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Students in Oregon are stumping for the passage of two ballot measures that would bring millions of dollars of funding to the state’s struggling public colleges and universities.

The referenda, Measures 66 and 67, will be the only items on the ballot on January 26th. Sixty-six would raise income taxes on the wealthy, sixty-seven would increase the minimum corporate tax, and together, they’d bring in more than seven hundred million dollars a year in new state revenue.

Students in Oregon just concluded a major voter registration drive in advance of the election, a drive that was capped off yesterday with supportive visits to three campuses by new Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown.

Now, with three weeks to go before election day, the campaign turns to voter education and GOTV. A poll released last week by supporters of the measures showed each leading with a small majority, but in a special election like this one, turnout is likely to be crucial.

With state budgets in crisis across the country, this referendum will be closely watched in other capitals. We’ll have more on the students’ campaign in the weeks to come.

Random fun fact: Brown, who was elected Secretary of State last November by a 51-46 margin, is the highest-ranking openly bisexual politician in the United States.

I only just got the chance to crack last week’s New Yorker, which has a big article on the University of California financial crisis and the escalating wave of protest at UC Berkeley. There’s a lot to the story, and I’m sure I’ll circle back around to it again, but for now I just want to highlight one quote.

Early in the fall semester Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, told the magazine that students “can occupy any [campus] space they like, that’s fine. Unless they damage a building, in which case they’re breaking the law, and I’d send in the police.”

That was then.

Since Birgenau made that statement, Birgeneau has sent in the police to arrest protesting students three times. On November 20, he sent cops to arrest more than forty students who were occupying Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, though the occupiers had engaged in no property damage or physical violence. On December 11, he directed the police to roust a second occupation of Wheeler, this time while the students — who had kept the doors to the building open for nearly four days — slept. Sixty-six people were arrested in that incident.

It wasn’t until that night — after more than a hundred students demonstrating peacefully had been arrested — that the semester’s first significant incident of property damage took place at Berkeley.

Nice work, chancellor. You’ve managed to create the university you feared.

On New Year’s Eve I posted a list of this site’s sixth through tenth most-read posts of the last year. That list was dominated by the fall’s University of California protests, though a New York City building takeover and Austria’s wave of activism made the cut as well.

California takes the top spot on today’s lineup of the site’s top five posts of 2009, but otherwise this list is a lot more eclectic:

5. Sotomayor’s Student Free Speech Ruling: The Nitty Gritty

Two years before Barack Obama picked Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, the future justice sat on a panel that heard the case of a high school student who was punished by her school for blogging about the school’s administration. I’d written about the case before I’d ever heard of Sotomayor, and when word leaked that she’d been shortlisted for the Court, I revisited it, concluding that though her vote wasn’t one I agreed with, it wasn’t as bad as some observers were making out.

I wrote about Sotomayor four more times after her nomination, by the way, discussing her “wise latina” comment, her relationship with MeChA and La Raza, and her years as a student activist at Princeton.

4. New Google Map of American Student Activism

In late November, inspired by similar maps created by European student activists, I set up a Google Map of American student activism in the 2009-10 academic year. When The Nation ran a very nice blogpost about the map a few days later, traffic and attention really began to spike. Expect a lot more action on that project in the coming months.

3. Kentucky School Bars Gay Students From Bathrooms?

Back in May I got word of a weird situation in of Kentucky — according to media reports, a high school had barred gay and lesbian students from leaving class to use school bathrooms. I wrote up the story, including coverage of a protest against the rule that students had staged, and linked to my post on Twitter, where it got a lot of attention. (I kept digging for more info after posting, by the way, and eventually discovered that the ban on bathroom use was limited to specific students who’d had disciplinary issues in the past.)

2. Why Julea Ward Was Expelled from EMU

This was another story that went viral in an unexpected way. Julea Ward, a counseling grad student at Eastern Michigan University, was dropped from her program in March 2009 for refusing to treat a gay client who was having relationship trouble. Ward sued the university, and her case became a cause celebre in the right-wing blogosphere. I went back to the court documents and transcripts to reconstruct what had actually happened, and published an analysis of the case that explained (and endorsed) the school’s decision. My post wound up getting a bunch of links and critical comments from conservative sites, and it still garners a fair amount of traffic from Google searches.

1. Student Occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall is Fifth in Two Days at UC

I wrote a lot of posts about California in the fall of 2009, a lot of posts about Berkeley, and a lot of posts about the several occupations of Wheeler Hall. But this post, liveblogging the first Wheeler occupation on November 20, attracted nearly twice as many hits as any other.

There are a few reasons for that, but the biggest — which I’ll discuss more in an upcoming piece — was the effectiveness with which the Wheeler protesters used Twitter. Their @ucbprotest feed, which went from a few dozen followers to more than a thousand that day, was a source of solid real-time information on the situation inside and outside Wheeler, the protesters’ motivations and demands, and the larger crisis in the UC system. That feed gave me a lot of the data I passed on to my readers that day, and made Twitter a hub for news and analysis of the UC crisis on a level that it hadn’t been before. It offered a powerful model for student organizing online, one that I expect to see duplicated and improved upon in 2010.

California’s campuses have been as quiet as you’d expect over the break, but the winter quarter begins tomorrow at UC Irvine, and activists there are planning to start the new term up the way the old one ended.

Tomorrow at noon at the flagpoles at UCI, there’s going to be a rally against the UC fee increase. As the event’s Facebook page puts it, “many of us just paid our Winter Quarter fees; but with the new fee hike going into effect, some of our friends and classmates couldn’t,” and the protest is intended to make it clear that “we expect our administrators to do everything they can to reverse the cuts and ease the burden on poor students and students of color and their families.”

The protest organizers will be posting updates to Twitter at @takebackuci.

Wow. It’s been quite a year, both for the blog and for the world of student activism. Just going back over these stories reminded me just how much actually happened (and there was a lot of big stuff that didn’t make the cut, too).

Here’s the first half of my roundup of the ten studentactivism.net stories that got the most attention in 2009:

10. New Occupation Underway at the New School.

One morning in April, a group of activists from New York City’s New School took over an unoccupied building owned by that university. I heard about the occupation via Twitter not long after dawn, and liveblogged the occupation as it unfolded. This was the first American student action to be extensively documented on Twitter as it happened, and — for me, at least — an object lesson in how important it is for student activists to use social media to get their word out early and consistently. (More of my coverage of the New School occupation can be found here and here.)

9. UCSC Students Present 35-Point List of Demands.

This year saw dozens of American campus buildings occupied in California and elsewhere, but few of those takeovers incorporated the kinds of narrow, targeted demand lists that have been common in years past. Instead, knowing that universities were unlikely to negotiate on any substantive issue, activists tended to go in one of two directions — forego demands entirely, or shoot for the moon. The initial demand list from the November UC Santa Cruz occupations of Kerr Hall and Kresge Town Hall, which called for an abolition of the UC Regents and a total amnesty for all student debt, was an example of the latter.

8. Massive Student Protests in Austria.

With so much happening in the US this fall, I didn’t find the time to give Europe’s huge wave of student protest all the attention it deserved. But with a near-total American media blackout on that story, whatever I did write on the topic tended to find an audience through Twitter and Google search. This writeup, my first on the semester’s building occupations in Austria, is still drawing new links and significant traffic.

7. The UC Walkout, Campus By Campus.

November’s protests around the regents’ fee hike got more media attention (and more hits here), but California’s new student movement began in September, in a co-ordinated statewide day of action against UC cutbacks. Ten thousand students participated in the protests, which included Berkeley’s biggest campus rally since Vietnam. The post linked above was my first on the day’s planned events, and I followed it with updates here and here.

6. UCLA Tasers Student Protesters, Then Denies It.

I wrote a lot of stuff about California’s November regents protests, but this post on police violence at UCLA drew more traffic than any other. The police use of Tasers, batons, and pellet weapons at the UCLA regents’ meeting would be replicated and expanded on other campuses in the month that followed, and the university’s willingness to inflict physical violence on student demonstrators is emerging as one of the biggest stories of the current wave of protest.

In Part Two: The top half of the top ten, with stories on Sonia Sotomayor, gay Kentucky high schoolers, a fundamentalist expelled from grad school in Michigan, and the ongoing saga of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. Find it here.