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The Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico, whose Humanities division was shuttered by student protesters on Tuesday, has now seen that shutdown spread to the divisions of Education and Social Sciences (article | translation).

Students in all three divisions have shut down classroom buildings, leaving them barricaded against entry. So far, neither administrators nor police have acted against the student strikers. A mass student assembly was scheduled for this morning.

The Occupy California blog has additional photos and details of the Humanities action.

I’ve been asked about this a couple of times, so here’s my take…

A new analysis of an audiotape recorded at the time of the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings suggests — to at least one researcher — that pistol shots were fired not long before National Guard troops opened fire on antiwar protesters on the Ohio campus, killing four students.

In my experience, acoustic analysis is as much art as science, and any one expert’s claim should be taken with a grain of salt. What’s on the tape may be gunfire, and it may not.

Representative Dennis Kucinich is promising to lead an investigation into this new evidence, and that seems warranted. There’s a lot that’s still not known about what happened that day. In particular, Kucinich’s request for FBI documents relating to the Bureau’s relationship with Terry Norman, a Kent State student who was then working as a police informant — and who is known to have carried a gun to campus that day — is welcome.

But this new piece of data doesn’t add much to what we know, at least not yet. It’s an opportunity to ask some questions that have not yet received satisfactory answers, but so far it’s not much more than that.

Last spring a student strike closed ten of UPR’s eleven campuses for two months, ending with student victories on tuition, budget, and other issues. And now things are heating up again.

At five o’clock this morning students blockaded [Google translation] the Humanities Division (Facultad de Humanidades) of the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico in protest against a planned $800 tuition increase. Administrators did not interfere with the student protesters, and the division remains closed at this hour.

Today’s strike was approved at a general assembly of Rio Piedras humanities students last week. In a separate meeting, students in the university’s Education Division voted to strike this Thursday.

More on this story as I get it.

Update | More background on today’s strike. [Google translation]

The University of California will soon be considering a governance change that’s as overdue as it is depressing — changing the formal title of students’ payments from “fees” to “tuition.”

For most of the history of the University UC was free or nearly so. The system was created in 1868, but as late as 1956 the student fee stood at less than $100 a year. The state was committed to the principle that, as the university’s 1960 Master Plan had put it, UC would always be “tuition free to all residents of the state,” with teaching expenses absorbed by the taxpayer and fees representing “charges to the students for services not directly related to instruction, such as health, counseling … placement services, housing, recreation, and the like.”

Fees rose to $600 a year by the mid-seventies, and spiked again in the early eighties, but the increases were modest compared to what would come later. (The 1956 fee had amounted to $656 in today’s dollars, while the the 1990 fee was worth $2362 in present-day money.)

Costs to students rose throughout this period — more some years than others — but the premise of public higher education in California remained the same. Students would be asked to contribute to the costs of their education, but the bulk of the price of their instruction — their tuition — would be paid for by the state.

Today, that premise — that promise — no longer exists. Since 1990, per-student state funding for the University of California has fallen by two thirds in constant dollars. (I’ll say that again: For every 2010 dollar that California spent on a UC student twenty years ago, it now spends just thirty-three cents.)

And as state support for higher ed has fallen, UC “fees” have exploded. They now stand at more than $10,000 a year, well above the national average for public colleges, and they could rise by as much as 20% this fall.

As early as 1970, State Senator Al Rodda wrote that it was “no longer possible … to argue that we have not adopted the tuition principle in California.” But by calling tuition “fees,” the university has continued to make just that argument.

Sometime in the next few weeks it will stop.

“There is nothing easier than writing an article against something. It’s just so simple. It writes itself. You’ve just got to be angry about something. And you’ve just got to puff and wheeze with indignation and fury and resentment and bile and malice and the thing writes itself. But if you write anything that’s for something it looks sentimental and cutesy. And it’s so much harder to write. So much harder to write well.”

–Stephen Fry, here.