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A roundup of what I’ve been able to glean so far. I’ll be updating this as we go. For an overview of the day’s events, check out the October 7 Google map, which currently lists nearly seventy actions in more than twenty states.

UC Berkeley

The Daily Cal is liveblogging. The crowd in front of Sproul Hall is estimated at 1000 or more. Berkeley folks are active on Twitter. Some fire alarms have been pulled in campus buildings.

4:40 ET | The Berkeley rally has turned into a sit-in. New post here.

UC System-Wide

Activists are staging an attempted DDOS — disributed denial of service — attack on the website of the offices of the UC president, attempting to crash the site.

UC San Diego

The @JusticeUCSD Twitter account is live-tweeting consistently. Claims 350-plus participants in rally and teach-out. Die-in at chancellor’s office shortly after noon Pacific time.

Yale University

Students from Yale University are staging a march on the New Haven Police Department today to file civil complaints after a raid on a downtown club last weekend in which students allege police punched and kicked a student for no reason.

UC Davis

A report on Twitter says that “about 80” students are staging a sit-in at Mrak Hall, the UC Davis administration building.

Today is a national day of action to defend public education, with events planned in campuses and communities across the country. I’ll be updating the map below all day as news and information comes in.

8:15 pm | I’ll have more reports later, but right now the biggest ongoing story is the Berkeley sit-in. I’m following that here.

5:05 pm | Reports and/or photos from six California campuses. Sit-ins at Berkeley and UC Davis. National tally now stands at 76 actions.

4:45 pm | Actions in Colorado, California, Connecticut, Ohio, and Washington bring the national tally to 74 actions in 25 states.

1:05 pm | A Kansas action brings the national total to 68 in 23 states. Check out the blue pins on the map for links to reports from the field.

11:40 am | Two new actions in Wisconsin received via Twitter, one in Illinois via the blog, one in Colorado via Facebook. The total now stands at 67 actions in 22 states and Washington DC.

10:00 am | Added eight new California actions from the UC Strike Facebook page and a Massachusetts rally from Twitter.

9:15 am | Added two new actions from the Student Labor Action Project site, bringing the total to 54 actions in 21 states plus the District of Columbia.

8:35 am | Fifty-two actions in twenty-one states. I’ve posted all the actions from the Defend Education website, now I’m branching out to other sources. If you’ve got info on an action not yet listed, leave the data as a comment to this post.

The Defend Education website now lists 36 demonstrations and other events for tomorrow’s National Day of Action, up from 28 earlier this week. Other sources around the net mention additional actions, and news is still coming in via Twitter and Facebook.

I’ll be updating this post as I get a handle on the scope of what’s in store. Stay tuned!

8:00 am, October 7 | I’m putting together a Google map of today’s actions. There’s a lot left to add, but it already includes thirty-two actions in eleven states, from a student strike in Minnesota and a documentary screening in Alabama to an art action in California and a jazz funeral for education in Louisiana.

11:45 am | The Google map now stands at 67 actions in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

6:00 pm | More than 75 actions in 25 states now recorded, including sit-ins at Berkeley and UC Davis. Check the main page for updates.

An attorney representing Dhuran Ravi, the Rutgers roommate of Tyler Clementi, has released a statement.

Ravi is accused of using a webcam to surreptitiously view and stream video of Clementi in a dorm-room sexual encounter with another man, bragging about the incident on Twitter, and then inviting others to join him in watching Clementi a second time.

The statement, as excerpted by ABC News, read as follows:

Unfortunately, a life has been lost. Out of respect to Tyler Clementi’s family, this is not the time for explanations of defenses or justifications to be made public by an attorney.

In regards to statements made by the prosecuting agencies of their continuing investigation and whether to file bias charges against Dharun Ravi, I am heartened to hear that they are taking their time to learn all the facts before rushing to judgment. I can only hope that the public will do the same. I am confident that nothing will be learned to justify, warrant or support the filing of any bias criminal complaint.

The statement notably includes neither an apology to Tyler Clementi’s family nor a declaration of innocence as to the charges of invasion of privacy that have already been brought. It does not, despite ABC News’ characterization, contend that Ravi “did not bully Clementi.”

Molly Wei, a friend of Ravi’s, has been accused of allowing Ravi to use her computer in the spying scheme, and William Fisher, an attorney for Wei has also released a statement. Again, ABC news provided excerpts:

This is a tragic situation. But this tragedy has also unfairly led to rampant speculation and misinformation, which threaten to overwhelm the actual facts of the matter. Those true facts will reveal that Molly Wei is innocent. Molly committed no crime. Her remarkable reputation is being unjustly tarnished by uninformed and incorrect assumptions.

[Wei is a] wonderful, caring and talented young woman with a bright future [who has been] maligned by unfounded attacks on her character.

This statement also apparently included no apology and no denial of involvement in the spying incident.

It’s not uncommon for politicians to exaggerate or even invent tales of military heroism, but this is a new one on me … a candidate concocting tales of campus protest derring-do.

In the spring of 1970 President Nixon launched an invasion of Cambodia, and campuses across the country erupted into protest. When National Guard troops shot and killed four students at Kent State on May 4, the protests grew bigger and angrier.

Enter Carl Paladino.

Paladino, now the Republican candidate for governor of New York, was a law student at Syracuse University that spring. In an interview published this week, he says that the campus erupted into “riots” after Kent State, with student demonstrators holding Chancellor John Corbally “hostage” in a locked-down building.

It was Paladino himself, he says, who freed Corbally. The Syracuse chief of police, Thomas Sardino, came up with the idea of offering to take the chancellor’s place, and asked the young law student to make it happen. So Paladino, he now says, negotiated with the radical activists, entering the building and asking them to “take the police commissioner and let the chancellor go home.” They agreed to the swap, and the stand-off was eventually resolved peacefully.

It’s a great story. Too bad it never happened.

Newspaper accounts from the time say nothing about any lockdown, and make no mention of any hostage situation. Corbally wasn’t in his office when the students took over the building, those accounts say, and he and Sardino entered together shortly thereafter. They stayed talking to the students for two hours, then left. Faculty and students who were involved in the protest tell similar stories now.

Corbally and Sardino are both now dead, but John Beach, who was the university’s lawyer during the protests, also remembers the situation as it was reported in the papers. He says he has no memory that the chancellor was “ever prevented or threatened to be prevented from getting out,” and that the police chief “befriended the students and stayed overnight” voluntarily.

As for Paladino, who now says he “didn’t like the war protesters … that whole hippie crowd,” nobody remembers him being involved in the protest at all.

Update | Paladino’s spokesperson is walking the story back a bit: “His involvement was on the margins … the way Carl remembers it, the chancellor was in a difficult situation that needed to be resolved.”

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