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Professors at the University of Puerto Rico have called a 24-hour strike in support of student activists who have been subjected to harsh discipline by university officials and police.

Students at UPR have been engaging in actions for a year in opposition to tuition hikes, and the university has moved in recent months to squelch the protests. This week a judge lifted a ban on demonstrations on campus and re-instated a suspended student leader, but new clashes with police followed. Yesterday police “indiscriminately” beat activists with batons in an incident that ended in 21 student arrests.

More info and photos at the Occupy CA blog.

Update | In a strongly-worded editorial, the Puerto Rico Daily Sun is calling on Puerto Rico’s governor to end the police occupation of the UPR campus. Key quote:

As reported by the DREAMActivist blog this morning, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is looking to take another whack at the DREAM Act.

Hutchison voted against the DREAM Act — which would have given some undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children or young teens a path to citizenship through college study or military service — in the lame duck session. At the time, however, she indicated that she might be able to support it if it was limited to “the intended group of children who grew up in the U.S. and attended primary and secondary schools here.”

That was then. Now she’s taking a different approach.

It is, Hutchison says, “a clear-cut issue that we should not deport young people who have been educated in our schools, who many times have a college education, who we encourage to go to college.” But that “we should not deport” has a catch. She doesn’t want to deport them, but she doesn’t want to give them access to citizenship either.

Instead, she wants to allow people who were brought to the United States as children — in some cases as infants or toddlers — to work toward permanent residency, but no more. Under her proposal, someone who had lived their entire life in the US, someone who knew no other home, would have no path toward becoming an American citizen.

Because that, apparently, would be “amnesty.”

I’ve been thinking about the idea of “apathy” a lot recently, and the more I do the more I doubt its usefulness.

A lot of what’s taken for apathy is actually, I think, despair. It’s a nagging, grinding, chronic despair that leads a person to think that what’s wrong will always be wrong and that they can’t play any part in changing it. It’s not apathy, because apathy would mean that they didn’t care. They do care, often, but they’re resigned to things the way they are because they think they’re powerless.

This is something I talk a lot about with students when they bring up the question of campus apathy. I ask them whether the problem is that other students don’t give a damn about the barriers they’re facing, or whether they just assume those barriers are insurmountable. My hunch is that it’s usually mostly the second, even when it looks and sounds like the first.

And it turns out that this is good news. Because if the problem in your community is apathy, you have to convince the people you’re working with to care. If the problem is perceived powerlessness, then your task is very different.

Convincing people that they have power is hard, of course, but it’s easier than browbeating them into giving a damn. And it turns out that the best way to do it is to go out and start making change — which means that the work of activism and the work of movement-building wind up being the same work.

Another important element to this is that many students who get dismissed as apathetic are really just busy. Busy with schoolwork, busy with jobs, busy with their families and friends. Or busy with projects that aren’t your project.

Not everyone has the time or energy to be an activist, and that’s okay. Activists do their work in part so that non-activists can live their lives without having to be activists themselves.

It’s become a commonplace to say that the sixties began on February 1, 1960, when four black students from North Carolina Ag and Tech sat down at the lunch counter of a Greensboro Woolworth’s in defiance of segregation.

But the February 1 sit-in wasn’t the first — students and other young activists had been protesting at lunch counters semi-regularly for years by then. What made Greensboro different is the way that it caught on, the way that it spread.

And it started to spread fifty-one years ago today.

There were lunch counter sit-ins in two new North Carolina cities on February 8. In Durham, more than a dozen black students from North Carolina College, joined by four white students from Duke, sat down in a Woolworth’s in that city. When the store closed at noon, they moved on to a Kress, which closed a few minutes later.

In Winston-Salem, the protest that day started small — really small. Carl Matthews, a recent graduate of Winston-Salem Teachers College, sat down on his own at the lunch counter of that city’s Kress store. When word of his action was reported on the radio, some two dozen other young blacks, mostly college and high school students, joined him.

By the end of the summer, one historian estimates, more than a hundred thousand young people had joined protests against lunch-counter discrimination across the United States. The first great social movement of the American sixties was underway.

The Irvine 11, a group of students accused of disrupting a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador to the US at the University of California at Irvine a year ago, have been indicted on misdemeanor charges.

Prosecutors allege that each of the indicted — who include eight Irvine students and three graduates of UC Riverside — conspired to disrupt the event and then “deliberately and intentionally interrupted Ambassador Oren during his speech one at a time.” Each faces a single misdemeanor count of conspiracy to disturb a meeting as well as a misdemeanor count of the disturbance of a meeting — if convicted, they could face as much as six months in jail.

UC Irvine has already brought disciplinary action against the students involved, as well as suspending the campus Muslim Student Union and placing it on probation.

In an editorial published two days before the indictments came down, the Los Angeles Times argued that bringing charges would be “overkill, a punishment out of proportion to the offense”:

Is it really necessary to threaten the futures of students who engaged in a nonviolent protest that didn’t, ultimately, stop Oren from delivering his remarks? These students have been punished already, in an effort to make clear the difference between legitimate protest and their unacceptable actions. We hope they’ve learned a lesson. Now it’s time to move on.

The students will be arraigned on March 11. All plan to plead not guilty.

Update | Both the Dean of the UC Irvine law school and the ACLU of Southern California have spoken out against the indictments.