A UC Berkeley hunger strike, now in its eighth day, has turned far more confrontational.

The hunger strikers have been camped out in front of the campus’s California Hall since last weekend, mostly without incident. But around dawn today, word came that Berkeley police would be rousting the group.

Reports on Twitter early this morning suggested that wi-fi had been turned off in the vicinity of the demonstrators as police gathered. It was claimed that the university was planning to turn on lawn sprinklers as a method of crowd dispersal, though that apparently didn’t come to pass — perhaps because campus workers refused to comply with the order.

Shortly before noon Pacific Time, it was reported that a group of protesters had for the first time taken up positions blocking the entrance to California Hall, site of administration offices.

The hunger strikers have a blog called Hungry for Justice, and tweets from the scene have been coming through this morning from @hungry4justice, @callie_hoo, and @shaneboyle. I’ll have more on the story as news develops, both here and on Twitter.

For the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama has chosen a former student activist to sit on the Supreme Court.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan, like justice Sonia Sotomayor, went from the public high schools of New York City to an undergraduate career on Princeton University’s New Jersey campus. And like Sotomayor, Kagan became involved in student organizing while there.

In her junior and senior years Kagan served as the “editorial chairman” of the Daily Princetonian, in which capacity she oversaw the writing and selection of editorials attacking the military draft, calling for an end to single-sex social clubs on campus, and urging the university to create a women’s studies department. One editorial published during her tenure harshly criticized the university’s policy of limiting students’ freedom to bring controversial speakers and organizations to campus.

Each of these editorials was unsigned, and though Kagan surely wrote many — perhaps most — of them herself, there is no way of knowing which. In the spring of her senior year, however, Kagan lent her name and her energy to a prominent student organizing effort on campus when she became part of the “Coordinating Council of the Campaign for a Democratic University.”

Kagan was one of eight members of the Coordinating Council to sign a manifesto for student rights on campus that was published in the Princetonian. Claiming that student consultation on governance issues was a sham and that the administration “ruled” Princeton “by decree,” Kagan and her allies argued that “effective student participation in University governance is a myth,” calling for a “fundamental restructuring” of the university.

One of Kagan’s co-signers on that manifesto, by the way, was Princeton student government president Eliot Spitzer.

We’ll have more on Kagan’s record on student and campus issues, including a discussion of her service as dean of Harvard Law School, in the days and weeks to come.

Update | I’ll have a full post on what all this may mean for Kagan’s likely temperament as a justice tonight or tomorrow, but for now, here’s a comment I just left over at Feministe:

There’s nothing terribly shocking in what I’ve uncovered [about Kagan’s student activist days], but it does seem to lend weight to the arguments made by those who say she’s a politically progressive person who has spent her life working within the constraints of less-progressive institutions, rather than a centrist herself. And that kind of person does tend to blossom on the Court.

Also, I find the fact that she’s a former student newspaper editor who locked horns with the Princeton administration over student freedoms gives me some hope for her prospects of becoming a worthy successor to Justice Stevens on civil liberties issues.

On May 9, 1960, fifty years ago today, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would be granting approval to the birth control pill. As the sixties progressed, sex and gender relations in the United States were irrevocably transformed.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that the Pill created that transformation on its own. As historian Elaine Tyler May notes, it was women’s activism that unlocked “the revolutionary potential of the Pill” — feminism and women’s new ability to control their fertility went hand in hand. But May 9, 1960 was nonetheless a milestone moment in women’s liberation.

A student strike that has shut down the university of Puerto Rico for two weeks shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

English-language reporting on the strike has been almost non-existent — the most recent relevant Google News hit on “university puerto rico protest” is a University of Minnesota campus paper’s April 29 story on the strike’s effect on three U of M students.

But the Puerto Rico Daily Sun (which is in English, but isn’t on Google News, for some reason) is covering the story, and recent developments suggest the strike may continue to drag on for quite a while.

On Monday, the university trustees refused a student offer to negotiate. On Tuesday, police forcibly removed twenty student demonstrators and a journalist from the gates of the university’s Río Piedras campus, injuring six. That afternoon, student representatives delivered an updated list of demands to the university president. On Wednesday some students left the campus and demonstrated at the offices of individual trustees.

More news on this story as I get it — feel free to post links in comments.

May 17 update | My coverage of the situation in Puerto Rico is ongoing — click here and scroll down to see the latest news.

Word out of UC Berkeley this afternoon is that two university employees — a custodian and a gardener — have added their bodies to the campus hunger strike we reported on earlier this week.

The workers, both AFSCME Local 3299 members, are joining about twenty other hunger strikers who have been camped out with several dozen supporters for the last four days.

A planned meeting between representatives of the demonstrators and university administrators was called off yesterday, one activist said, because the administration refused to allow an employee to join student representatives in the sit down.

The demonstrators say they will remain in place until their demands are met, while university officials say they are welcome to remain camped out … as long as they stay awake. If any of them fall asleep at the demonstration site, a campus police representative told the Daily Cal, the nappers will be “lodging” in violation of university rules, and subject to disciplinary action or arrest.