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University of California administrators have been moving on several different fronts this week to end the occupation of the Gill Tract, a 15-acre experimental farm not far from the UC Berkeley campus.

Activists have been occupying the farm since April 22. As one occupation organizer puts it,

The University of California’s public mission as a Land Grant institution is to promote community involvement and initiatives in agriculture. Nonetheless, institutional attempts to ensure the university fulfills this promise have not been successful. It is only with the recent land occupation that the University has proposed to hold a series of workshops to explore the possibilities for “metropolitan agricultural initiatives” on the Gill Tract.

But the university has refused to move forward with those initiatives until the occupiers leave the land, and over the last few days they’ve been ratcheting up the pressure. On Wednesday the UC Board of Regents filed suit against the group, looking for a restraining order and injunction against the occupation. They also put up concrete barricades to block vehicular traffic from the site.

Yesterday the university went further, closing and locking both of the farm’s gates. So far, police have not attempted to prevent occupiers from climbing over fences to get in and out of the site. Organizers feared that a police raid was imminent last night, but so far none has materialized.

The occupiers’ website is at takebackthetract.com. Twitter updates can be found at #occupythefarm.

Mitt Romney has a problem.

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that in 1965, when he was a high school senior, Romney organized a group of his fellow students in a physical assault on a gay classmate, John Lauber. When Lauber, who was closeted at the time, appeared on campus one spring wearing his hair longer than usual, and dyed blond, Romney reportedly put together a posse who grabbed him and held him down, screaming and crying, while Romney cut his hair with a pair of scissors.

Four of Romney’s classmates confirmed the story to the Post, including one who says he participated in the assault.

Of course, 1965 was a long time ago, and few of us would want to be judged on the basis of our worst moments in high school. But this was a physical assault, an act of bullying that participants and witnesses remember as “senseless” and “vicious.” In the era of Tyler Clementi and “it gets better,” it’s an incident that demands a response.

There are three ways to address a story like this. The first, obviously, is to deny it, which Romney doesn’t do. He says he doesn’t remember it, but doesn’t dispute that it happened. That leaves two choices: acknowledge that the incident was serious and express real remorse, or dismiss it as insignificant.

You can’t do both. If the attack was wrong, you can’t brush it aside. Non-conforming kids are still getting brutalized today, and you can’t stand up against that kind of bullying if you don’t take it seriously in your own past. Conversely, any defense that rests on a claim that the story isn’t important because Romney has evolved as a person since high school has to be accompanied by some indication of what that evolution has entailed.

So far, Romney has tried to blow the story off. He’s offered a variety of conditional, vague apologies, but ducked a reporter who asked him whether he’d characterize the incident as one of bullying, and giggled his way through the first interview in which the issue came up. He’s going through the motions of expressing contrition, but making it clear that he’s eager to move on to more serious issues.

And his supporters are following his lead. Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review has dismissed the story as “silly” and “trivial.” A Breitbart columnist has gone so far as to suggest that Romney was merely enforcing the school’s dress code.

I don’t think this approach is going to fly. Teen violence is a recognized problem in this country, and Romney’s equivocation gives comfort to its apologists. On the National Review website, one commenter declared that “we all have such episodes in our past,” while another suggested that the story “makes it sound like he was a normal red-blooded American male teenager and makes him more likable.” As long as Romney continues to minimize his actions, he’s effectively endorsing these defenses and normalizing his behavior.

When Mitt Romney was a high school senior at Michigan’s prestigious Cranbrook School in 1965, one of his classmates was a kid named John Lauber. A transfer student and a junior, Lauber was soft-spoken, non-conformist, and gay.

After spring break that year, Lauber returned to the boarding school’s campus with his longish hair bleached blond. Here’s how one of Romney’s close friends from school remembers what happened next:

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann. … Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors…

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

Five of Romney’s schoolmates described the incident to the Washington Post recently, four of them on the record. Each talked to the paper independently, and each recounted essentially the same version of events. One of the four, who says he helped hold Lauber down while Romney attacked him, says he still regrets the attack half a century later, calling it “senseless, stupid, idiotic.”

A Romney campaign representative declined to deny the accounts, telling the Post merely that they “seem exaggerated and off base,” and that the nominee “has no memory of participating in these incidents.” The campaign refused to comment further. (see 10:40 update below)

The Post uncovered other similar — though less horrific — incidents from Romney’s high school years as well. One gay classmate, who like Lauber was then closeted, says Romney would shout “Atta girl!” when he would speak in class. Another classmate remembers an incident in which Romney guided a teacher with limited vision into a closed door, causing the teacher to slam into it.

As for Lauber, he left campus for several days after the incident, and when he returned his hair had been cut short and dyed brown. He was later expelled when a classmate reported him to the administration for smoking a cigarette on school grounds. He came out as gay a few years later, and died of liver cancer in 2004. According to his sister, he bleached his hair blond again after leaving Cranbrook, and kept it that way for the rest of his life.

10:40 am update | In a new statement following the publication of the Washington Post report, Romney again declines to dispute it, and in fact appears to concede the essential accuracy of his classmates’ accounts: “Back in high school I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended by that I apologize.”

11:20 update | The above Romney quote comes from a radio interview he gave this morning. Here’s the rest of what he had to say:

Twice he apologized, but in general terms and conditionally. “I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that,” he said, and “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school and some might have gone too far and for that, I apologize,” and “if there’s anything I said that is offensive to someone, I certainly am sorry for that, very deeply sorry for that.”

“If anybody was hurt … or offended.” “Some might have gone too far.” “If there’s anything I said that is offensive to someone.”

Here’s how Romney responded to the specific allegation that he and a group of friends held John Lauber down and chopped off his hair with a pair of scissors:

“I don’t remember that incident,” Romney said, laughing. “I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.”

The idea that in 1965, American teenagers weren’t aware of the existence of gay people, or that there wouldn’t any association in such teens’ minds between a boy’s long, bleached-blond hair and homosexuality, is of course preposterous.

11:50 update | Here’s how future president George W Bush responded to a friend who was mocking someone for being gay in 1965:

A few of us were in the common room one night. It was 1965, I believe — my junior year, his sophomore. We were making our usual sarcastic commentaries on those who walked by us. A little nasty perhaps, but always with a touch of humor. On this occasion, however, someone we all believed to be gay walked by, although the word we used in those days was “queer.” Someone, I’m sorry to say, snidely used that word as he walked by. George heard it and, most uncharacteristically, snapped: “Shut up.” Then he said, in words I can remember almost verbatim: “Why don’t you try walking in his shoes for a while and see how it feels before you make a comment like that?”

“People say, ‘Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!’ As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. I say, ‘You are in touch, lady — you’re mean to your kids, you treat your husband like shit, you lie, you’re selfish … That is your childhood self!’

“In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It’s vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly. I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew…

“It would scare them.”

—Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

After a week of reputation-damaging equivocation and demurral, the Chronicle of Higher Education has sacked Naomi Schaefer Riley, the blogger responsible for its recent black studies embarrassment.

“We now agree,” Chronicle editor Liz McMillen wrote this evening, “that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet the Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog.”

The mea culpa didn’t end there, either. “My Editor’s Note last week inviting you to debate the posting also seemed to elevate it to the level of informed opinion, which it was not,” said McMillen. I also realize that, as the controversy unfolded last week, our response on Twitter did not accurately convey The Chronicle’s message.”

That last bit is a barely-veiled reference to the disaster that was Chronicle Editorial Promotions Manager Amy Lynn Alexander’s jaw-droppingly unprofessional Twitter response to the crisis late last week.