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I recently sat down with Laura Flanders of GritTV to discuss the current crisis in higher education and how students are fighting back. Joining me on the show was Christian Ragland, student government president at Pennsylvania State University. Check it out:

“Democrats losing edge among young voters.”

“The college vote is up for grabs.”

“Far fewer 18-to-29 year olds identify themselves as Democrats.”

“Right now it seems like Republicans just care a lot more than Democrats.”

All these quotes — from a New York Times article titled “Fewer Young Voters See Themselves as Democrats,” out today — depict young people as moving dramatically in the direction of the GOP, risking “lasting or permanent damage” to the Democratic Party.

But it isn’t until the article’s twenty-first paragraph that we learn the magnitude of this “profound” shift:

Five points.

Yep. According to the Pew Research Center, youth Democratic Party identification is down just five points from its mid-2008 high, and now stands at fifty-seven percent. What’s more, youth Democratic identification has actually risen in recent months, leaving the Dems with a healthy twenty-point advantage over Republicans.

Also unmentioned in the Times piece is the fact that this small decline in youth identification with the Democrats since 2008 almost precisely mirrors the decline in Democratic party identification in the electorate as a whole.

And despite the article’s claim that youth party affiliation is soft right now because young voters identified more with Obama than the Democrats in 2008, multiple polls show that youth support for the Democrats has actually declined less than their support for the President.

That last bit is really important, so I’ll say it again.

Since inauguration day, youth support for the Democratic Party has declined less than youth support for Obama.

“Youth” is an ambiguous concept in politics and polling. Gallup defines it as the 18-29 cohort in some polls, as the 18-34 group in others. Today’s Times piece defined it as voters born after 1980. (It should be noted that treating the “youth vote” and the “college vote” as synonymous, as the Times did in this piece, is a common, and huge, mistake.)

But however you define “youth,” the facts are clear:

• Young people in America today are more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans, by a wide margin.
• Young people identify as Democrats at a higher rate than any other age group.
• The slippage in youth support for the Democrats in the last two years has been small and inconsistent.
• That slippage is in line with a decline in support that the Dems have seen in the electorate as a whole.
• Youth identification with the Democratic Party is more stable than youth support for President Obama.

A group of students briefly occupied a classroom building at the University of New Orleans yesterday morning, then staged a larger walkout that culminated in a confrontation with university police.

Local media reported that eight students staged the occupation of UNO’s Milneburg Hall, which appears to have begun overnight. Campus cops forced their way into the building at about 8:30 am, removing the occupiers but making no arrests. University officials said that the students did no damage to the building, and “helped clean everything up” as they left, while an activist blog claims that the removal was conducted by “violent, angry campus cops wielding batons and pepper spray.”

After the occupation, some 150 students walked out of classes and made their way through the campus carrying banners that read OCCUPY, STRIKE, and RESIST. University officials had set up microphones for a rally at an amphitheater, but the students instead marched on the administration building.

Two protesters were arrested in the course of the day’s events, and video from the scene shows several physical altercations between protesters and campus police. UNO chancellor Tim Ryan later said that the campus police chief suffered a twisted ankle while trying to prevent students from gaining access to Ryan’s office.

More than $14 million has been cut from UNO’s budget since early 2009. Yesterday’s protesters intended, the blog Occupy Louisiana said, to “to take back control of their university from big business and little bureaucrats.”

Thursday Afternoon Update | The arrested students — one grad student and one undergrad — have been released from jail on their own recognizance. They face felony charges of resisting arrest and battering a police officer. Campus police say each of them punched two cops while attempting to gain access to the chancellor’s office.

This post is the sixth in a series of twelve exploring the student activism stories that are likely to make news on the American campus in the 2010-11 academic year.

Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more.

Critics of Israeli government policies introduced resolutions in two University of California student governments this spring asking their institutions to divest from several companies that have contracts with the Israeli military. Neither of those resolutions was ultimately enacted, though one — at Berkeley — came close. (It passed by a wide margin, but was vetoed by the student government president, then was debated again several times before falling one vote short of an override.)

Even if they’d passed, the divestment resolutions wouldn’t have had any immediate practical effect. Student governments in UC don’t set university investment policy, after all. But the Berkeley resolution attracted a surprising amount of attention off campus, with Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, and Naomi Klein making public statements of support while an AIPAC official declared that his group would respond by making sure that “pro-Israel students take over the student government” at Berkeley and wherever else such a resolution appeared.

It was all a little weird.

And it all happened weeks before the May 31 raid on an aid ship that was trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. That raid, conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces, left nine dead aboard the ship and sparked widespread international outrage.

A divestment resolution is unlikely to make much headway at Berkeley this year, as much of the new student government’s leadership has already announced its opposition. But given the amount of attention last year’s efforts garnered, and given the fact that a UN investigation of the flotilla raid is expected to release a preliminary report on that incident sometime next month, it seems a safe bet that we’ll be seeing this tactic again soon.