Last week USA Today ran a story on several recent campaigns to save people who were brought to the United States as children by their parents, from deportation as adults. Their headline? “Groups Try to Delay Deportations of Illegal Students.”

USA Today, like many media outlets (but unlike Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor) routinely uses the term illegal immigrant rather than the more accurate “undocumented immigrant.” But “illegal students” was an unwelcome novelty.

There are several problems with “illegal immigrant,” beginning with the fact that being in the US without documentation is a violation, not a crime. “Illegal student,” however, is even more problematic, though, because it describes a status that’s virtually non-existent.

Some people do, of course, immigrate to the US illegally, and in that sense those people — about half of all undocumented immigrants — could technically be called illegal immigrants. (The term itself is commonly regarded as offensive, of course, and should be avoided for that reason.) But the term illegal student makes no sense at all. In forty-nine of the fifty states, it’s not a violation of the law for an undocumented immigrant to attend school or college.

Pressure from activists led USA Today to alter their headline, changing “Illegal Students” to “Illegal Immigrant Students,” but organizers are keeping up the pressure on the larger issue of the newspaper’s house style — the website dreamactivist.org is running a contest soliciting “music, creative writing, videos, graphics, and programs” critiquing the concept of the illegal immigrant. The contest carries a $500 first prize and runs through January 10.

“All human beings,” it notes, “regardless of citizenship status, are eligible to participate.”

Site traffic has cratered since Friday, and my list of pre-Christmas chores keeps getting longer. So since y’all aren’t reading and I don’t have time to write, updates are going to be sparse between now and the new year.

I’ve got some stuff coming up, and if big news breaks I’ll be on top of it, but don’t expect a huge amount of volume over the next week or so.

UC Berkeley spokesperson has Dan Mogulof responded to some of the questions raised about last Friday’s Wheeler Hall arrests.

In a story in yesterday’s Berkeley Daily Planet, Mogulof said that the final decision to conduct mass arrests was made on Thursday afternoon, about twelve hours before the arrests actually took place. He argued that it was not possible to give warning of the decision to arrest because “in this day of texting and Twitter and Facebook, a warning would have served as an invitation for all kinds of people to come running to the scene.”

This makes a certain amount of sense, as an answer to one narrow question. It’s likely that if the administration had announced on Thursday afternoon that Wheeler Hall would be cleared that night, some students would have joined the protest in solidarity. But it should be noted that there would have been other consequences of such a warning, too. Hard questions would have been asked about the decision to conduct arrests, particularly in light of the previous three days’ tacit acceptance of the occupation. Faculty would have criticized the administration’s plans, and urged them to reverse course. Media would have been on hand when the arrests finally happened.

Yes, the decision to arrest without warning made the process of carrying out those arrests logistically simpler. But it did so in significant part by allowing the university — as Berkeley’s Student Advocate’s Office said this week — to evade responsibility for its actions.

And Mogulof’s comments to the Daily Planet do nothing to answer the crucial question of why there was no order to disperse given when police entered Wheeler Hall before dawn on Friday. Such an order — given at four thirty in the morning — would hardly have spurred a mad rush to Wheeler. His comments also fail to explain why students who were barefoot and in their pyjamas were not given the opportunity to dress before being arrested, or why those students were transported thirty miles across county lines for booking and held for an entire day before being released.

The Google Map of American student activism that I launched at the end of November is creeping up toward a hundred pins in about half the states. (For an explanation of the map and its rationale, see this lovely piece from The Nation‘s blog.) There’s obviously a huge amount of organizing happening on American campuses right now, and I’m having a great time tracking it.

At the same time, though, all that activity means that I’ve got a huge amount to write about here on the main site, and it’s easy to put off adding to the map, since it’s not as visible and not as time-sensitive. I’d been trying to update the map daily, but once you miss a day — and it’s impossible not to miss a day every once in a while — it’s easy for that day to turn into two, and three, and so on.

So. New plan.

Every Monday, starting December 29, is going to be Map Monday at studentactivism.net. I’ll post a copy of the map, along with a list of all the actions — new and back-dated — that I’ve added in the past week. I’ll still try to update the map during the week, but I’ll plan on holding most of the additions for the weekend.

In addition to making map updates more predictable and more visible on the site, this’ll also give me a prominent place to post about the actions that don’t wind up getting their own posts. It’ll provide a snapshot of the week’s campus organizing, and a review of some of the stories that may be getting bigger over the course of the week. Last but not least, it’ll give all of you a regular place to post suggestions for the map, while giving you a quick and easy way to check if I’ve missed something.

I’m excited about this — I think it’s going to work well. Check back on Monday, December 29 for the first new map, and feel free to post a comment here if you’ve got anything for me to add to it.

The Berkeley Student Advocate’s office released their report on the Wheeler Hall occupation yesterday, two days after a draft version of the report leaked on the internet. The official version of the report drops some of the draft’s most tweet-worthy adjectives, but its substance is pretty much unchanged, and its portrait of the university administration is no more flattering.

UC Berkeley’s initial press release on the Wheeler Hall arrests conceded that the occupation of the building had been “largely non-disruptive,” and that the occupiers had initially taken steps “to ensure that their activities would not conflict with classroom review sessions.” It claimed, however, that as the week wore on the nature of the occupation shifted. “Things began to change the last couple of nights,” said university spokesman Dan Mogulof. Students began “breaking into locked classrooms and things like that,” and started to plan a hip-hop concert and dance party for Friday night. “Once the group refused to reconsider plans to hold an unauthorized all-night concert in an academic building,” said Mogulof, “we had to take steps to ensure that finals could go forward.”

But Mogulof conceded that there had been no property damage in Wheeler Hall, and provided no details regarding the nature or adverse consequences of the supposed classroom break-ins. On the subject of the concert, one member of the occupation told the Berkeley Daily Planet that the students had been ready to “guarantee that Wheeler would be clean and functional by 6 am, well before final exams on Saturday morning.” But Mogulof denied that any promises to that effect had been made, saying — in the Daily Planet‘s paraphrase — that “had there been such a guarantee, things might have had a different outcome.”

According to the SAO, however, the outcome was predetermined.

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