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A group of students have taken over the Housing Community Center (HCC) at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

A communique from the students who conducted the takeover was posted at about 10:30 am Pacific Time today. It says that the group is “disheartened, discouraged and frustrated” by the realization that they have been paying tuition to follow rules they had no say in creating, and that they have thus “commandeer[ed] the facilities that we are paying for.”

“Everything that we paid for is ours,” the statement says. “Everything is ours. It’s right there in front of you, waiting for the intention, the desire and the effort.”

The message closes with a slogan that has been frequently used in recent California campus takeovers: “Occupy Everything. Demand Nothing.”

I’ll have more on this story soon.

2:45 pm Pacific Time | I’ve found a Twitter feed from the Evergreen occupation: @OccupiedHCC. Tweets posted from that account suggest that the occupation began at the end of a dance party yesterday evening, and that thirty people slept in the HCC last night. They’ve also posted a schedule of workshops for this afternoon.

3:05 pm | According to the @OccupiedHCC Twitter feed, the first of the afternoon’s workshops is scheduled to start in ten minutes, and it’s on university budget cuts. Later there will be a workshop called “on occupying and occupations” and one on the history of protest in Olympia. A concert is planned for later tonight.

It’s worth underscoring that this is an open occupation, one in which students and others are encouraged to come and participate, and in which there’s no attempt to lock down the occupied building. Like the Berkeley Live Week occupation last December, the HCC occupation is oriented toward creating — on at least a small scale — an alternative university rather than an attempt to shut down the one that exists.

I’ll write about this in more detail in a separate post soon, but it seems to me that the last year or so has seen a gradual shift in tactics in American campus protests from closed occupations to open ones, and that this shift is potentially a very significant development.

4:25 pm | I’ve raised the question of open vs. closed occupations over on Twitter, and it’s produced two really interesting responses (so far). @anticapitalproj argues that “Closed & open tend to be tactical choices based on local factors, take on meaning w/in that context,” while @MPHarris27 says “Student liberation means no locked doors ever.”

Feel free to join the conversation over there … or here, in comments.

4:40 am Sunday (still Pacific Time) | As of a bit after midnight, the occupation was still going on, but whether the students planned to continue it overnight was unclear.

Also, I may have jumped to conclusions about this being an open occupation — commenter Gesa writes that some students have been prevented from entering HCC. I haven’t been able to confirm that account, but seems to be at least partially backed up by a tweet from @OccupiedHCC that described a failed attempt to take down barricades at the occupation.

2:45 pm | The @OccupiedHCC tweeter has posted that the occupation has concluded after “36 hours of a fully autonomous HCC.”

New polling shows that huge majorities of Americans agree with student activists on the nature of the contemporary university and the need for reform.

The poll, from the National Center for Public Policy and higher Education, shows that strong majorities of Americans believe that colleges are run too much like businesses, that they should be spending government money to keep tuition down, and that enrollment could be raised substantially without cutting educational quality.

On the subject of educational access, more than eighty percent believe that students are forced to borrow too much money for their studies, while less than thirty percent believe that all or nearly all “qualified, motivated students” get a chance to attend college.

Highlights:

• Six in ten Americans believe that colleges, “like most businesses … care mainly about the bottom line.”
• By the same token, only 32% say colleges “care mainly about education and making sure students have a good educational experience” — a twelve-point drop in just two years.
• Sixty percent believe colleges could enroll “a lot more students” without cutting quality.
• Sixty-four percent believe colleges and universities should use federal stimulus money to keep tuition and fees down. Only 25% disagree.
• Only 29% believe that “the vast majority of qualified, motivated students” get the opportunity to go to college. Sixty-nine percent think that many qualified students are closed out.
• A whopping 83% believe that students have to borrow too much money for college today, with 65% agreeing “strongly.”

A group of students at the University of California San Diego held a racist “Compton Cookout” last weekend, billed as a commemoration of Black History Month. The party’s invitation promised “chicken, coolade, and of course Watermelon,” and encouraged partygoers to dress and act “ghetto.” (The full invitation, even more repulsive than these excerpts indicate, can be found here.)

Members of the Pi Kappa Alpha (Pike) fraternity were allegedly involved in planning the party, which took place off campus. Local and national officers in the fraternity have since condemned the party, and denied that it was an officially sponsored frat event.

The university is investigating the incident, and planning a teach-in on “mutual respect and civility” to be held next Wednesday.

More than 70% of UCSD’s student body is of color, but only 2% is black.

February 21 Update | The UCSD Black Student Union has presented the university’s chancellor with a statement on the party and its aftermath, saying that a “toxic environment” exists “for African-American students on this campus.” The statement claims that on Friday night a group of students on the campus’s student-run television statement defended the party and used a racial epithet to describe those who have criticized it.

The BSU’s statement notes that the incidents surrounding the party have “has marked UC San Diego as a racist university,” hampering efforts to recruit and retain students of color. It calls for “those students involved in the shameful racist acts” to be suspended from the university, and presents a list of other demands. (I received the BSU’s statement through a friend’s Facebook post, but will link to it directly when it is made publicly available.)

The UCSD BSU will be holding a general meeting tomorrow evening, and members of the group are calling on campuses across California to hold solidarity actions in conjunction with UCSD’s planned Wednesday teach-in.

I’ll update this post further when I have more details — if you have information on the situation at UCSD, relevant links, or news about solidarity actions, post them here or email me directly.

Yesterday Gregory Cendana, president of the United States Student Association, made a speech billed as a State of the Student Union, posting it as video and text on USSA’s website and promoting it heavily on Facebook and Twitter. The speech describes American student life as “on the brink of fundamental change,” and pledges USSA to taking a leading role in making the 2010s a “decade of student power.”

The US Student Association, founded in 1947 as a federation of American student governments, has played many roles in its six-decade history, from service work to radical activism to federal lobbying. With this speech Cendana articulates a vision of an Association that bridges the divide between the legislative politics of Washington and the grassroots activism of America’s campuses.

Cendana’s speech is longer on federal policy positions than on specific plans for supporting America’s current wave of activism, and it tends to view that activism through the lens of electoral organizing, USSA’s primary focus. But with the March 4 national day of action just two weeks away, the speech amounts to a timely and high-profile embrace of that organizing project.

Earlier this month, USSA announced that their next National Student Congress will be held at UCLA this July. As students in California and beyond work in the coming weeks and months to build that state’s recent uprising into a sustained national movement, the role that USSA chooses to play will be well worth watching.