Fill us in on an action you’ve done, a piece you’ve written, an event you’ve got coming up … or just pass along a link to the best thing you’ve read this week.

I’ve had a great time out in Wisconsin the last two days, helping out at the state student association’s annual conference. United Council‘s membership, officers, and staff have all been wonderfully warm and generous, and I’ve had a series of amazing conversations about student government, student activism, and the university that will keep me in blogposts for weeks to come.

I’m getting on a plane back home in a couple of hours, but before I go, I wanted to share something I learned about last night.

Founded in 1960, United Council is the oldest surviving state student association in America. But when it was created most American students didn’t have the right to vote. As a result it, like the SSAs that came in its wake, didn’t really start doing serious lobbying and electoral organizing until 1971, when the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution reduced the voting age from 21 to 18.

One of United Council’s first big victories as an electoral advocacy group came in 1974, when the Wisconsin state legislature passed State Statute 36.09(5). That statute reads, in part…

The students of each institution or campus subject to the responsibilities and powers of the board, the president, the chancellor, and the faculty shall be active participants in the immediate governance of and policy development for such institutions. As such, students shall have the primary responsibility for the formulation and review of policies concerning student life, services, and interests. … The students of each institution or campus shall have the right to organize themselves in a manner they determine and to select their representatives to participate in institutional governance.

Students shall be active participants in university governance and policy development. They shall have the primary responsibility for the formulation and review of policies concerning student life. And they shall have the right to organize themselves in a manner they determine.

Good stuff.

Happy 50th birthday, UC.

All throughout the day on March 4, students throughout the country tweeted updates about local actions on Twitter using the #March4 hashtag. (Hashtags are a way for posters on Twitter to find other people’s posts on a particular subject.)

I posted a bunch of #March4 stuff myself, but at the end of the day, I tweeted that I couldn’t wait for #March5. Someone asked why, I and I said “I can’t wait for #March5 because #March5 is what comes after #March4. #March5 is The Future.”

Well, the future is here.

Early in the morning of Friday, March 5, students at the University of Virginia hung a banner from a campus bridge that read “Public Education Is Under Attack — Stand Up Fight Back.”

There was no huge protest at UVA on March 4, no giant rally, no occupation. But activists on that campus are taking that day’s actions as a spur to something new. They’ll be holding a mass meeting on March 19, in conjunction with protests around a speech by Bush administration “torture memo” author John Yoo, and moving forward from there.

#March5 has arrived.

Posting will be light this morning, as I’m flying out to Madison, Wisconsin to give the keynote address at the Building Unity conference of United Council, Wisconsin’s statewide student association. If you’re near Madison, stop by — I’ll also be speaking at UC’s 50th anniversary gala tomorrow night, and tickets are still available.

If you’re not near Madison, but you are in the Northeast, I’ll be speaking later this month at major student conferences in New York and Washington DC, and I’ll be posting details of both of those events soon.

Most of today’s protests have wound down, or seem likely to in the near future, and the day is coming into clearer focus.

There have been clashes with police. Most notable was the takeover of a freeway in Oakland which ended, one officer estimated, in 150 arrests. One student was injured in that incident, though reports differ as to the severity of his injuries. Students were also arrested or detained in New York, in Michigan, and elsewhere, though rarely in large numbers.

Oakland was not the only place where students took to the streets. One college — UC Santa Cruz — was closed for much of the day after demonstrators blocked both roads onto campus to vehicular traffic. Many other marches spilled off sidewalks onto intersections, even highways, leading a blogger for the Berkeley student newspaper to declare that “freeways are the new buildings when it comes to occupying stuff.”

There weren’t many of those more traditional occupations. Students at UCLA sat in at their chancellor’s office for most of the day, but left peacefully not long ago. At UC Irvine and New York’s Hunter College, students tried and failed to find a space they could take and hold. At the State University of New York at Purchase an occupation was going on this afternoon, but no reports have been heard from it in hours.

At UC San Diego, wracked by racial traumas for weeks, administrators and representatives of the Black Student Union negotiated an agreement that resolved many of the issues that had divided them in the recent past. But UCSD was an exception — today’s protesters rarely articulated immediate demands, and administrators rarely engaged with them. Today was more about activists talking to each other, working with each other, than it was about talking to or working with — or working to overthrow — university power structures.

That part comes later. That part starts March 5.