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Neither of these are big stories, but each of them gives a glimpse of the large changes that have taken place in higher education in California in recent months, and the effect that those changes are having on the students of the state:

Two days before Christmas, internet access went out at the Verano Place graduate student housing at UC Irvine. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time, of course, but this time is different — Irvine’s IT staff is on furlough until January 4. One laundry room in the complex has functioning WiFi, and an Engineering building nearly half a mile away has six computers available, but the students staying in Verano over break are apparently out of luck otherwise.

Meanwhile, over at Fresno State, the university is mounting a slate of intensive courses during the January break in an attempt to repair some of the damage done to students’ academic progress by the fall’s massive cutbacks. Students who saw required courses cancelled last semester may be able to make up that lost ground by coming back to campus early and taking intersession classes that meet four hours a day, five days a week, for three weeks. There’s a catch, though — the classes are being run on a revenue-neutral basis, so tuition is nearly double what the university usually charges.

In each of these cases, politicians’ and administrators’ failure to maintain a functioning university is wreaking havoc with students’ lives. Grad students at Irvine who planned to keep their research moving forward during the break are being denied the chance to do so because there’s nobody around to reboot a server, while undergrads at Fresno are scrambling — and paying hefty premiums — for the privilege of disrupting their holidays to take courses they should have had access to last semester. These are real barriers to students’ academic progress, as real as the fee hikes and library closings of the fall.

Higher education in California is crumbling, and students are getting clobbered by the falling debris.

A few days before Christmas, Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl announced that he was shelving plans for a first-in-the-nation city tax on college tuition.

The tuition tax plan, which had drawn intense opposition from students and educational institutions alike, was intended to help close a $15 million annual budget deficit. As Ravenstahl agreed to drop the proposal, Pittsburgh’s universities agreed to bump up their voluntary contributions to the city, and to join with the city government in lobbying the state legislature for increased aid.

But Ravenstahl only ever had commitments from five Pittsburgh’s nine city council members to endorse the tax, and weakness in that support may have led him to cut a deal. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported last week that council support for the plan had begun “to waver” in the run-up to the vote. Crucially, the universities appear to have made no specific pledges of new contributions in exchange for the agreement.

A tuition tax proposal was earlier rumored to be a possibility in Boston, which is currently looking to increase university-based revenue, but Boston mayor Thomas Menino put the kibosh on that idea earlier this month, saying through a spokesperson that “burdening students isn’t what we should be doing.”

Christmas is over, grades have been submitted, and regular posting will begin again tomorrow. If you’ve got news I missed in the last week or so, feel free to leave a comment.

Last week USA Today ran a story on several recent campaigns to save people who were brought to the United States as children by their parents, from deportation as adults. Their headline? “Groups Try to Delay Deportations of Illegal Students.”

USA Today, like many media outlets (but unlike Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor) routinely uses the term illegal immigrant rather than the more accurate “undocumented immigrant.” But “illegal students” was an unwelcome novelty.

There are several problems with “illegal immigrant,” beginning with the fact that being in the US without documentation is a violation, not a crime. “Illegal student,” however, is even more problematic, though, because it describes a status that’s virtually non-existent.

Some people do, of course, immigrate to the US illegally, and in that sense those people — about half of all undocumented immigrants — could technically be called illegal immigrants. (The term itself is commonly regarded as offensive, of course, and should be avoided for that reason.) But the term illegal student makes no sense at all. In forty-nine of the fifty states, it’s not a violation of the law for an undocumented immigrant to attend school or college.

Pressure from activists led USA Today to alter their headline, changing “Illegal Students” to “Illegal Immigrant Students,” but organizers are keeping up the pressure on the larger issue of the newspaper’s house style — the website dreamactivist.org is running a contest soliciting “music, creative writing, videos, graphics, and programs” critiquing the concept of the illegal immigrant. The contest carries a $500 first prize and runs through January 10.

“All human beings,” it notes, “regardless of citizenship status, are eligible to participate.”

Site traffic has cratered since Friday, and my list of pre-Christmas chores keeps getting longer. So since y’all aren’t reading and I don’t have time to write, updates are going to be sparse between now and the new year.

I’ve got some stuff coming up, and if big news breaks I’ll be on top of it, but don’t expect a huge amount of volume over the next week or so.