This week’s updates to the Student Activism map come from an incredibly comprehensive global review of 2009 education protests that’s just been published at Emancipating Education for All.

I found eight US actions from this fall on their list that hadn’t made mine, and of course they’ve got great coverage of overseas stuff, too. Go check it out.

I’ll get back to new stuff with next week’s update — I’ve got a lot in the pipeline, and I’ll be putting it up as the week progresses. As always, a list of updates follows the new map.

December 17: Seven hundred students, parents, and teachers protested city plans to shut New York’s Jamaica High School.

December 4: Two hundred students rallied at Michigan State University to try to save MSU’s deaf education program.

November 18: Twenty students picketed a meeting of the UNC Chapel Hill regents as the regents approved an $1162 hike in out-of-state tuition.

November 17: The SDS chapter at the University of North Dakota held a teach-in on student empowerment as part of a global week of action against the corporatization of education.

November 17: Students at New York’s City College held a demonstration and rally against budget cuts and tuition hikes.

November 15: A three-day students of color conference at UC San Diego was capped off by a rally against fee increases and enrollment cuts.

November 3: More than five hundred students joined faculty and staff in walking out of classes to protest budget cuts and furloughs.

October 11: Students at CSU Northridge held a silent protest against budget cuts.

I recently rewatched The Wire from start to finish, and it got me thinking.

(Warning: spoilers ahead. If you haven’t watched the show yet, go do it now.)

The Wire is often accused of being a pessimistic show, of depicting efforts to make social change as futile and doomed, and there’s some truth to that charge. The series’ five seasons are strewn with noble failed attempts to reform massive impersonal institutions.

But there’s another, more subtle and more hopeful, message lurking in that rubble, and it’s a message that’s got real relevance to student activists.

It’s true that The Wire depicts very few large-scale victories. But this is, I think, less a function of any intrinsic pessimism than of the demands of drama. If any of the schemes the show nodded to had been successfully implemented, The Wire would have risked becoming a mere policy paper for specific reforms, an axe-grinding exercise in “this is what you should do.” That would have been an artistically and intellectually unsatisfying path.

Could The Wire have done more to offer solutions to the problems it raises? Yep. This article, among others, suggests how. But its failures and defeats aren’t, for the most part, presented as inevitabilities. Yes, it argues, there are profound structural and institutional impediments to positive change. Yes, human frailty and weakness — and sheer bad luck — can undo the work of years in an instant. Yes, progress is fragile and regression is a constant threat. But it does make room for hope as well.

The Wire’s biggest, most compelling characters tend to be hacks or heroes.

The hacks — Clay Davis, Marlo, Herc, Levy, Burrell, and so on and on — are out for themselves, and uninterested in anyone or anything else. They generally prosper, though sometimes they do get eaten by bigger fish.

The heroes — McNulty, Omar, Stringer, Freamon, Sobotka — want the world to be different, and they’re not satisfied just wanting. They’re smart and savvy enough to see how things work, and audacious enough to try to fix what’s wrong. They’ve seen what happens when they try to go through channels, do things the way things are done, and they don’t have the patience for that. So they bend the rules, and then they break them.

The Wire’s heroes all fail, and it’s this fact, as much as anything else, that prompts the charges of cynicism leveled at the show. Some of the hacks thrive, and some of the hacks get taken down, but by the end of the fifth season, all the heroes are out of the game. (Those who work for the police have all been fired or forced to quit, and those who live outside the law are all, without exception, dead.)

But there’s a third category of characters in The Wire who collectively meet a very different fate. They’re with the heroes in seeing the flaws in the world as it exists, and in wanting the world to be different, but they’re not temperamentally inclined to go cowboy. They look for their chances to make small differences, stand up for what’s right when they can, and absorb all the punches they can absorb. They don’t have much use for grand gestures, and they’re skeptical — if at times admiring — of those who do. They just keep plugging away, doing what they can.

And at the end of the series, all of these pluggers are still plugging away. Kima and Bunk are still working homicides. Carver is rising through the ranks. Bubbles is still clean, and Walon is still running his meeting. Alma is still covering stories. and Gus is still editing them. Cutty has his gym, Prez has his classroom, and Pearlman has landed a seat on the bench. They’re all getting up in the morning, going to work, and doing what they do, and each one of them is making a difference in his or her own small way.

In the world of The Wire, as in the world of … well, the world, work is what makes stuff happen. You pay attention to the details, you learn from your mistakes, you check yourself and those around you, and you get stuff done. Probably not big stuff, probably not all the stuff you’d want, but you get stuff done.

“If you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. Amazing things will happen.”

–Conan O’Brien

A report in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle says that widely-despised University of California chancellor Mark Yudof plans to join California students in an upcoming march on Sacramento. The march, scheduled for March 4, has been billed as a Day of Action in Defense of Public Education, and will include rallies, lobbying, and labor actions.

Correction: The Chronicle’s claim that Yudof and the regents would be participating in the March 4 Day of Action was incorrect. See this follow-up post for details.

Students around the country have been watching events in California unfold since September, and the March 4 action, originally planned as a California event, has begun to draw interest from coast to coast. Concrete planning is still spotty, but I’m hearing a growing buzz, and I’ll be tracking information as I receive it.

Update | Here’s a good concise statement of the argument that the regents’ participation in the Day of Action is “a cynical publicity stunt.”

Second Update | I’ll be tracking groups’ participation in the day of action here…

• The original national call for a day of action came from these California folks.
• A separate national call came from this “ad-hoc body” two days later.
• The New School Reoccupied, in New York City, is on board.
• Here’s a national Facebook group.
• A listserve out of Massachusetts.

The story of student activism in California last semester was a story of growing student inventiveness met with escalating administrative aggressiveness, so it’s not surprising that the state’s first major action of the new year is both inventive and cautious.

The Kroeber Makeover is a four-day event modeled on last December’s Live Week at Wheeler Hall. Like the Wheeler event, the Kroeber event features a rolling lineup of events ranging from free meals and art exhibits to activist workshops and planning sessions. Unlike Wheeler, the Kroeber students aren’t staying in the building overnight at all — it’s a makeover, not a takeover.

Kroeber Hall is the home of Berkeley’s anthropology department, and the anthro students behind this action have been careful not to give the administration any pretext for a repeat of the mass arrests that ended Live Week one day early. They’ve been formally reserving rooms, for instance, and scheduling their events to end well before the building closes each night.

Despite  the Kroeber makeover-ers’ conscientiousness, however, the Berkeley administration has taken an aggressive, confrontational stance toward the action. Yesterday they sent out an email to all members of the campus community saying that they expect “full compliance” with regulations limiting speech and organizing on campus, and one student I spoke with said admins have been warning profs sympathetic to the makeover that they’ll be held responsible “if anything happens.”

The Kroeber Makeover is scheduled to continue through tomorrow evening.