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This post is the sixth in a series of twelve exploring the student activism stories that are likely to make news on the American campus in the 2010-11 academic year.

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Critics of Israeli government policies introduced resolutions in two University of California student governments this spring asking their institutions to divest from several companies that have contracts with the Israeli military. Neither of those resolutions was ultimately enacted, though one — at Berkeley — came close. (It passed by a wide margin, but was vetoed by the student government president, then was debated again several times before falling one vote short of an override.)

Even if they’d passed, the divestment resolutions wouldn’t have had any immediate practical effect. Student governments in UC don’t set university investment policy, after all. But the Berkeley resolution attracted a surprising amount of attention off campus, with Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, and Naomi Klein making public statements of support while an AIPAC official declared that his group would respond by making sure that “pro-Israel students take over the student government” at Berkeley and wherever else such a resolution appeared.

It was all a little weird.

And it all happened weeks before the May 31 raid on an aid ship that was trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. That raid, conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces, left nine dead aboard the ship and sparked widespread international outrage.

A divestment resolution is unlikely to make much headway at Berkeley this year, as much of the new student government’s leadership has already announced its opposition. But given the amount of attention last year’s efforts garnered, and given the fact that a UN investigation of the flotilla raid is expected to release a preliminary report on that incident sometime next month, it seems a safe bet that we’ll be seeing this tactic again soon.

In the past, I’ve written about the undergraduate activities of folks ranging from Sonia Sotomayor to Roger Ebert, but this glimpse into Kentucky senate candidate Rand Paul’s college experiences is a doozy.

Paul, the libertarian son of Congressman Ron Paul, went to Baylor University, a Christian college in Waco, Texas, in the early eighties. While there, he joined an underground student club called the NoZe Brotherhood that regularly mocked the school’s religious values and repressive sexual attitudes.

But that’s not the weird part.

The weird part is something that happened in 1983. He and a NoZe buddy showed up at a female friend’s house, and … well, I’ll let her tell it:

“They blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.”

Then they took her to a creek outside of town:

“They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him. … They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”

The woman, whose name GQ did not reveal, has since said that “force” wasn’t a completely accurate description of what happened to her, telling the Washington Post that she “went along” with the whole thing “because we were friends.” But she says that she and Paul never really spoke after that night.

Paul dropped out of Baylor the following year, for reasons apparently unrelated to the incident. He later went on to medical school without ever earning an undergraduate degree. Since the GQ story broke he has denied ever “kidnapping” or “forcibly drugging people,” but he has not otherwise denied the veracity of the woman’s account.

Yesterday I posted about this week’s balloon drop in the Berkeley lecture halls, and speculated that it might have been the first student protest of the 2010-11 academic year on an American campus.

Nope.

As Berkeley’s Ricardo Gomez points out over at the Student Activism facebook page, students at Cal State Monterey Bay staged a banner drop at a back-to-campus barbecue last Sunday, backing it up with some lit distribution.

Congratulations (and apologies) to the students of CSUMB!

At least, the first I’m aware of.

Student activists at UC Berkeley floated budget stats and contact info into some of the campus’s largest lecture halls on the first day of class this week. Have I missed something, or was this the country’s first student protest of 2010-11?

Saturday Update | Looks like the students of Cal State Monterey Bay beat Berkeley to the punch.

For-profit colleges are pulling in billions in student aid money, while producing questionable educational results, mediocre job placement statistics, and high loan default rates. Such colleges are coming under increasing scrutiny this summer, as federal regulators and government officials take a hard look at their business practices and their use of public money.

I hesitated about putting this story on my top twelve list. Students at for-profit colleges have so far engaged in very little activism themselves, and students at other institutions generally haven’t taken up their cause in any organized way. But this is a big higher education story, and it’s only going to get bigger.

It’s one that’s only going to grow more intertwined with other student activism stories. As the current investigations of for-profit higher ed bear fruit, the huge scale of the funding that’s going to that sector is going to become far better known.

And as this article from Wednesday’s Chronicle of Higher Education makes clear, public-private partnerships that involve for-profit institutions are coming under new scrutiny. (Summary: California’s public community college system was forced this week to abandon an agreement that would have encouraged its students to take courses at Kaplan University.)

For-profit higher education is booming right now, but it may be heading for a fall.

This post is the fifth in a series of twelve exploring the student activism stories that are likely to make news on the American campus in the 2010-11 academic year.