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“We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, ‘Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?’ That’s the answer.

“Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be — have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!

“And that — that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

–Mario Savio

About a hundred and fifty students bearing petitions signed by ten thousand more confronted the Pittsburgh city council yesterday. They were to make their views heard at a public hearing on a tuition tax the council is considering imposing.

If passed, the tuition tax would be the first in the nation — a one percent tax on higher education bills intended to help close the city’s budget gap while doing an end-run around its universities’ tax exempt status.

The bill has been dubbed the “Fair Share Tax,” and its supporters argue that students currently get a free ride, receiving city services without contributing to city revenue. But opponents of the tax note that nearly three quarters of students at city universities already pay real estate taxes (either directly or, as renters, indirectly). They also pay a variety of other taxes and fees — notably, as one student speaker at the hearing pointed out, the seven percent tax on alcohol served in bars and restaurants. “Let’s face it,” grad student Mackenzie Farone told the council, “we are the ones that pay the drink tax.”

Students also point out that the tax would not be covered by financial aid — a poor undergraduate on a full scholarship at Carnegie Mellon would be hit with the same $400 tax as her wealthiest fellow student.

The council is currently split 5-4 on the tax, with five members supporting it. Students are hoping to change one member’s mind before a vote later this month.

If the tax does pass, it is expected to face court challenges, and there is a move underway in the Pennsylvania state legislature to prevent its adoption. Students are also promising to remember councilmembers’ votes when the next city council election rolls around in 2011.

Opponents of the tax have a website here.

Here’s something kind of cool: A new Google Map of American student activism in the 2009-10 academic year.

(The red markers are building occupations, the blue ones are demonstrations, the green ones are strikes, and the yellow ones are other newsworthy stories. A black dot means that one or more students were arrested in connection with the event.)

I’ve still got a lot to do to flesh it out, both in terms of adding more sites of activism and bulking up the information I include on the ones that are already there. I want to plug in links to websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds for as many of the actions as I can, for instance. But it’s well underway, and adding new material will go quicker if y’all are giving me the benefit of your knowledge.

Please feel free to make suggestions for new “pins” or other new info either in comments here or over at Google, and I’ll input what you give me as quickly as I can.

My inspiration for this map, by the way, came from this German map of student occupations. I figured I’d do my own since I wanted to recognize a broader spectrum of actions than they do (and, well, because theirs is in German), but that map is an excellent one with a global reach.

December 1 Update | The Nation has put up a very welcome online article about the map. If you’re interested in more detail about what I’m up to and why, that’s the place to go.

December 4 Update | There are now more than thirty pins in the map, in more than a dozen states, each with a link to media coverage of the event in question. Four of the incidents noted took place after I created the map earlier this week, and there are more updates coming this weekend.

December 8 Update | Closing in on fifty pins, including the new Wheeler Hall occupation at Berkeley and the CSU Stanislaus demonstration from Saturday. The Google Maps interface is annoyingly clunky and slow, but I’m adding new stuff pretty much every day.

January Update | I’m putting up a revised version of the map every Monday now, with a blogpost overview of what’s been added in the previous week. Check the main site on Mondays for new installments.

Back in April, I brought you the saga of a free-speech battle over the screening of sexual material at the University of Maryland. Now that story has another chapter.

This spring, the producers of a big budget porn flick were drumming up publicity by offering their film free for campus screenings, and the student programming board at UM announced plans to take them up on their offer. When word got out, conservatives in the state legislature gave the PR campaign a huge boost by threatening to cut the university’s budget if the movie was shown, and administrators banned the film from campus.

At that point a local campus group called the Student Power Party defied the ban and screened the film on campus … sort of. (They showed the first half hour of the movie, then got bored, turned it off, and talked about freedom of expression for a while.) The legislature backed down from their threat to cut funding to the university immediately, but directed UM’s regents to come up with a policy regulating “the displaying or screening of obscene films and materials” on campus. They gave them a deadline of December 1.

Which is this Tuesday.

As late as last month, the regents were widely expected to comply with the legislature’s order, even going so far as to write up a draft policy, but two weeks ago they announced that they would not be adopting it.

No other state university system in the nation regulates the display of sexually explicit material on campus, and any effort to do so would be certain to face strong constitutional challenges. The regents also concluded that adopting such a policy would “place undue financial and administrative burdens on the system’s campuses,” according to the Baltimore Sun.

It remains unclear whether legislators will punish UM for their defiance, as they had threatened to do, but at least a few are likely to try — State Senator Andy Harris, who was the engine behind the policy in the spring, is running for Congress.

Sunday Update | I have rewritten this post to reflect new information received this evening.

Ten days ago, fifty-one UC Davis students and one professor were arrested in the course of an occupation of Mrak Hall, the Davis administration building. Five days ago, students took over Mrak Hall again, demanding that criminal prosecution of those 52 be abandoned. On Friday afternoon, it looked like they had almost gotten their wish.

The UC Davis administration negotiated an end to the second takeover on Tuesday, agreeing — among other things — to urge the Yolo County DA to set aside all charges against those demonstrators. On Friday it was widely reported that the DA had agreed not to bring charges against 51 of them.

But that’s not quite what happened.

The charges against the “Mrak 51” haven’t been dropped, they’ve just been set aside, and they can be brought forward again at any time during the coming year. As the DA said in a news release, he hopes “that future student demonstrations will comply with the law and eliminate the need for the district attorney’s involvement.” If students act up again, in other words, last week’s threats of prosecution can be revived.

Meanwhile, charges are going forward against Bree Holmes, a student who was accused of assaulting a police officer during the demonstration. Holmes is said to have been slammed up against a police cruiser while being arrested, and the Davis administration has agreed to conduct a review of the circumstances of her arrest.

Supporters of the Mrak Hall activists will be holding a rally on the UC Davis quad on Monday, November 30 at 2 pm.