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“The fact that barely committed actors cannot click their way to a better world does not mean that committed actors cannot use social media effectively. … Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, exile, or kill users in response.”

–Clay Shirky

Brad Weiner, Dean of the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras, has a new blogpost up at Huffington Post attacking the UPR student strikers and defending the decision to bring police onto campus. There’s already a vigorous debate over his claims beginning to heat up in comments to his post, but there’s one piece of his argument that’s worth looking at in detail.

Weiner writes:

Many of the recent UPR student conflicts have received national and even international attention. As a result, my stateside colleagues invariably have many questions. I always try to carefully explain the issues. Inevitably, I get the following question: “How much do students at the University of Puerto Rico pay for tuition and fees?” My answer: $1200-$1500, depending on the number of credits. Per semester? No, per year. At that point, the discussion usually ends in disbelief because they cannot believe (1) how low the tuition and fees are, and (2) how it possibly can be an issue, given the cost of higher education everywhere else, including other institutions in Puerto Rico.

But tuition isn’t the only cost of attending a university — there are mandatory fees to be paid as well. And according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, in-state tuition and fees at UPR Rio Piedras last year were actually $1,814, not “$1200-$1500.”

That’s still pretty good, though, right? Well, sort of. Because as Weiner surely knows — but many of his stateside colleagues presumably do not — income in Puerto Rico lags far behind that of households in the continental United States. According to the census bureau, in fact, median household income there is only $17,500 — less than 35% of the national average of $50,221.

The national average tuition and fees at four-year public colleges, according to the Chronicle, is $6,633. That means that UPR’s planned $800 a year tuition hike would push UPR tuition up to 104% of the income-adjusted national average, and it would do so by hiking tuition the stateside equivalent of nearly $2,300 a year.

And there’s one more thing that needs to be understood — comparing income medians between Puerto Rico and the United States as a whole is a bit deceptive, because income inequality in Puerto Rico is much higher. The Gini Coefficient, a standard measure of the gap between the rich and the poor, is 0.469 across the US. In Puerto Rico, it’s 0.532, a number higher than any American state.

So yes, tuition and fees at UPR are pretty low right now by national standards. But what’s being planned would change that dramatically, and would do so abruptly and in the middle of a very tough financial climate.

Update | Victor Sanchez of the United States Student Association tweeted the following response to this piece: “Tuition is low, comparable to what? Other public institutions? Ha! #sameoldassargument #privatization.” Victor makes an excellent point, and it’s one worth expanding to more than 140 characters.

By definition, about half of all universities are going to have tuition lower than the national average at any given time — that’s how averages work. If every institution with below-average tuition raises their prices to the national average, the national average will go up. And suddenly all the institutions that had already had national-average tuition will be below average, and have a new justification for raising their tuition. A chase to the national average will produce an unending rapid upward spiral in college costs.

And of course it’s not just institutions with below-average tuition who are raising their rates. The University of California, long one of the nation’s more expensive public universities, has been raising rates through the roof recently. And with each California tuition hike, the national average — and thus the benchmark for what’s “reasonable” — rises accordingly.

If tuition costs are going to be kept to any sort of limits, some of the institutions with below-average tuition costs are going to have to stay below average. That’s not politics. It’s just math.

The “honeypot” explanation for the rape allegations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — the theory that his accusers had been CIA plants, recruited for the purpose of seducing him and crying rape — was always a weird one.

The whole thing had a bit of an Ian Fleming vibe, for starters. The one accuser’s supposed links to the CIA turned out to be embarrassingly tenuous. And then there was the problem of the scripting — if these women had been sent to lie, why wouldn’t they have been sent with a simpler, cleaner lie? Why not claim rapes that would be immediately understood by all as rapes, rather than assaults that would themselves become the subject of heated dispute?

The stories circulated, though, as stories do, and they wound up getting passed along by some pretty prominent people. One of Assange’s lawyers speculated that they might be true. Bianca Jagger tweeted about it all — and was notoriously retweeted by Keith Olbermann.

But now Assange has come out with his own explanation for the charges, and he dismisses the honeypot theory — which he calls “that kind of classic Russian-Moscow thing” — as “not probable.” (He claims that the women who accused him were in a “tizzy” because of STD fears, and were “bamboozled” by police, for what that’s worth. He also suggests that his lawyer was misquoted.)

This winter’s student strike against tuition hikes at the University of Puerto Rico saw new levels of violence yesterday, as protesters claimed that students were viciously beaten by police and cops claimed eight police officers were left injured.

Police have been stationed on UPR campuses this month for the first time in more than three decades — a strike this spring left the university closed for 54 days, and university officials and politicians are desperate to avoid a replay of that outcome. A week ago, a local court banned demonstrations on university property.

Cops say that yesterday’s clashes began late in the afternoon when activists lit smoke bombs in an attempt to clear classrooms, and escalated as students threw rocks and other objects at police.

It has been reported that one student protester’s shoulder was dislocated by police, and urgent messages on Twitter last night spoke of intense fear and anger at police behavior. A second clash between police and demonstrators is said to have taken place at a police station later in the evening.

“Consent” means words or overt actions by a person indicating a freely given present agreement to perform a particular sexual act with the actor. Consent does not mean the existence of a prior or current social relationship between the actor and the complainant or that the complainant failed to resist a particular sexual act.

–Minnesota state code, section 609.341/4b