Today is the day that the UC San Diego administration set aside for a campus-wide discussion of the racist Compton Cookout party hosted by UCSD students on the weekend of February 13, but in the eight days since the administration announced today’s teach-in, events on campus have spiraled far out of the university’s control.

Tensions surrounding the aftermath of the party, high from the moment that reports about it first surfaced, rose dramatically last Thursday, when students on UCSD’s campus television station broadcast a show that mocked the protests and black students in general. No recording of the broadcast has yet surfaced, but one student was quoted in the San Diego Union Tribune saying that the participants in the broadcast had “called us niggers, and called us ungrateful, and ghetto and dumb.”

The station that ran the show is run by the UCSD student government, and the broadcast implicated other student media as well — the students who made the bigoted on-air comments were staffers for The Koala, a campus humor magazine with a history of racist speech. In response to the broadcast, UCSD’s student government president, Utsav Gupta, pulled the station off the air and implemented an immediate freeze on outlays to all student media. Gupta called the freeze a temporary “time out” while student government re-assessed its policies.

In the meantime the UCSD BSU has presented a list of demands to the campus administration, while students have called on other California campuses to stage solidarity actions today. A rally at UC Irvine is going on at this hour, with much more to come over the course of the day. Stay tuned…

1:30 pm California time | The situation is rapidly evolving, but here’s what I’ve learned so far. The UCSD BSU held a press conference before the administration’s “teach-in,” and that press conference was followed by a rally that turned into a march. When the official teach-in began, students staged a walkout, urging attendees to leave the administration-controlled space and join a student-led teach-in outside on the lawn. Reports from Twitter suggest that everyone left the official event to join the student one, and photos suggest that the student event, still going on now, is huge. Search “UCSD” on Twitter for a high volume of powerful tweets from many many participants in today’s events, and check back here later for my full report.

5:00 pm | Gathering news coverage and on-the-scene reports. More soon.

Thursday morning | So many things to say about this event, and its implications for the future of student organizing. Here’s one of them.

Thursday afternoon | Here’s my take on the free speech issues involved in the current UCSD crisis.

The regular Monday Map will be back soon, but today I’m introducing a new feature on the site — a Google Map of planned March 4 Day of Action activities.

The March 4 Day of Action to Defend Education is a national campaign that’s grown out of the last few months’ organizing in California. The folks at Defend Education and the California Faculty Association have identified hundreds of planned actions in dozens of states, but as far as I know nobody’s put together a graphic representation of what’s going on yet. So here it is:

I only started this map this morning, and I’ve got a huge amount of stuff left to add. I’ve plugged in several actions I’ve found out about directly, and I’ve made my way about halfway through the Defend Education list, but I haven’t even touched the CFA list, and I’ve largely skipped over California and New York, since each of those states has such a huge amount going on.

My plan is to compile a full list of planned actions by next Monday, and then to update the map with real-time news from the ground as things get underway next week. (“Day of Action” is a bit of a misnomer, by the way — associated actions are going to be starting as early as Monday.)

I’ll add more to the map as I get the chance, so keep checking back. If you know of an action that’s not listed, don’t assume I’ve got it in my queue — leave a comment here or at the map itself. I’ll be adding stuff I get directly more quickly than stuff I cull from outside lists.

One last thing — the goal here is to have information on organizers’ websites, blogs, Facebook groups, Google groups, etc for every action, so if you’ve got that data, be sure to send it along. Help me help folks find you!

Tuesday | Keep those additions coming! I added some this afternoon, and I’ll put up another bunch tonight.

Wednesday morning | Nearly fifty entries in the map, across twenty states. Many many more to come.

Have you written something worth reading recently? Conducted an action we should know about? Started a blog, or just posted to one? Or maybe you’ve got something coming up that you want to let us know about?

Well, here’s your chance! Include a short description, so we know what we’re clicking through to. And feel free to post links to other folks’ great stuff as well.

A group of students have taken over the Housing Community Center (HCC) at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

A communique from the students who conducted the takeover was posted at about 10:30 am Pacific Time today. It says that the group is “disheartened, discouraged and frustrated” by the realization that they have been paying tuition to follow rules they had no say in creating, and that they have thus “commandeer[ed] the facilities that we are paying for.”

“Everything that we paid for is ours,” the statement says. “Everything is ours. It’s right there in front of you, waiting for the intention, the desire and the effort.”

The message closes with a slogan that has been frequently used in recent California campus takeovers: “Occupy Everything. Demand Nothing.”

I’ll have more on this story soon.

2:45 pm Pacific Time | I’ve found a Twitter feed from the Evergreen occupation: @OccupiedHCC. Tweets posted from that account suggest that the occupation began at the end of a dance party yesterday evening, and that thirty people slept in the HCC last night. They’ve also posted a schedule of workshops for this afternoon.

3:05 pm | According to the @OccupiedHCC Twitter feed, the first of the afternoon’s workshops is scheduled to start in ten minutes, and it’s on university budget cuts. Later there will be a workshop called “on occupying and occupations” and one on the history of protest in Olympia. A concert is planned for later tonight.

It’s worth underscoring that this is an open occupation, one in which students and others are encouraged to come and participate, and in which there’s no attempt to lock down the occupied building. Like the Berkeley Live Week occupation last December, the HCC occupation is oriented toward creating — on at least a small scale — an alternative university rather than an attempt to shut down the one that exists.

I’ll write about this in more detail in a separate post soon, but it seems to me that the last year or so has seen a gradual shift in tactics in American campus protests from closed occupations to open ones, and that this shift is potentially a very significant development.

4:25 pm | I’ve raised the question of open vs. closed occupations over on Twitter, and it’s produced two really interesting responses (so far). @anticapitalproj argues that “Closed & open tend to be tactical choices based on local factors, take on meaning w/in that context,” while @MPHarris27 says “Student liberation means no locked doors ever.”

Feel free to join the conversation over there … or here, in comments.

4:40 am Sunday (still Pacific Time) | As of a bit after midnight, the occupation was still going on, but whether the students planned to continue it overnight was unclear.

Also, I may have jumped to conclusions about this being an open occupation — commenter Gesa writes that some students have been prevented from entering HCC. I haven’t been able to confirm that account, but seems to be at least partially backed up by a tweet from @OccupiedHCC that described a failed attempt to take down barricades at the occupation.

2:45 pm | The @OccupiedHCC tweeter has posted that the occupation has concluded after “36 hours of a fully autonomous HCC.”

New polling shows that huge majorities of Americans agree with student activists on the nature of the contemporary university and the need for reform.

The poll, from the National Center for Public Policy and higher Education, shows that strong majorities of Americans believe that colleges are run too much like businesses, that they should be spending government money to keep tuition down, and that enrollment could be raised substantially without cutting educational quality.

On the subject of educational access, more than eighty percent believe that students are forced to borrow too much money for their studies, while less than thirty percent believe that all or nearly all “qualified, motivated students” get a chance to attend college.

Highlights:

• Six in ten Americans believe that colleges, “like most businesses … care mainly about the bottom line.”
• By the same token, only 32% say colleges “care mainly about education and making sure students have a good educational experience” — a twelve-point drop in just two years.
• Sixty percent believe colleges could enroll “a lot more students” without cutting quality.
• Sixty-four percent believe colleges and universities should use federal stimulus money to keep tuition and fees down. Only 25% disagree.
• Only 29% believe that “the vast majority of qualified, motivated students” get the opportunity to go to college. Sixty-nine percent think that many qualified students are closed out.
• A whopping 83% believe that students have to borrow too much money for college today, with 65% agreeing “strongly.”