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Former University of California Regent and longtime affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly has attracted some attention recently by saying he wants to review an agreement that UC San Diego reached with the campus’ Black Student Union on March 4.

UCSD has been hit by a string of bias incidents in recent weeks, and the UCSD administration and the BSU have been working to craft a response. Connerly has expressed concern that their agreement may violate provisions in the California state constitution that ban racial preferences in college admissions.

There’s nothing out of line about this. Proposition 209 is the law of the land, and it’s legitimate for a Prop 209 proponent to try to make sure it’s enforced. But in attempting to explain why UCSD has such a low African American enrollment rate, Connerly made a false and derogatory claim about black students.

Here’s what he said, in an interview with a Southern California paper: “There just aren’t enough black kids who are academically prepared to go to UC San Diego.”

This isn’t an opinion, it’s a factual claim. It’s checkable. It’s verifiable. And it’s wrong.

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On Wednesday, University of California president Mark Yudof posted a link on his Facebook page. The link was to a Wall Street Journal editorial that weirdly lays the blame for California’s higher education funding crisis on a single cause — excessive state spending due to an overly generous government pension policy.

(This editorial is deeply flawed — plenty of states that don’t share California’s pension setups are raising tuition and cutting higher ed spending right now, and California is an extreme case for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with pensions. To the extent that pension policy is an issue in the state, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. But that’s not my primary point here.)

Anyway, Yudof posted this link with a comment: “In case you missed it, WSJ calls it right. The causes for CA’s fiscal crisis lie with lawmakers, not the university!”

Yudof’s note received a number of replies, but my favorite was this one:

Are you trying to tell me we SHOULDN’T occupy everything?

There’s been a fair amount of “after March 4, what next?” talk around the internets this last few days, with the most common answer being “all sorts of stuff.” But some specific proposals are beginning to emerge.

One, out of UC Irvine, is a proposal for a new national day of coordinated action on May 4, the fortieth anniversary of the Kent State killings. (On May 4, 1970 National Guard troops on that Ohio campus fired on a crowd of student antiwar protesters at a distance of more than a hundred yards, killing two protesters and two passers-by. All four of the dead were Kent State students.)

Noting that broadly conceived days of action have brought in more previously uninvolved students than more narrowly targeted protests, the Irvine activists call for students nationwide to “hold funeral processions and silent marches this day; tell everyone to dress in black.”

One thought for Irvine activists and others to bear in mind while planning and promoting such an action — on the night of May 14, 1970, just ten days after Kent State, local and state police in Jackson, Mississippi opened fire on a dormitory building on the Jackson State campus, killing two students and injuring twelve.

The Kent State killings are far better known than those at Jackson State, but both are part of American student history, and our national amnesia about Jackson State is deeply problematic. Any commemoration of the one should make note of the other.

Idaho was one of the dozen-plus states that did not, as far as I’ve been able to determine, participate in the March 4 Day of Action for education, but its students have not been silent.

On February 25, some two hundred students at Idaho State University in Pocatello staged an on-campus protest against state budget cuts and tuition hikes, and yesterday several dozen ISU students made the 250-mile drive to the state capitol in Boise to rally and lobby legislators directly.

Eight members of the ISU student government joined the group in Boise, including the student government president. Next up for the Idaho students’ agenda is building their campaign into a statewide movement — students from two other public universities in the state participated yesterday, and the ISU folks are hoping to build on that in the future.