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UC Berkeley announced yesterday that it will be dropping four team sports — baseball, men’s and women’s gymnastics, and women’s lacrosse — in a cost-saving move. It also plans to drop men’s rugby from varsity to club status.

The school allocated more than $13 million to athletics last year, and it’s looking to bring that number down to $5 million by 2014. Yesterday’s cuts are expected to save the university $4 million next year.

According to the Daily Cal, Berkeley’s student newspaper, the criteria used to decide which teams to dump included

“financial impact, the team’s history of competitive success, the department’s ability to comply with Title IX and the principles of gender equity, donor impact, opportunities for NCAA and Pac-10 success, contributions to student-athlete diversity, student-athlete opportunities, utilization of support services, contributions to the Directors’ Cup, contributions to the athletic department mission and prevalence of local and regional varsity competition.”

I’m curious what y’all think. Is cutting athletics an appropriate response to the current crisis, or is it yet another example of balancing the budget on the backs of the students? And if cuts to sports are the way to go, are these criteria good ones?

In Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” he argues that “strong-tie” relationships — bonds among people who share intense personal connections — are necessary to any serious activist project. Because online organizing builds on “weak-tie” relationships, he suggests, the world of Twitter and Facebook is unsuited to substantial, world-changing activism.

The centerpiece of Gladwell’s essay is his retelling of the story of the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Gladwell is right to note that the first of those sit-ins sprung from the strong-tie friendships among its student organizers at North Carolina A&T. He rightly notes as well that established activists throughout the South did much to facilitate the growth of the campaign in the weeks and months that followed. But he neglects the role that pre-internet social networking — ad hoc communication among college students connected through fraternities and sororities, loose friendship clusters, student governments, or just shared hang-out spaces — played in spreading the word and building the movement.

And if you’re looking for weak-tie organizing in the activism of the sixties, the civil rights movement — church-led, small-town-based, building on the preparatory work of decades of communal struggle — is the wrong place to start, anyway. The right place to start is the student movement centered on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

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Oak Reed is a guy. He wears the same uniform as the other guys in the school’s band. His teachers refer to him as “he.” He’s going to wear the “male robe and cap” (whatever those are) at graduation.

But his official records at Mona Shores High School in Muskegon, Michigan list him as female, and so — the school says — they couldn’t let him serve as homecoming king.

Never mind that the students of the senior class voted him in. Never mind that his peers, his teachers, his fellow band geeks think of him as a boy. Never mind that HE’S A GUY. The school overruled all that, and put someone else in the homecoming court in his place last Friday.

Jezebel has more details, and a bunch of links to places you can go to complain. They also link to the Oak Is My King group on Facebook, who write:

Oak Reed received the most votes for homecoming King. Period. Our school not only lied to students, but they also promoted transphobia. Our school has made it clear that they don’t want a transgendered student to represent Mona Shores. As students, we must stand up to assert the rights of Oak, and transgendered students everywhere.

After the craziness of Homecoming is over, students are encouraged to wear “Oak is my King” t-shirts on October 1st.

Oak is so my King, and I don’t care who knows it.

As sophomore Stefanie Dazio writes at The Huffington Post, American colleges and universities are increasingly subjecting students to discipline for their off-campus actions. Their codes, she notes, often use “broad, vague language” that gives “university officials more discretion in sanctioning misconduct both on and off campus.”

Dazio, a student at American University, notes that her own campus changed its code of conduct last June to allow disciplinary action

“when, in the judgment of University officials, a student’s alleged misconduct has a negative effect on the university’s pursuit of its mission or on the well being of the greater community”

even if such “misconduct” took place off campus and did not violate any law.

The ten most-read posts of the week…

1. DREAM Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: What Happened

How the bills failed in the Senate, and where they go from here.

2. Three Arrested at UC Santa Cruz Dance Party

Police bust an activist dance party on the Santa Cruz campus.

3. Campus Paper Runs Heartfelt, Thoughtful Apology for Rape Joke

A lesson in how to respond when you screw up.

4. Harvard Students of Color Blast Peretz Honor

Students reject New Republic editor’s bigoted remarks about Muslims, Latinos, and blacks.

5. Why Legacy Admissions Suck, and Why they Matter

The truth behind higher education’s biggest affirmative action program for rich white men.

6. Congressional Candidate: School Integration Will Lead to Mongrelization of the Races

The rantings of an old-school racist from the New York City suburbs…

7. O’Donnell: Co-Ed Dorms Will Lead to “Orgy Rooms”

…And some new-school wackiness from the Delaware Senate race. (2nd week on the chart!)

8. California Student Protest Crackdown Rolls On

UC Berkeley’s problematic judicial proceedings against last year’s student protesters.

9. On the “Why Can’t Whites Have a White Student Union?” Question

A classic post on an ugly question.

10. Universities Restrict Student Speech Across the Political Spectrum

Is suppression of conservative speech on campus political?