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Spongebob: “We should probably vow to do it.”

Patrick: “Vow?”

Spongebob: “Vow.”

Patrick: “How about instead of vowing, we just do it?”

Spongebob: “I LIKE IT!!!”

At my last count yesterday, I had word of 76 actions in 25 states for the Day of Action to Defend Public Education. That number was incomplete — I’ve already learned about a major action in New Orleans that flew under my radar, and I’m sure there were plenty of other smaller ones too.

But if we figure that 76/25 is in the ballpark, and that what we’ve heard about the nature of yesterday’s actions is representative, we can draw some conclusions about the day. Here are my initial thoughts…

October 7 was smaller than March 4, but that was to be expected. Student protest follows an annual rhythm, and barring a huge spark it grows slowly over the course of the year. (This chart, from a workshop at a USSA Congress a while back, tells the story.)

Yesterday’s events also tended to be less confrontational than March 4’s. No campuses were shut down, no freeways were taken over. The two known sit-ins (at Berkeley and UC Davis) ended early and of their own accord.

California remained a center of protest, as in March, but the national character of the event seemed, if anything, more on display. There were about half as many actions yesterday as there were on March 4, but their geographical spread was almost as broad. A number of campuses that did not participate in March’s day of action did participate yesterday, while others — far from California and not known for a history of activism — participated in both.

There was an emphasis in some actions on electoral organizing that wasn’t seen in March. Some events featured voter registration projects, others concentrated on educating students about the upcoming elections or demonstrating student political effectiveness to politicians. Obviously this reflects the difference between an event held in March and one held 26 days before a national election, but it also I think reflects a rejection by student electoral activists of the idea that youth are going to sit this election out.

It’s clear, though, that this was, like March 4, an extremely diverse event. Participants’ political views ranged from reformism to revolutionary ideology, and their tactics varied even more. The financial crisis in American higher education remains a central concern, but students also stood up for due process on campus, against bias attacks, and for a long list of other causes.

The question “what did the protests achieve?” was asked regularly after March 4, and it will no doubt be asked again in the weeks to come. But the longer this new wave of student organizing and protest builds, the less useful it becomes to ask that question of any one action. American students are in the midst of a new project of movement-building right now, and the results of that project are unlikely to be clear for some time.

The middle years of the sixties, 1965 and 1966, were a moment when student campaigns — for peace, for student power, for racial and ethnic inclusion — that had long been the causes of small campus minorities began to catch the imagination of significant numbers of previously uninvolved students. The campus movements of the late sixties didn’t often produce dramatic results in their first few years, but they did continue to build and grow, and ultimately they proved transformative.

Are we in a similar historical moment today? I don’t know. Historical analogies are always clumsy, and anyone who claims to be able to predict the future is a liar. But what October 7 suggests to me, more than anything else, is that March 4 wasn’t a fluke.

American students are up to something new. And what they’re up to deserves attention.

Transcripts from an online bulletin board suggest that Rutgers student Tyler Clementi complained to his RA about his roommate’s spying and online taunts just hours before he killed himself, and that he initially hesitated to raise the issue with the university because he feared they’d just make the situation worse. (“I don’t wanna report him and then end up with nothing happening except him getting pissed at me,” said one message believed to have been written by Clementi the day before he died.)

Now a new report claims that New Jersey authorities have subpoenaed emails pertaining to Rutgers’ handling of Clementi’s complaint because of concerns that the university was “not fully cooperating” with their criminal investigation.

Given all this, questions have been raised with increasing urgency about how Rutgers responded to the incident, and whether any institutional failures may have contributed to the still-murky chain of events that led Clementi to take his own life.

But yesterday President Richard McCormick, answering questions from reporters about the case for the first time, declared that he has reviewed university records and concluded that Rutgers “responded appropriately to the information we had.” “Based on everything I know,” he said, “I believe that we did all we could and we did the right thing.”

McCormick cited privacy laws in refusing to provide further details of the university’s handling of the situation. Future litigation may make those records public, however, giving Rutgers students and others an opportunity to judge the accuracy of McCormick’s assurances for themselves.

The Newark Star-Ledger is reporting that state investigators concluded recently that “some at the state university were not fully cooperating with [their] investigation” into Tyler Clementi’s suicide. As a result, they have filed subpoenas demanding that Rutgers turn over emails relating to a complaint that Clementi is believed to have filed within 24 hours of his death.

Dharun Ravi, Clementi’s roommate, is said to have secretly watched Clementi “making out” with a man in their dorm room via webcam hookup. Ravi is also alleged to have bragged about this spying on Twitter and attempted to stream video of a second encounter to friends.

Posts to a message board suggest that Clementi complained to his RA about Ravi’s invasion of his privacy hours before he took his own life on September 22, asking that either he or Ravi be transferred to another room.

1:40 pm Pacific Time | The rally at the University of California at Berkeley, estimated at more than a thousand participants, has culminated in a sit-in at the main reading room in Berkeley’s Doe Library. As many as six hundred students are said to be sitting in at Doe at this hour, and university police have shut the doors to the room to prevent more from entering.

2:00 pm | Photos from the Berkeley action are up at Occupy CA.

2:40 pm | Reports on Twitter now suggest that the doors to the reading room have been opened, and additional students are being allowed in.

3:00 pm | Occupy CA reports that Doe Library is scheduled to remain open until 9 pm tonight. Librarians have told students they’re “welcome to stay” until then.

3:35 pm | A general meeting of the Doe sit-in folks has been called for four o’clock. Before the sit-in began, activists presented administrators with a list of demands and a 5 pm deadline.

3:50 pm | The Berkeley Daily Cal (which has been liveblogging today’s events admirably) has posted the list of demands that were presented to Berkeley administration earlier today. The list of twenty-two demands emphasizes campus and state budget issues.

4:35 pm | Today’s sit-in marks the first major student protest action of the new year in the UC system, and it comes at a time when Berkeley’s handling of previous demonstrations is facing heavy scrutiny. Judicial proceedings against participants in last year’s campus protests continue to drag on this fall, amid charges of administrative heavy-handedness and due process violations.

Will Berkeley pursue a new approach to student protest in the new year? Tonight might be the night we find out.

4:50 pm | Berkeley administrators have distributed a letter to the students sitting in. Here’s the text as provided by the Daily Cal:

To those protesting today for public higher education, we want to acknowledge the concerns that you have expressed to preserve public education in California and make the opportunity of education fairly available to every qualified student. As you know, this goal is shared by the entire UC Berkeley community. We take great pride in the fact that this year we have the largest number of low income undergraduate students in UC Berkeley’s history with the lowest net cost in recent history. Although we cannot respond to all of the demands for which you are fighting, we do support the cause of continuing to raise your voices to inform the California public of the need to continue to invest in public higher education. The ability to provide excellent education that is accessible and affordable is in the interest of all of the people in the State of California and is fundamental to the mission of the University of California, Berkeley.

“We want to acknowledge the concerns … this goal is shared … we do support the cause of continuing to raise your voices.” That doesn’t much sound like an administration that’s planning to send in the cops in four hours and ten minutes, does it?

6:30 pm | The Daily Cal reports on Twitter that about a hundred demonstrators remain, and that they have voted to occupy the room “indefinitely.”

Friday morning | The sit-in broke up around seven o’clock or a little earlier. Neither the Occupy CA liveblog, the Daily Cal liveblog, nor the Daily Cal morning story say exactly why, but a Cal editorial suggests that logistical problems played a role: “With impossible acoustics in the library’s North Reading Room, nobody could effectively communicate to the group. The decision to leave the room and go downstairs, one that some protesters realized only after reading The Daily Californian’s update, ended the occupation when participants decided to disperse.”

I should also note, I guess, that yesterday’s 4:50 pm update wasn’t intended to suggest that the Berkeley administration was extending an honest hand to the protesters, or inclined to negotiate in good faith. I interpreted their letter as a tactical move, intended — clumsily — to co-opt the occupation. But in terms of public relations, it’s dangerous to praise people’s ethics one moment and then arrest them the next.