Quebec’s legislature, shaken by the province’s ongoing student strike, is now debating passage of an emergency anti-protest law that the chair of the Quebec bar association calls “a breach to the fundamental, constitutional rights” of its citizens.

The legislation, known as Bill 78, would mandate an end to the strike, impose extraordinary restrictions on demonstrations and impel local student associations to prevent their members from engaging in illegal protest. It would impose harsh fines for violations of provisions one legal experts say “are written so vaguely they’re impossible to respect,” while threatening student activists with the dissolution of their student unions in the case of non-compliance.

Key provisions of the bill as presented to the legislature:

• All classes at campuses currently participating in the student strike will be immediately suspended, with the remainder of the spring semester delayed until August.
• It would become a crime for an individual or organization to “directly or indirectly contribute” to the blocking of a campus, with those terms left undefined in the bill. Organizations would be held responsible for the actions of their members in this regard, whether those members were acting with organizational sanction or not.
• Student associations and federations would be required to “employ appropriate means to induce” their members to comply with the law.
• Student associations and regional federations that violated the law would have their funding and use of campus facilities cut for one semester for each day of campus closure.
• Campuses whose student associations were shuttered under this provision would not be permitted to establish interim associations while the suspensions were in place.
• “Any form of gathering that could result” in an interference with the functioning of a college would be banned at all campuses, and for a 50-meter radius surrounding them.
• Organizers of any demonstration larger than ten people would be required to submit the time, location, duration, and other information to the police eight hours in advance. The police would have the authority to amend any of the proposed parameters.
• Organizers of such demonstrations would be held criminally liable if the demonstrators deviated from police-approved parameters, as would associations participating in such demonstrations, even if they were not the organizers.
• Students who violated the act could be fined as much as $5,000. Representatives of student groups that did so could face personal fines of as much as $35,000. Organizations violating the act could face fines of up to $125,000.All such fines would be doubled for subsequent offenses.

Wow.

3:20 pm update | The president of Quebec’s largest faculty union says the implementation of Bill 78 would make the province “a totalitarian society.”

3:40 pm | An open letter from a group of prominent Quebecois historians says Bill 78 “calls into question the principle of the rule of law.” (Link in French, Google translation here.)

3:45 pm | According to activist Kevin Harding, Quebec’s education minister was asked this afternoon whether wearing the red square fabric swatches that have been adopted by activists as a symbol of the student strike would constitute a violation of Bill 78. Her reply? “I trust our prosecutors and judges.”

That’s not a no. That’s quite pointedly not a no.

5:20 pm | Multiple reports on Twitter say the law has passed, and that it wasn’t even close — 68-48. Fasten your seat belts.

6:20 pm | It’s not immediately clear when the law will go into effect, but if it’s anytime in the near future, I expect large-scale mass defiance of the demonstration-notice provisions in the first day. In other news, tweets from @GadflyQuebec indicate that there were some amendments to the bill prior to the vote, but that the core provisions remain intact. More when I get it.

6:55 pm | According to this, ten amendments were made before the bill’s passage, including one that raised the threshold at which a demonstration needs to be cleared with the police from ten participants to fifty. (Link in French, Google translation here.)

Saturday | According to the website of the Quebec legislature, Bill 78 was put into effect yesterday night. It’s still not completely clear what the final text of the law is, though, because as of now the formal public version of the bill includes nine pages of hand-written amendments, some of which are considerably less legible than others. As I noted in a follow-up post, this is an embarrassment.

On Monday evening a group of Indiana high school seniors snuck into their school. Armed with stationery supplies and a borrowed key, they proceeded to redecorate the place. Nobody was harmed, no damage was done. They just slapped up a few thousand Post-Its.

The pranksters included the school’s valedictorian, salutatorian, and senior class president. The key came from the mother of one of the students, who was a school board member and was aware of their plans. A custodian kept an eye out to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. The group even planned to take down the Post-Its themselves.

But when school officials arrived the next morning, they suspended all six for trespassing, and moved to fire the custodian (also the mother of a student, as it happens). When supportive students staged a gym sit-in protest, another 57 were suspended.

I’ve always found this kind of trespassing charge ridiculous, and more than a little chilling. A school (or a college) is a community as much as it is an institution, and these students’ acts were grounded in that sense of community — the sense that the school is their school. When administrators use the language of trespass to punish behavior like a prank or a demonstration they do casual violence to that vision of community.

This particular story, I’m glad to report, has a mostly happy ending. After students, parents, and alumni protested, the six pranksters’ suspensions were revoked and expunged from their records. The plan to fire the custodian has been abandoned. The 57 protesters’ suspensions were reduced to a single day’s after-school detention.

And with a little luck next year’s seniors will pull an even better prank.

John Scalzi put up a hell of a blogpost yesterday. Titled “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,” it uses a videogame analogy to explain the concept of white male privilege. It’s great stuff. Go read it.

Done? Cool. Because I had a thing or two to say about the comments.

One common theme among Scalzi’s critics is the idea that white guys used to have it good, but affirmative action has put an end to that, and now the deck is stacked in favor of women and people of color. Here’s a snippet of a representative argument (from commenter bpmitche) to that effect:

In the case of academia, for instance, the admittance guidelines often restrict the number of applicants who will be accepted according to their stated race and their declared major.

For instance, let’s say that the Engineering program at Cal Poly is only going to accept 450 students in a given year; of those 450 openings 200 are set aside for whites, 100 for blacks, 100 for hispanics, and 50 for asians. There are also gender standards – let’s be generous and assume that the goal is pairity between admitted student genders. Now, let’s look at our pool of applicants: although Cal Poly gets applicants from all over the country, there are some demographic truths involved here. First, white males will be the overwhelming majority of applicants to the Engineering program, based simply on the racial demographics of the US (wikipedia). Out of any given 1000 applicants to the Engineering program 637 of them will be white, 163 will be hispanic, 122 will be black and 48 will be asian (with a total of 30 “other or mixed”).

Bpmitche goes on from there to report admission rates for various demographic categories to the nearest tenth of a percent. (“as a white male, your chances … are at best 31.8% … for a black male or female, 81.9%; for a hispanic male 61.7%, female 60.9%; and 100% for both asian males and females.”)

Damning, right? There’s only one problem with this analysis. It’s completely made up.

To start, race-based affirmative action in California’s public universities is illegal, and has been since 1996. Under the California state constitution, the state may not consider “race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Period. At Cal Poly, admissions officials aren’t even told applicants’ race or gender.

And even outside of California, the kind of quotas this guy describes are illegal nationwide, and have been since the Supreme Court’s 1978  Bakke decision. Since 2003, moreover, it’s been illegal to give college applicants any quantifiable numerical advantage in admissions on the basis of race. (Colleges are still allowed — though not required — to consider a student’s race on a case-by-case basis, for now.)

Bpmitche also errs in assuming that applicants to an elite engineering program will reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. If that were the case — if people of all races and genders were getting the kind of preparation and training that would render them viable candidates for admission to a school like Cal Poly — then any sort of affirmative action would of course be absurd. But they’re not.

Finally, there’s the issue of Cal Poly’s engineering school’s demographics, perhaps the simplest relevant fact to uncover. Bpmitche estimates that about 45% of the school’s students are white, while the true number is above 60%. He figures the school’s Latino enrollment at 22%, when in fact it’s just 13%. And black students, who bpmitche likewise estimates at 22% of the school’s enrollment, amount to just 0.9% — just 47 students in a school of more than five thousand.

And this, ultimately, is why folks like bpmitche think they’re oppressed.

It’s because they have literally no idea what the facts are.

Sarah McBride won election as American University’s student government president as Tim McBride. She served for a year as Tim McBride. But two weeks ago, as she stepped down from the office, she set the record straight:

As SG President, I realized that as great as it is to work on issues of fairness, it only highlighted my own struggles. It didn’t bring the completeness that I sought. By mid-fall, it had gotten to the point where I was living in my own head. With everything I did, from the mundane to the exciting, the only way I was able to enjoy it was if I re-imagined doing it as a girl. My life was passing me by, and I was done wasting it as someone I wasn’t.

I told my family and some of my closest friends over winter break. My brothers and parents greeted me with immediate support and unconditional love. This was the first time that my parents have had to worry about my safety, my job prospects and my acceptance. This story is my experience and my experience alone. There is no one-size-fits-all narrative; everyone’s path winds in different ways.

The experience highlights my own privilege. I grew up in an upper-income household, in an accepting environment and with incredible educational opportunities. I never worried about my family’s reaction.

But those worries are all too common for most. For far too many trans individuals, the reality is far bleaker; coming out oftentimes means getting kicked out of your home. I say this not to diminish my own experience, but to acknowledge the privilege and opportunities which have been afforded to me.

Today is the next day of the life I’ve already had, but at the same time, the first day of the life I always knew I wanted to lead. Starting on Saturday, I will present as my true self. Going forward, I ask that you use female pronouns (she/her) and my chosen name, Sarah.

Congrats, Sarah, and good luck.

The Council of University of California Faculty Associations is saying there’s a deal in the works between Governor Jerry Brown and UC President Mark Yudof to “loosen the most important ties between the university and the state.”

Under the terms of the reported deal, UC will be freed up to raise tuition, increase out-of-state enrollment, and divert state funds to construction projects. And crucially, it will no longer have to make the specifics of these arrangements public.

UC’s out-of-state enrollment has been skyrocketing in recent years, as has out-of-state tuition. Just a few years ago, non-Californians represented just 10% of UC Berkeley enrollment, for instance, but now they make up nearly a third of the Berkeley student body — and they’re paying rates higher than Harvard’s.

Let’s underscore that: A third of UC Berkeley students are from out-of-state, and they’re being charged private university fees.

This is the future of the UC system, if CUCFA’s analysis is accurate.

And it should be noted as well that UC’s student body isn’t expected to get bigger, at least not at rates that would be necessary to keep rates of in-state enrollment stable. As CUCFA notes, UC is likely to “dump a larger number of eligible Californians onto the CSU and Community Colleges, which will in turn pass on their overflow to for-profit schools” if this plan goes through.

This represents nothing less than the privatization of the UC system, once the greatest public university in the nation.