Students at Britain’s University of Sussex occupied a conference center on campus for 29 hours earlier this week, in opposition to coming cutbacks and in solidarity with campus labor actions against those cuts.

One hundred and six students were present at the start of the occupation on Monday, and two hundred more reportedly joined the group the following afternoon.

The students ended the occupation voluntarily. There were no arrests and no immediate reports of disciplinary action. The students made no demands over the course of their action, and did not seek to negotiate with the university administration.

One class scheduled to be held in the occupied space was canceled, but the cancelation came at the insistence of the university, over the objections of the course’s professor and students.

The Sussex protest and other similar actions prompted the weekly magazine The New Statesman to ask this week whether Britain’s campuses are seeing the beginning of a new wave of student protests and strikes.

We’re three weeks away from March 4, and the planned Day of Action to Defend Public Education keeps growing from coast to coast. Late last night I got word about a new blog out of Louisiana State University, joining the action and calling for a general strike at LSU. Here are some excerpts from their blog’s first post:

The University is in crisis.  And not just our university.  The University System.  Public higher-education itself.

This crisis is not caused by the global recession.  Rather, it is caused by the the leadership of our educational institutions, who have cynically used the pretense of financial pressure to pursue their own narrow agendas.

Through their decisions (eliminating faculty and programs while continuing unnecessary large-scale construction projects; laying off custodians while giving athletic coaches massive raises), university policymakers have made it clear that their priorities share little in common with those of the teachers, students, and workers who make our school great…

The call has gone out for an International Strike and Day of Action in defense of education for Thursday March 4, 2010.  Students, faculty, and staff of LSU will of course participate.  On this day, we are calling on all LSU professors to cancel class, all students to skip class, and all workers to call in sick.  Instead of business as usual, we will begin a constructive discussion about the future of our school – a discussion that is ours to have.

An estimated seven hundred UNLV students walked out of their classes yesterday in protest against cuts in the Nevada governor’s proposed budget. They were joined in their action by students from two other Nevada state colleges, as well as the president of UNLV, the chancellor of the state’s public university system, and the chair of the system’s board of regents.

The students rallied on campus, then rode chartered buses across town to demonstrate outside a meeting of the state legislature’s finance committee.

About a dozen University of California students were arrested at UC Irvine last night after they disrupted a speech by Michael B. Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States.

Oren, who is on a speaking tour of West Coast campuses, was interrupted by protesters ten times over the course of his speech, and at one point left the podium for twenty minutes.

A post at the Irvine activist blog Occupy UCI said that twelve students were arrested, and that all were enrolled at UC Irvine, while an Associated Press article put the number at eleven — nine Irvine students and two from UC Riverside. All of the arrested students were cited and released at the scene.

Another Israeli official, Daniel Taub of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is scheduled to speak at Irvine at noon tomorrow, in an event billed as a discussion of “Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Law.”

If I wrote a post every time the Chronicle of Higher Education breathlessly endorsed shoddy anti-student “research” I’d never have time to do anything else, but the most recent example is too ridiculous to pass up.

The front page of the Chronicle’s website currently carries a headline reading “College Makes Students More Liberal, but Not Smarter About Civics.” Click through to the article in question, and you find the same headline repeated with a qualifier: “Study Finds.”

But the “study” in question, an annual survey conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, found no such thing. In fact, the Chronicle‘s eleven-word headline misrepresents the survey’s findings in three different ways:

First, the survey didn’t find that college makes students more liberal. What it found was that people who graduated from college were more liberal than people who didn’t, which any statistician will tell you isn’t remotely the same thing.

Second, the survey didn’t address the issue of whether college makes students smarter about civics. It examined the “civic knowledge” of various demographic groups, but didn’t make any effort to track what individual students learned in college.

Third, the survey’s definition of “civic knowledge” encompasses issues that bear little relationship to civics as that term is commonly understood — or as it’s used in the Chronicle piece. The survey’s subjects range from Sputnik to the moral philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, with lengthy digressions into military history and economic theory.

The ISI, which the Chronicle calls “an independent group with a tradition-minded view of issues,” is in reality a right-wing think tank. Its first president was William F. Buckley, its current president is a former Reagan administration domestic policy advisor, and its website prominently features a Glenn Beck video clip. The group publishes a version of the same tendentious survey every year — why the Chronicle is treating it as news is beyond me.