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An estimated seven hundred UNLV students walked out of their classes yesterday in protest against cuts in the Nevada governor’s proposed budget. They were joined in their action by students from two other Nevada state colleges, as well as the president of UNLV, the chancellor of the state’s public university system, and the chair of the system’s board of regents.

The students rallied on campus, then rode chartered buses across town to demonstrate outside a meeting of the state legislature’s finance committee.

About a dozen University of California students were arrested at UC Irvine last night after they disrupted a speech by Michael B. Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States.

Oren, who is on a speaking tour of West Coast campuses, was interrupted by protesters ten times over the course of his speech, and at one point left the podium for twenty minutes.

A post at the Irvine activist blog Occupy UCI said that twelve students were arrested, and that all were enrolled at UC Irvine, while an Associated Press article put the number at eleven — nine Irvine students and two from UC Riverside. All of the arrested students were cited and released at the scene.

Another Israeli official, Daniel Taub of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is scheduled to speak at Irvine at noon tomorrow, in an event billed as a discussion of “Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Law.”

If I wrote a post every time the Chronicle of Higher Education breathlessly endorsed shoddy anti-student “research” I’d never have time to do anything else, but the most recent example is too ridiculous to pass up.

The front page of the Chronicle’s website currently carries a headline reading “College Makes Students More Liberal, but Not Smarter About Civics.” Click through to the article in question, and you find the same headline repeated with a qualifier: “Study Finds.”

But the “study” in question, an annual survey conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, found no such thing. In fact, the Chronicle‘s eleven-word headline misrepresents the survey’s findings in three different ways:

First, the survey didn’t find that college makes students more liberal. What it found was that people who graduated from college were more liberal than people who didn’t, which any statistician will tell you isn’t remotely the same thing.

Second, the survey didn’t address the issue of whether college makes students smarter about civics. It examined the “civic knowledge” of various demographic groups, but didn’t make any effort to track what individual students learned in college.

Third, the survey’s definition of “civic knowledge” encompasses issues that bear little relationship to civics as that term is commonly understood — or as it’s used in the Chronicle piece. The survey’s subjects range from Sputnik to the moral philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, with lengthy digressions into military history and economic theory.

The ISI, which the Chronicle calls “an independent group with a tradition-minded view of issues,” is in reality a right-wing think tank. Its first president was William F. Buckley, its current president is a former Reagan administration domestic policy advisor, and its website prominently features a Glenn Beck video clip. The group publishes a version of the same tendentious survey every year — why the Chronicle is treating it as news is beyond me.

“There is a certain stigma that comes with being from Berkeley, and I’m proud of that stigma.”

–New Orleans Saints linebacker Scott Fujita, talking politics with the New York Times.

Students at the University of California at Davis are occupying their campus library this weekend, and UCD’s chancellor has announced that instead of disrupting the occupation she’ll keep the library officially open all weekend long.

The Shields library “study-in and slumber party” has been in the works for quite a while, but Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi’s statement came just one day before its scheduled kickoff.

In a response posted to a UC Davis activist blog shortly after Katehi’s announcement, study-in supporters stressed that the concession was not a result of discussions or negotiations between the university and the action’s organizers. It was, instead, a reflection of Katehi’s “recognition of what will happen this weekend,” and of the fact “that she cannot stop it.”

The Davis study-in, like several of California’s fall occupations, boasts a solid lineup of events and activities. You can learn more from the Our University blog, or from the @OurUCD Twitter feed.

Correction: Katehi is the chancellor of UC Davis, not its president. I always screw that up.