When students at San Francisco State University took over that campus’s business school building in December, the university responded with force. Administrators brought police from campuses across the state to the scene, broke a window to gain access, and arrested eleven student activists.

In the weeks after the arrests, administrators and students worked out a deal to resolve the charges. Ten of the eleven students signed on to the agreement — admitting their participation in the occupation, accepting a semester’s academic probation, and promising to pay the university restitution for damage.

No exact figure for the restitution was agreed upon, but students were promised that the amount would be minimal. Students say they were told they would be charged for minor physical damage like scratches to walls, and that the total assessment would be no more than $50 per student.

But when the university finally billed the group not long ago, the figure was nearly fifteen times that high — $744.25 per student, $8,186.71 in total. The fee included not just cleanup from the damage done by the students themselves, but also the replacement of the window the cops chose to break and even the lodging costs for housing non-local police.

Reached for comment this week, university spokesperson Ellen Griffin acknowledged that the university had promised the students that charges would be minimal. “$8,000 would seem to be a minimal charge,” she said.

SFSU’s approach to the December occupation has a parallel at UC Berkeley, where administrators claimed in a campus newspaper article yesterday that the year’s protests had cost Berkeley “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” That tally included everything from overtime for police and maintenance workers to $2,631 to replace decorative planters.

But there are two problems with this line of reasoning, above and beyond a general healthy skepticism about the specific dollar figures put forward.

First, student protest is a legitimate and appropriate campus activity. Students rally. They march. And yes, sometimes they take over buildings. They always have, and they always will. The costs associated with such activities are intrinsic, not extrinsic, to the university’s basic functioning.

Second, administrators must take responsibility for their own decisions. When a protester breaks a window, as one did at the residence of the Berkeley chancellor on December 11, that act — right or wrong — is the moral and legal responsibility of the protester in question. But when an administrator directs a campus police officer to break a window, as one did at the SFSU business building the previous day, that is a choice, not an inevitability.

Mere weeks after Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau invited campus activists to “occupy any space they like,” universities across the UC and CSU systems adopted a harsh, punitive — and expensive — stance in opposition to such protests. That stance was not merely reactive. It was not merely defensive. It reflected and advanced a particular vision of the university and of students’ place in it.

I have argued in the past that it would have been better for the university to have handled these protests differently. It’s important to remember, as administrators put forward this new line of attack, that it would have been cheaper, too.

Update: I don’t have any independent confirmation of this yet, but over on Twitter UCSC grad student @BrianMalone writes, “Protestors at UC Santa Cruz charged $972 EACH for Kerr Hall occupation. No news story yet, but check it out.”

Anyone know anything?

“The defendants’ argument that the interest which the plaintiffs have in attending a state university is a mere privilege and not a constitutional right was specifically rejected in the Dixon case, and the Court thinks rightfully so. Whether the interest involved be described as a right or a privilege, the fact remains that it is an interest of almost incalculable value, especially to those students who have already enrolled in the institution and begun the pursuit of their college training.”

—Knight v. State Board of Education (1961), quoted in the ACLU’s must-read April 6 letter to the UC Berkeley administration.

The British newspaper The Guardian is reporting that the country’s Labour Party will endorse a 16-year-old voting age today.

Labour, which is currently in power in Britain, is releasing a new party platform in advance of national elections scheduled for next month. The elections, in which voters will elect the country’s parliament, are expected to be closely fought.

Incumbent prime minister Gordon Brown has endorsed votes for 16-year-olds in the past, as has Britain’s opposition Liberal Democratic party, but this will be the first time that Labour itself has embraced the concept.

A few weeks ago I passed along word that students in Idaho, one of the few states not to have a presence in the national March 4 Day of Action, had held a lobby day at the state capitol. And now comes word that they’re at it again, and upping the ante.

The Idaho Statesman newspaper reported this morning that students from the Idaho Student Association (Facebook, Twitter), a new statewide student group, are planning a sit-in protest at today’s meeting of the state Board of Education. The Board is expected to hike tuition at the state’s public colleges and universities by as much as twelve percent.

I’ll update this post with new info as I get it.

“The first demonstrations we had were just a handful of people. In fact when Dr. King himself went to jail, only fifty-five people would go with him. So, when young people today ask me, ‘When are we going to be able to get together like you all were in the sixties?’ — nobody was ‘together’ in the sixties! It was a small group of dedicated people who got it started…

“And then the kids took it over.”

–Andrew Young, interviewed by Spike Lee for the documentary 4 Little Girls, discussing the Birmingham campaign.