Michael Bérubé, an incisive observer of the American campus scene, observes the Penn State scandal from an extraordinary perspective. Berube is not just a Penn State scholar, he holds a professorship endowed by Joe Paterno. He has discussed Moby Dick with JoePa, and disability issues with Paterno’s wife — a longtime supporter of the Special Olympics.

And as Bérubé noted in yesterday’s New York Times, PSU has stood for decades as an exception to the collegiate rule that athletic excellence had to come at the expense of academics, and it has done so in no small part because of Paterno himself:

Joe Paterno — author of the “Grand Experiment” that sought to uphold academic standards in a major football program, the English major from Brown, the coach whose favorite poet is Virgil and who said, after his first national championship, that Penn State had to improve its library because “you can’t have a great university without a great library.” He and his wife, Sue, led the capital campaign that quadrupled the library’s size; the new wing bears their name.

Mr. Paterno and three university presidents — Bryce Jordan, Joab L. Thomas and Graham B. Spanier — were determined to compete with their counterparts in the Big Ten off the field as well as on.

Bérubé decries Penn State’s status as a “top down” university in which decisions were made at the highest levels rather than by a community of scholars, and suggests that a commitment to shared governance might have stopped Jerry Sandusky earlier: “Perhaps if a faculty ethics committee had been informed about Mr. Sandusky in 2002,” he offers, “one of us could have advised administrators to inquire more aggressively into the case instead of circling the football program’s wagons.”

But as worthy a principle as shared governance is, there’s little indication that it would have saved Penn State, or Sandusky’s victims. Given that the administrators who covered up Sandusky’s crimes did so in the face of a legal obligation that they inform the police (as well as, you know, the fact that they were letting a child rapist roam free) it’s hard to imagine that an ethics committee’s guideline’s would have swayed them.

So what can we do to keep something like this happening again? More on that next week.

On November 17, 1939, the Nazis executed nine Czech student leaders, sent 1200 more to concentration camps, and closed down all of Czechoslovakia’s colleges and universities indefinitely.

On November 17, 1973, the Greek junta staged a tank attack on Athens Polytechnic to put down an uprising by Athenian students against the regime. At least two dozen people died in the vicinity of the university that night.

Since 1941, November 17 has been celebrated as International Students Day, and on this International Students Day demonstrations are breaking out all over:

• I’ve been on Twitter this morning talking about the Occupy Wall Street actions.
• Italian students are rioting against education cuts in Milan.
• Some thirty thousand Greeks took to the streets of Athens in a march commemorating the anniversary of the 1973 attack.
• Protesters in Portland, Oregon were arrested early this morning after they occupied a local bridge. CNN video now showing a much larger group.

And later today students at some eighty American colleges and universities are planning student strikes and other actions.

I’ll have more in a bit.

For the fourth time in barely a year, and in the face of intense student protests, the trustees of the California State University voted to raise that system’s tuition rates.

But this vote was different than the ones that went before.

On November 10, 2010, the trustees approved a mid-year tuition hike of five percent and a 2011-12 increase of ten percent on top of that. This July they increased Fall 2011 tuition an additional 12 percent beyond what they’d already agreed to. Today’s vote increases 2012-13 tuition by another nine percent on top of that.

In all, that comes to an aggregate increase of 41% in just three semesters.

But here’s the interesting part: The November 10 mid-year increase was approved by a vote of 14-2, with the only two dissents coming from the state’s lieutenant governor and the board’s student trustee. The first 2011-12 hike was approved by a 13-3 vote, and the July increase passed by a 13-2 margin.

Today’s vote? Nine to six.

Four trustees flipped from yes to no since the board’s last tuition vote. If just two of the remaining nine had joined them, this hike would have been rejected.

Yesterday morning Duarte Square seemed like a perfect backup for Zuccotti Park’s displaced Occupy Wall Street occupiers. It’s a roomy open space just a mile from Zuccotti, with good access to public transit, local shops, and City Hall. Best of all, half of the empty square is owned by Trinity Church, an Episcopalian congregation that’s been supportive of OWS in the past. (The other half is city property.)

So when OWS organizers gathered at Foley Plaza after the late-night raid on the Zuccotti Park encampment and proposed a march to Duarte, it made a hell of a lot of sense. Several hundred people, including myself, made that march. We arrived not long after nine o’clock and gathered in the city-owned half of the plaza, on the other side of a locked fence from the Trinity-owned area.

Before the march left Foley Square word had gone out that a judge had ordered the police to allow OWS back into Zuccotti, though, and there had already been some sentiment in favor of marching back there. That sentiment grew after we arrived at Duarte, but organizers told the group that a delegation of interfaith leaders was on their way to meet us, and that prospects were good for Trinity Church to give permission to occupy. A significant part of the crowd peeled off to head back to Zuccotti to test the court order, but most of the group remained.

After a while the interfaith group arrived, and one of their members reiterated that discussions with Trinity were underway. He gave no indication of how those talks were going, though, or when they were likely to end.

At about eleven o’clock I left to recharge my phone, and while I was gone a gate in the fence was broken open. It’s not clear whether the folks who breached the fence knew that they were crossing from city-owned land into Trinity’s property — that distinction had not been made clear in any of the announcements I heard — or exactly how the decision came about, though a report in the New York Times suggests that it was an extemporaneous decision by a few people acting on their own initiative.

By the time I returned to Duarte a little while later cops were massing and a few dozen people were on Trinity property. Far more remained on the outside of the fence, or straddling it. Confusion persisted as to the status of the church negotiations, with some reports on twitter suggesting that permission to occupy had already been granted.

Ultimately police announced that permission had been denied, and moved in to make arrests in the enclosed space. Some occupiers scrambled over the fence to safety, while a dozen or so (and a few journalists) did not. Even as the arrests were beginning, OWS people were still attempting to secure a reprieve from Trinity.

So what happened here, and why?

It’s not at all clear. Trinity Church has released two statements saying that they never granted OWS permission to enter their property, but neither of those statements specifies whether arrests were made at their request. It is possible that Trinity informed the NYPD that OWS was on their property without authorization, and NYPD conducted the arrests on their own initiative.

But it also remains unclear why OWS was in Duarte Square at all yesterday morning.

If the hope was to convince Trinity Church to agree, on a friendly basis, to allow OWS to set up camp, the breaching of the fence couldn’t have helped that process along. And once we were in Duarte, the breaching of the fence was a predictable event — you put a bunch of bored OWS folks next to a chained-off open space for long enough, and someone’s going to make a move to liberate it.

If, on the other hand, the plan was to establish the occupation of Duarte as a fact on the ground in hope that Trinity would assent … well, that just doesn’t seem likely. The vast majority of the crowd stayed outside the fence yesterday, including all of the interfaith dignitaries. Only one gate was opened up by the occupying group, and their actions gave very little evidence of a coordinated plan.

Right now Zuccotti is open to demonstrators, a magnet for public gatherings, but hostile to permanent encampments. If it stays that way in the coming weeks and months, the occupation of a space like Duarte Square would be a huge boon to OWS. Duarte, or someplace like it, could serve as a home, a kitchen, a retreat, a staging area — as infrastructure for the front-of-the-house setup at Zuccotti. But for that to happen, for a private entity to allow OWS to set up camp, they’ll have to be wooed. And wooing involves building mutual confidence, establishing trustworthiness.

Which is why yesterday leaves me so confused.

November 26 Update | This piece from Josh Harkinson clarifies things a bit. Harkinson says that OWS had been negotiating with Trinity for use of the space, but that those negotiations had broken down. The hope was that Trinity would, faced with the fact of an occupation, reconsider its objections.

Harkinson also confirms that the Duarte Square occupation had been planned for that morning days in advance of the Zuccotti eviction, which explains some of the sense of confusion I picked up on that morning. An action that had been conceived in one context was executed in another, and though the new circumstances actually gave the the original idea new urgency, it also altered the situation enough that various elements of it had to be reassessed on the fly.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, just back from an weeklong trip abroad, has reviewed the video of last week’s police brutality on campus and declared them “very disturbing” and “unworthy of us as a university community.” He has further declared that

“We can best move forward by granting amnesty from action under the Student Code of Conduct to all Berkeley students who were arrested and cited solely for attempting to block the police in removing the Occupy Cal encampment on Wednesday, Nov. 9. We will do so immediately.”

While this sounds like good news, it raises a number of questions. First, and most pressing, is whether the criminal charges against those arrested last week will go forward. Second is how many of those cited were cited “solely for attempting to block the police in removing the Occupy Cal encampment.” And third is whether this marks a change in policy or just a tactical retreat.

More soon.