This is impressive: the administration of the University of California Irvine has given a victory to occupiers of their campus library, and the occupiers haven’t entered the library yet.

Before Thanksgiving, students at UC Irvine announced that they would be staging a library occupation beginning today. Although they didn’t make any formal demands at that time, they did state their belief that students “should have full access to books, computers, and library materials before and during Finals Week.” They asked that the university keep automated book checkout and computer labs open during the occupation. (They also promised not to barricade the building if the university’s response to the takeover was peaceful, and stated their intention to “leave the library cleaner than how we found it.”

That was on November 23rd. The occupation is scheduled to begin at three o’clock this afternoon. On Tuesday the university announced that the library, and three other study centers on campus, would be open 24 hours a day beginning this morning and continuing through the end of finals a week from now.

Planned occupation activities, including study sessions and teach-ins, will continue.

(You can follow this story at the Occupy UCI! website.)

As I mentioned on Twitter, I popped down to DC yesterday for a panel discussion at the Center for American Progress.

Sponsored by their Campus Progress wing, along with USPIRG and the US Student Association, the panel was a discussion of the current wave of activism sweeping California, and the larger questions about college affordability that are raised by that organizing.

In addition to myself, the panel consisted of Victor Sanchez, the president of the University of California Student Association, Bruce Cain, director of the UC Washington Center, and Pedro de la Torre of Campus Progress. The whole thing was deftly moderated by CP’s Erica Williams, and I think it was illuminating and productive in all sorts of ways.

The panel was streamed live on the internet, and I’m told that the video may soon be made available for watching online. In the meantime, check out this excellent writeup from Inside Higher Ed.

“We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, ‘Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?’ That’s the answer.

“Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be — have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!

“And that — that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

–Mario Savio

About a hundred and fifty students bearing petitions signed by ten thousand more confronted the Pittsburgh city council yesterday. They were to make their views heard at a public hearing on a tuition tax the council is considering imposing.

If passed, the tuition tax would be the first in the nation — a one percent tax on higher education bills intended to help close the city’s budget gap while doing an end-run around its universities’ tax exempt status.

The bill has been dubbed the “Fair Share Tax,” and its supporters argue that students currently get a free ride, receiving city services without contributing to city revenue. But opponents of the tax note that nearly three quarters of students at city universities already pay real estate taxes (either directly or, as renters, indirectly). They also pay a variety of other taxes and fees — notably, as one student speaker at the hearing pointed out, the seven percent tax on alcohol served in bars and restaurants. “Let’s face it,” grad student Mackenzie Farone told the council, “we are the ones that pay the drink tax.”

Students also point out that the tax would not be covered by financial aid — a poor undergraduate on a full scholarship at Carnegie Mellon would be hit with the same $400 tax as her wealthiest fellow student.

The council is currently split 5-4 on the tax, with five members supporting it. Students are hoping to change one member’s mind before a vote later this month.

If the tax does pass, it is expected to face court challenges, and there is a move underway in the Pennsylvania state legislature to prevent its adoption. Students are also promising to remember councilmembers’ votes when the next city council election rolls around in 2011.

Opponents of the tax have a website here.

Here’s something kind of cool: A new Google Map of American student activism in the 2009-10 academic year.

(The red markers are building occupations, the blue ones are demonstrations, the green ones are strikes, and the yellow ones are other newsworthy stories. A black dot means that one or more students were arrested in connection with the event.)

I’ve still got a lot to do to flesh it out, both in terms of adding more sites of activism and bulking up the information I include on the ones that are already there. I want to plug in links to websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds for as many of the actions as I can, for instance. But it’s well underway, and adding new material will go quicker if y’all are giving me the benefit of your knowledge.

Please feel free to make suggestions for new “pins” or other new info either in comments here or over at Google, and I’ll input what you give me as quickly as I can.

My inspiration for this map, by the way, came from this German map of student occupations. I figured I’d do my own since I wanted to recognize a broader spectrum of actions than they do (and, well, because theirs is in German), but that map is an excellent one with a global reach.

December 1 Update | The Nation has put up a very welcome online article about the map. If you’re interested in more detail about what I’m up to and why, that’s the place to go.

December 4 Update | There are now more than thirty pins in the map, in more than a dozen states, each with a link to media coverage of the event in question. Four of the incidents noted took place after I created the map earlier this week, and there are more updates coming this weekend.

December 8 Update | Closing in on fifty pins, including the new Wheeler Hall occupation at Berkeley and the CSU Stanislaus demonstration from Saturday. The Google Maps interface is annoyingly clunky and slow, but I’m adding new stuff pretty much every day.

January Update | I’m putting up a revised version of the map every Monday now, with a blogpost overview of what’s been added in the previous week. Check the main site on Mondays for new installments.