On New Year’s Eve I posted a list of this site’s sixth through tenth most-read posts of the last year. That list was dominated by the fall’s University of California protests, though a New York City building takeover and Austria’s wave of activism made the cut as well.

California takes the top spot on today’s lineup of the site’s top five posts of 2009, but otherwise this list is a lot more eclectic:

5. Sotomayor’s Student Free Speech Ruling: The Nitty Gritty

Two years before Barack Obama picked Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, the future justice sat on a panel that heard the case of a high school student who was punished by her school for blogging about the school’s administration. I’d written about the case before I’d ever heard of Sotomayor, and when word leaked that she’d been shortlisted for the Court, I revisited it, concluding that though her vote wasn’t one I agreed with, it wasn’t as bad as some observers were making out.

I wrote about Sotomayor four more times after her nomination, by the way, discussing her “wise latina” comment, her relationship with MeChA and La Raza, and her years as a student activist at Princeton.

4. New Google Map of American Student Activism

In late November, inspired by similar maps created by European student activists, I set up a Google Map of American student activism in the 2009-10 academic year. When The Nation ran a very nice blogpost about the map a few days later, traffic and attention really began to spike. Expect a lot more action on that project in the coming months.

3. Kentucky School Bars Gay Students From Bathrooms?

Back in May I got word of a weird situation in of Kentucky — according to media reports, a high school had barred gay and lesbian students from leaving class to use school bathrooms. I wrote up the story, including coverage of a protest against the rule that students had staged, and linked to my post on Twitter, where it got a lot of attention. (I kept digging for more info after posting, by the way, and eventually discovered that the ban on bathroom use was limited to specific students who’d had disciplinary issues in the past.)

2. Why Julea Ward Was Expelled from EMU

This was another story that went viral in an unexpected way. Julea Ward, a counseling grad student at Eastern Michigan University, was dropped from her program in March 2009 for refusing to treat a gay client who was having relationship trouble. Ward sued the university, and her case became a cause celebre in the right-wing blogosphere. I went back to the court documents and transcripts to reconstruct what had actually happened, and published an analysis of the case that explained (and endorsed) the school’s decision. My post wound up getting a bunch of links and critical comments from conservative sites, and it still garners a fair amount of traffic from Google searches.

1. Student Occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall is Fifth in Two Days at UC

I wrote a lot of posts about California in the fall of 2009, a lot of posts about Berkeley, and a lot of posts about the several occupations of Wheeler Hall. But this post, liveblogging the first Wheeler occupation on November 20, attracted nearly twice as many hits as any other.

There are a few reasons for that, but the biggest — which I’ll discuss more in an upcoming piece — was the effectiveness with which the Wheeler protesters used Twitter. Their @ucbprotest feed, which went from a few dozen followers to more than a thousand that day, was a source of solid real-time information on the situation inside and outside Wheeler, the protesters’ motivations and demands, and the larger crisis in the UC system. That feed gave me a lot of the data I passed on to my readers that day, and made Twitter a hub for news and analysis of the UC crisis on a level that it hadn’t been before. It offered a powerful model for student organizing online, one that I expect to see duplicated and improved upon in 2010.