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This semester has seen students at three large Texas universities publicly grapple with questions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights.

First the University of North Texas student government shot down a proposal to allow same-sex couples to run for the school’s homecoming court. The vote made headlines and sparked student protest at a subsequent student government meeting, prompting the student senate to put the question to a referendum vote. More than two thousand UNT students voted in favor of the change, but the referendum failed by a 58-42 margin in heavy turnout.

In early December, the student government at Southern Methodist University divided over a plan to add a special interest seat for “Sexual Orientation and Gender Equity” to its student senate. (The 47-member senate currently includes seats for African American, Latino, Asian, and international students.) A proposal to send that question to a referendum failed in a 19-19 vote of the senate, needing a three-quarters majority for passage. The question appears likely to go to a referendum anyway, as supporters have vowed to gather the 1100 signatures needed to authorize a vote without senate approval.

At about the same time, the UT Austin student government passed a resolution in support of extending partnership benefits to UT employees in same-sex relationships. The vote there was overwhelming — twenty-four in favor and one opposed, with one abstention. Supporters argued that the measure was not only a matter of decency but also of university competitiveness: “The University of Texas wants to be the best public university in the country,” one said, “but it’s working with one hand tied behind its back in terms of recruiting.”

None of these campaigns won concrete victories for LGBT rights. Two of the reform efforts came up short, and the question of partnership benefits for employees will be decided by UT’s regents, not its students. But the fact that supporters of equality have been able to build such substantial support on each of the three campuses indicates — like last week’s election of an openly lesbian mayor in Houston, Texas’s largest city — that some outsiders’ views of the Lone Star State may be in need of an update.

My post transcribing a speech by “Allie,” a student arrested at Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall on Friday, has generated a lot of response. Many of the early comments, unfortunately, consisted of criticism of the student’s use of the word “fucking,” but as the day has worn on more serious questions have come to the forefront.

One commenter in particular raises objections that I’ve seen a lot around the internet in the last couple of days, and they’re objections that I’d like to take a few minutes to address. The material in italics in this post comes from “David,” and my responses are in regular type.

I don’t see why the girl in this audio clip is so outraged by the arrests. An occupation involves trespassing. That’s part of the point of occupying a building, rather than sitting on the grass.

That’s one point of occupying a building, yes, but it was hardly the only — or even the primary — point of this particular occupation. The Wheeler Hall occupiers didn’t just take over the building. They didn’t barricade themselves in and shut it down. They opened it up. They held concerts and scholarly talks and review sessions and knitting circles. They discussed university reform and the budget crisis and state politics. They turned Wheeler Hall into — as Allie said in her speech — an “alternative model” for the university community. That wouldn’t have been possible if they’d just been sitting on the grass.

Violating the rules wasn’t the point of Wheeler Hall, and in fact some of the Wheeler occupiers were under the impression that they weren’t breaking the rules. On Tuesday evening word went out that the university had given the students permission to use the space through Friday, and students have said that they relied on those assurances when they made the decision to participate in the occupation. Yes, officials say they announced that the occupation wasn’t officially sanctioned, but that announcement was apparently taken as pro forma by some, and missed entirely by others. The doors to Wheeler Hall were open — the fact that someone was sleeping there at five o’clock on Friday morning doesn’t mean they were there to hear any warning that may have been given at another time, on another day.

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The DREAM Act, a bill currently working its way through Congress, is based on a simple premise — that undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children should have the opportunity to remain in the country they have come to call home.

In the service of that goal, the DREAM Act sets out a straightforward path to legal residency. It would make you eligible for permanent resident status if you were brought to the US before the age of fifteen, have lived here for five or more years, have graduated from an American high school, and have been enrolled in college or the armed forces for at least two years.

In the last few days, two individuals’ stories have come to the foreground of the DREAM Act campaign:

On Thursday, the US government announced that it was suspending deportation proceedings against Rigoberto Padilla, a Mexican-born student at the University of Illinois who has lived in Chicago since he was six years old. Padilla, a junior at UIC, became known to immigration authorities after he was picked up by police in a traffic stop in January, and was just six days away from deportation when the government halted the process.

Just as Padilla was receiving that reprieve, however, another young person found herself in his shoes.

Andrea Huerfano is a 24-year-old who has been in the United States since 2001. Her father was seeking political asylum, but he died while his case was pending. Her mother married an American citizen a few years later, gaining citizenship for herself and Andrea’s younger brother, but Andrea had by then turned 18, so she remained undocumented.

Huerfano graduated from Florida State University in 2008, with a degree in international studies. She was paying a traffic ticket last Tuesday when she was taken into custody by immigration officials. Huerfano was active in DREAM Act organizing as an undergraduate, and has worked on a variety of voter education and GOTV projects since graduation.

Padilla’s second chance came as a result of a yearlong campaign on his behalf, and now DREAM Activist, a group set up to push for the DREAM Act, has taken up her cause. You can find out more at their site or on Facebook.

Monday Update | According to a message sent out from the Facebook group Halt the Deportation of Student Activist Andrea Huerfano, immigration authorities have agreed to release Huerfano and give her a six month stay of removal. Details when I get them.

An audio recording from last night’s pre-concert rally has been released, and it’s well worth listening to. It’s a female student who was arrested yesterday morning at Wheeler Hall talking about the arrests, the occupation, and the larger movement. She’s incredibly angry — you should know there’s a lot of cursing, if that bothers you — but she has every right to be.

The university should be held accountable for the decision to shut down the Wheeler Hall open university early, without warning, and in violation of previous understandings. They should be held accountable for the decision to arrest the students at Wheeler. They should be held accountable for the decision to give no dispersal order. They should be held accountable for the decision not to cite and release the arrestees locally. They should be held accountable for the decision to cart them to a jail thirty miles away, in another county, where they were held for more than eight hours.

Audio is here, and a full transcript, edited very lightly for clarity, is below.

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As I posted earlier, during the course of a march on the home of UC Berkeley’s chancellor last night, some of the marchers broke windows, lights, and planters at the residence. Some are also alleged to have thrown burning torches at the home and at police.

I’ve posted some general thoughts on the question of property damage and violence against individuals as protest tactics, but someone at Occupy California has put up a defense of last night’s rioting that I want to respond to directly.

Here’s the relevant passage:

The Chancellor, although not the sole contributor to the crisis we face now, was directly involved in the unjust arrests of Wheeler Hall in the morning and continues to threaten the futures of the stakeholders of the University of California, Berkeley. He is … a powerful and influential individual that refuses to accept both the project that Live Week attempted to create and the fact that he shares a part of the blame, no matter who he can point his finger at. … As the events unrolled during the evening, it was clear that many are aware of the lack of faith the Chancellor has for the students and many have become aware of the power that individuals have, due to promise that Live Week fulfilled, to create a space for people to come together.

Although some may attempt to paint the evening as a night of petty violence, this event reveals a refusal to accept the university’s actions and the physically violent police repression in passivity. The property damage incurred may seem ruthlessly aberrant and scarring on a university already suffering budget woes, but the damage incurred by the silencing of stakeholders Friday morning exceeds beyond any value the university can place on some broken glass and ceramics.

Two things.

First, throwing a planter at the window of someone’s home while there are people inside is not merely an act of vandalism. It is an act of assault. The person or people who attempted to break the chancellor’s windows could not have known whether the glass would hold or whether there was someone on the other side of the glass.

Attempting to smash the windows of someone’s home is not just “property damage.” It is not just “scarring on a university.” It is an attack on the people inside that home.

Second, the question of whether the chancellor “shares a part of the blame” for the arrests at Wheeler or the university’s budget crisis is not the issue here. He obviously does. The question is whether attacking his home with him and his wife inside it is an appropriate response to his misdeeds.

Again, this was not just a matter of some spray-paint or a few broken planters. The chancellor said this morning that he and his wife feared for their personal safety last night, and I believe him. He had reason to fear. There were people with torches outside his home, smashing things against it, trying to break in. That’s not just “some broken glass and ceramics.” That’s a violent attack, and it’s outrageous.

Update | In an earlier version of this post, quoted at Inside Higher Ed, I described the attack on the chancellor’s residence as the act of “a violent mob.” That characterization was based in large part on the account posted at Occupy California, but information has since come to light that calls that version of events into question. See this follow-up post for more.