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Students in two divisions of the flagship Rio Pedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico have voted to stage strikes next week that could lead to a new round of shutdowns at UPR.

This spring students shut down ten of UPR’s eleven campuses in a two-month action that won major victories against planned budget cuts and tuition hikes. But now the university is looking to implement an $800 tuition increase, to take effect in January, and students are fighting back. At meetings held earlier this week, Humanities students voted to strike on October 19 while Education students pledged to follow on October 21.

Initial plans call for each strike to last for just one day.

I haven’t seen any coverage of the new planned actions in the English-language media — the links above are to Google translations of articles written in Spanish. If you have updates or other links, please share in comments.

Yale’s DKE fraternity has apologized for a Wednesday evening incident in which frat members and pledges roamed the campus chanting “no means yes, yes means anal.”

Video of the chant was posted online hours after it occurred, and the act was denounced by campus groups ranging from the women’s center to other fraternities.

Wednesday’s chants were the latest in a string of misogynist pranks by Yale fraternities — in January 2008 twelve Zeta Psi pledges gathered in front of the campus women’s center chanting “dick! dick! dick!” while holding up a sign that read “We Love Yale Sluts.” Fraternity members were found not guilty of campus charges of harassment for that incident.

My Twitter feed has been buzzing this week with rumors that the University of California Regents may consider a fee hike of as much as 20 percent at their November meeting. No formal announcement of such a proposal has yet been made, but the story does have some meat to it.

As Tess Townsend of the Bay Citizen reports, the 20 percent figure had its origins in a weekend meeting of the University of California Students Association board of directors, where UC Budget Director Patrick Lenz told UCSA that fee hikes on the table in November could “range anywhere from zero to 20 percent.” Asked by Townsend whether he stood by that figure, he said he was “trying to give a very broad picture,” and that he didn’t expect such a hike to be proposed. He did not, however, rule it out.

With mandatory system-wide fees now standing at $10,302 a year, a 20 percent increase would translate into a bump of $2,060. It’s important to recognize, however, that as recently as two years ago, annual fees stood at about $7000 — as a dollar figure, that increase would actually be larger than 32 percent hike that roiled the University a year ago, making it the biggest fee increase in the history of the UC system.

The UC Regents’ November meeting will take place on November 16-18 at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus.

Georgia’s selective public universities will bar undocumented aliens from admission under a policy adopted by the state’s board of regents today.

The ban applies to all public colleges and universities that do not admit all academically qualified applicants in a given year, and will take effect next fall. Currently five state institutions — the University of Georgia, Georgia State, Georgia College & State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Medical College of Georgia — meet the regents’ definition.

The regents’ decision makes Georgia the third state to bar undocumented students from some or all public higher education institution. South Carolina bans undocumented immigrants from all public colleges, and Alabama bars them from two-year colleges.

Currently only 27 students attend the five colleges that are affected by the ban, while another 474 attend the state’s thirty non-selective institutions.

All undocumented students in Georgia are required to pay non-resident tuition rates, regardless of how long they have lived in the state. The regents today also passed new regulations designed to ensure that universities are aware of the residency status of students they enroll.

I’ll have a full post up on this with new developments in the story soon, but in the meantime I wanted to be sure to point y’all in the direction of my most recent Huffington Post op-ed — an exposé of the misrepresentations behind CSU Northridge Economics professor Kenneth Ng’s latest defense of “Big Dummy Kenny,” his Thai sex tourism website.