more media attention (and more hits here), but California’s new student movement began in September, in a co-ordinated statewide day of action against UC cutbacks. Ten thousand students participated in the protests, which included Berkeley’s biggest campus rally since Vietnam. The post linked above was my first on the day’s planned events, and I followed it with updates here and here.

6. UCLA Tasers Student Protesters, Then Denies It.

I wrote a lot of stuff about California’s November regents protests, but this post on police violence at UCLA drew more traffic than any other. The police use of Tasers, batons, and pellet weapons at the UCLA regents’ meeting would be replicated and expanded on other campuses in the month that followed, and the university’s willingness to inflict physical violence on student demonstrators is emerging as one of the biggest stories of the current wave of protest.

In Part Two: The top half of the top ten, with stories on Sonia Sotomayor, gay Kentucky high schoolers, a fundamentalist expelled from grad school in Michigan, and the ongoing saga of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. Find it here.