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That’s kind of what it sounds like.

A safety update posted at 7:00 am California time on the UCSC website says that “Due to potential safety concerns, people, including any employee scheduled for work, are advised not to come to the main campus. Check back for updated conditions.”

Earlier in the morning, student protesters closed both entrances to the UCSC campus to vehicular traffic. Occupy CA reported that as many as four people may have been hit by cars attempting to break through the human barriers at the campus entrances.

The UCSC website doesn’t mention that incident, but it does say that there was a report of a vehicle’s windshield being smashed in the vicinity. It does not present that account as confirmed, nor does it specify whether the vehicle was occupied at the time.

8:30 am California time | UC Santa Cruz sent out a “CruzAlert” message to all members of the campus community reading as follows: “Please avoid both campus entrances due to safety concerns. Check web or 459-INFO at noon for update.”

It sounds to me like they’re saying that anyone who is not already on campus should stay off campus until at least noon.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel has more on the morning’s events, though nothing (yet) on the advisory to remain off campus.

12:30 pm | UCSC is now advising “employees … not to come to the main campus for the duration of the day.” What’s odd, however, is what they’re not saying. They’re not saying classes are canceled, for instance.

It seems they’re trying to avoid saying that they’ve shut down the university for the day, but that’s pretty clearly what’s happened.

1:00 pm | The Santa Cruz Sentinel doesn’t share the university’s hesitance. Their headline? “Students Shut Down UCSC Campus.”

Trying to keep on top of the March 4 Day of Action? Here are a few resources that you’ll definitely find useful.

Student Sources

• UC Regent Live(blog) will have a team of writers covering national events throughout the day.
• The blog Occupy CA has been breaking stories about radical protest actions all year.
• This site will of course be passing on everything we get.
• Our national March 4 map includes links and contact information for many local actions.

Mainstream Media

• CNN is covering the story here, and they’ve been updating their map of actions as events develop.
• The Washington Post’s higher education section will be tracking the day’s news.
• A Washington Post reporter has compiled a solid resource page.
• Huffington Post’s new College site has been giving the buildup to March 4 a lot of attention. Expect more today.

Twitter

• The standard hashtag for the day’s events is #March4.
• We’ve created a Twitter list of folks who will be tweeting from today’s actions, and we’ll be adding feeds to it all day.
• Where possible, we’re adding Twitter links to local actions on the national March 4 map.
• And of course our own feed is @studentactivism.

The above map, an ongoing project charting all of the events in tomorrow’s March 4 Day of Action, currently includes well over a hundred actions in some thirty-two states, with more being added all the time.

If you click on any “pin” on the map, you’ll be taken to a short description of the action, along with links to further details and contact information for the folks involved.

For new readers, the March 4 Day of Action to Defend Education is a grass-roots event in which students, faculty, and others are coming together around the country to speak and act. The Day of Action was originally conceived in California as a response to the current crisis in higher education in that state, but it has since grown to encompass students and others at educational institutions at all levels in all parts of the country — from Berkeley and San Diego to Portland, Maine and Montgomery, Alabama.

More information on the Day of Action can be found at the Defend Education website, which was one of the earliest sponsors, but there is no one coordinating group behind March 4, no one agenda, no one ideological perspective.

If you have information about other actions, you can add it as a comment to this post. (Please include links and/or details of the action if you can.) If you have questions for the sponsors of an individual action, you can usually reach them through the links at their map entry. If you have questions for me, I may be reached by email at the address on the About page of this site.

Last March 3 update | There are now 122 events in 33 states on the map.

4:25 am California time | A report posted on the Occupy CA blog about an hour and a half ago says that the Humanities building at CSU Fullerton has been “barricaded from the inside.” More when I get it.

4:50 am | According to this calendar, today is a regular class day at Fullerton. I can’t quite tell by Googling whether the building under occupation houses classrooms, but if it does, that would make this (to my knowledge) the first of the more than two dozen California campus building occupations this year that has sought to shut down a classroom building while classes were in session.

Update: As regular commenter “*” notes, the December takeover of the Business building at San Francisco State and the first occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall in November both forced the cancellation of classes.

5:20 am | Occupy CA’s post now says the building has been barricaded with “some fairly heavy materials,” and includes an eight-paragraph statement from the occupiers. The bulk of their statement consists of a critique of the ideas of Michael Parker, CSU Fullerton’s Director of University Planning. Specifically, they challenge his contention that “esoteric offerings such as literature, philosophy, fine arts, and so forth” are only part of the university’s “core” mission to the extent that “they are clearly related to practical concerns.” They are occupying the Humanities building, they say, as a symbol of their rejection of that “University of Phoenix business model.”

6:20 am | A student activist blog at Fullerton, Make Believe Committee, has the occupiers’ statement. The blog doesn’t identify itself as being a project of the students behind the occupation, but I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to find out that it is.

7:30 am | Occupy CA reported about forty minutes ago that police are inside the occupied building “talking to” 15-18 occupiers. Four others who were detained earlier have been released.

8:30 am | Occupy CA is now reporting that the police entered the building through underground service tunnels, and that all of the occupiers have been cited and released.

9:50 am | Commenter mtd says that the occupiers weren’t cited, just released. The non-students among them were ordered to stay off campus for a week, but the students received no sanctions. No confirmation of this, but I thought I’d mention it.