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Students are conducting administration building occupations in at least seven eleven of the 23 campuses of the California State University system. The student activists are protesting budget cuts and demanding the resignation of the Cal State chancellor, Charles B. Reed.
Reports on Twitter show that occupations are currently underway at San Francisco State, Northridge, Sacramento, Monterey Bay, East Bay, Pomona, and San Jose. Activists are tweeting live from the scene of the various occupations using the #Apr13 hashtag.
I’ll be liveblogging as the situation develops, so be sure to check back in over the course of the afternoon and evening.
Update: 4 pm Pacific Time | The occupations currently underway are part of a statewide day of protest throughout the CSU system. According to this article, student/faculty demonstrations were planned for all of the Cal State campuses today.
4:10 pm | CSU Fresno students held an occupation this afternoon, bringing the total to eight campuses. According to a report from @alexandrasaras on Twitter, about eighty students participated, shutting down at least part of the building for about two hours. The CSUF president wasn’t on campus today, but protesters have been promised a meeting with her tomorrow.
4:50 pm | Looks like most of the occupations are winding down, with students making plans for future actions in coming days and weeks. Reports on Twitter suggest that there have been occupations at as many as eleven CSU campuses this afternoon, with a twelfth — Long Beach — seeing the admin building shut down to keep students out. More soon.
5:40 pm | The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says eight hundred students marched on the administration building at CSU Long Beach. News reports are also coming in from San Jose, Bakersfield, San Francisco, and Stanislaus, among others.
6:00 am | Although almost all of yesterday’s occupations ended voluntarily after a few hours, students at Sacramento State kept their occupation going overnight. They’re still there, and are gearing up for a Day Two rally when the administration building officially re-opens at seven o’clock. Local media are apparently on their way.
There’s a fascinating piece up today at The Chronicle‘s website on a new trend in student course evaluation — “smart” recommendation systems.
The premise is that course evaluations, on their own, don’t tell provide you with as much information as they could about how you’re likely to respond to (and how well you’re likely to do in) a particular class. If most of the folks taking “Immigration in America” are upper-level Sociology majors, and you’re a Bio student looking to fill out a distribution requirement, the fact that the prof gets high ratings for clarity doesn’t tell you a lot about whether you’re likely to sink or swim.
A smart course recommendation system, on the other hand, can pull out course evaluations from students like you — same year, same major, even similar GPAs — to see how folks in your position responded to a given class or professor. As the Chronicle notes, it’s basically applying the Netflix “our best guess for you” approach to movie ratings to the world of academic advising.
While writing my dissertation, I uncovered evidence that student course evaluations first appeared in the late 1940s as a program of the National Student Association, a student-run organization that eventually grew to be one of the largest and most important student activist groups in American history. The course evaluation program at my own alma mater, in fact, started as an NSA-inspired project.
Student course evaluations have since been adopted by colleges and universities themselves, of course, even as sites like Rate My Professor have sprung up to provide students with franker, less filtered feedback. But as someone who is now on the receiving end of such evaluations, I know that they’re still often frustratingly vague and incomplete, and this kind of demographic number crunching strikes me as a big step in the direction of making them more valuable for everyone.
Seven students were arrested yesterday at a demonstration against a ban on the admission of undocumented students to some state universities in Georgia. All of those arrested are reportedly undocumented themselves, and they may face deportation as a result of their protest.
The arrests came at the end of a rally and march that drew more than a hundred people in support of the DREAM Act and in opposition to a ban on admission of undocumented students to University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, Georgia College & State University and the Medical College of Georgia. The students called upon GSU president Mark Becker to refuse to comply with the ban, which was implemented by the state board of regents last fall.
Only five of the nearly forty state colleges and universities in Georgia are covered by the ban, but new regulations require all public colleges and universities in the state to determine students’ residency status. Undocumented students in the state are charged out-of-state tuition, however long they have lived in Georgia.
Seven of the nine students who “occupied” a high ledge on the face of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall last month have been charged with trespassing.
The Wheeler ledge action was the first Berkeley protest in recent memory to end in a negotiated settlement with the university, as administrators agreed to drop conduct charges against students who had participated in previous protests … and to forego such charges against the ledge protesters themselves.
But although Berkeley’s chief of police apparently promised one student that he would recommend against criminal charges, that promise was not part of the formal agreement. The students were cited and released when they came down off the ledge, and misdemeanor charges of “trespass with intent to interfere” were brought yesterday.
The seven students who now face charges have previously been arrested in Berkeley protests. The other two, who have not been arrested in the past, were not charged.
See my previous post on the ledge occupation for more on that action.
Several thousand students marched through downtown Montreal on Thursday, demonstrating against government plans to raise tuition for local colleges and universities by more than $1600 over the next five years.
Police say they used pepper spray and stun grenades after a “scuffle” with protesters outside a government building, but one activist who witnessed the events says that students did nothing to provoke the cops.
studentactivism.net 
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