The above map, an ongoing project charting all of the events in tomorrow’s March 4 Day of Action, currently includes well over a hundred actions in some thirty-two states, with more being added all the time.

If you click on any “pin” on the map, you’ll be taken to a short description of the action, along with links to further details and contact information for the folks involved.

For new readers, the March 4 Day of Action to Defend Education is a grass-roots event in which students, faculty, and others are coming together around the country to speak and act. The Day of Action was originally conceived in California as a response to the current crisis in higher education in that state, but it has since grown to encompass students and others at educational institutions at all levels in all parts of the country — from Berkeley and San Diego to Portland, Maine and Montgomery, Alabama.

Please see this post for updated information going forward.

Today is a statewide lobby day for higher education in California, with students, faculty, and staff — and even regents and top administrators — descending on the capital to make their case to members of the state assembly and senate.

There’s been a lot of activity in Sacramento today, and I’ll have a full report on it tomorrow, but right now I’m trying to get on top of one breaking story: students are apparently conducting sit-ins at the offices of two state legislators at this moment.

4:00 pm California time | All the info I have so far is coming in via Twitter, so it’s a bit fragmentary, but apparently students are sitting in at the offices of Assemblyman Jim Nielsen (R) and State Senator Darrell Steinberg (D). Twitterer @educatethestate is in the Steinberg offices, and @babysharkie is at the Nielsen sit-in.

4:06 | Tweets from @educatethestate suggest that State Senator Leland Yee has been negotiating with police on students’ behalf at the Steinberg sit-in, seeking to have any arrested students cited and released at the scene rather than being taken to jail for booking. Meanwhile, @babysharkie indicates that five students have just been arrested outside of Nielsen’s offices.

4:11 | The latest tweet from @educatethestate seems to indicate that five more students have been arrested at Senator Steinberg’s offices.

4:45 | Correction: no students were arrested at Steinberg’s offices.

The Guardian, UCSD’s student newspaper, has printed a statement that it says was written by the student who hung a noose in the campus library last week.

The student — who remains anonymous — claims that last Tuesday, two days before the noose was found, a friend of hers fashioned it from a piece of rope she had found on the ground, “without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD.” She herself then carried the noose with her to the library “and ended up hanging it at my desk.” It was, she says, “a mindless act and stupid mistake.” When she left the library hours later, “I simply forgot about it.”

The student says that she didn’t learn of the noose’s discovery until Friday morning. “Ashamed and embarrassed,” she called campus police and confessed. “As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by recent issues on campus,” she writes, “I am distraught to know that I have unintentionally added to their pain.”

An editor’s note at the end of her statement says that the paper “has verified the author’s authenticity.”

The full text of the statement, which at this writing is only available in PDF form at the paper’s website, appears below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I guess I have to address this, since it’s coming up more and more often in comments on my coverage of the UC San Diego situation: There is NO evidence that the black shock-comedian “Jiggaboo Jones” was behind last month’s racist “Compton Cookout” at UCSD. None. Zero.

Here’s the deal.

Sometime in early-to-mid-February, the invitation to the Compton Cookout party was posted on Facebook. As word of the party got around, complaints began to mount, and on February 16 the UCSD administration condemned the event.

On February 18, nearly a week after the party and two days after the scandal broke as a national story, a black comedian who goes by the name “Jiggaboo Jones” posted a video on YouTube claiming that he had thrown the party as a DVD release event. Right-wing websites and fringe journalists leaped to endorse this “debunking” of the story, particularly after subsequent racist incidents at UCSD began to make national news, and the claim has begun to find its way into more mainstream media coverage as well.

But Jones’ story doesn’t hold water, for a long list of reasons:

• His name appears nowhere on the invitation, nor does any mention of any DVD tie-in.
• No media coverage of the party mentioned his name until after he “confessed.”
• Nobody involved with the party has since come forward to confirm his involvement.
• Despite promoting his YouTube posts with promises of video from the party, he’s produced no such video.

A photo of Jones — wearing dark glasses and a Jheri curl wig, and holding a bucket of fried chicken — accompanied the original party invitation, but that’s the only link between him and the party other than his own claims. Again, there was no mention of him in the invitation, and nobody with any known link to the party has suggested that he was involved in any way.

Every piece of evidence that exists suggests that Jones’ claim is exactly what it looks like — a creepy self-promoter’s attempt to turn a thin, random connection to an ugly news story into a few moments of seedy notoriety.

And yes, I recognize that I’ve just given him what he wants, and yes, I’m disgusted by that.

A daylong protest at the UC San Diego chancellor’s office ended inconclusively on Friday evening, as students from the university’s Black Student Union rejected the administration’s response to their demands but chose to withdraw and regroup rather than continue the occupation through the weekend.

The students had been angered by a series of incidents at the UCSD campus — a racist invitation to an off-campus “Compton Cookout” party, a broadcast on student-run television that used racial slurs to mock black student activists, and the hanging of a noose in the university library.

The BSU is set to resume its protest at ten o’clock this morning. I’ll be following the story here as it develops over the course of the day.

9:45 am California time | The UCSD has released a new statement on the campus crisis. It identifies six specific steps that the university has taken in response to the incidents, and affirms the chancellor’s “personal commitment to making diversity issues a continuing campus priority; improving the overall campus climate to welcome and respect differences; improving the compositional diversity of the campus; and developing a curriculum that reflects the multi-cultural richness of the region.”

The statement also contains the news that campus police have been consulting with both local and federal prosecutors on the noose investigation. It makes no mention of the confessed perpetrator’s alleged accomplices.

11:00 am | The Guardian, UCSD’s student newspaper, has printed a statement that it claims is from the student who hanged the noose in the library. She claims that on Tuesday, two days before the noose was found, a friend of hers fashioned it from a piece of rope she had found on the ground, “without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD.” She then carried it with her to the library, “and ended up hanging it at my desk.” It was, she said, “a mindless act and stupid mistake.” When she left the library hours later, “I simply forgot about it.”

The student says that she didn’t learn of the noose’s discovery until Friday morning. “Ashamed and embarrassed,” she called campus police and confessed. “As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by recent issues on campus,” she writes, “I am distraught to know that I have unintentionally added to their pain.”

An editor’s note at the end of the statement says that the paper “has verified the author’s authenticity.”

11:30 am | Because the UCSD Guardian so far only has the student’s apology posted as part of a PDF of today’s paper, I have posted the full statement in text form in its own post.