A day after student riots shook a Liberal Party meeting in Quebec, there are reports of life-threatening injuries to protesters … and a possible resolution to the province’s massive twelve-week student strike.

Students from around Quebec gathered to protest at the Victoriaville meeting of Quebec’s ruling Liberal Party, chartering more than fifty buses from around the region. The students were protesting plans to raise tuition at Quebec’s colleges and universities by some $1,625 over the next five years.

Police erected crowd-control barriers far from the convention center where the meeting was to take place, but the students quickly dismantled them and surged toward the meeting site. Police and media claimed that some among the protesters through billiard balls, rocks, and chunks of concrete at police, who used tear gas and rubber bullets on the crowd.

Two students were said to have been left in comas by the violence yesterday, though it’s not clear how they received their injuries. One, Maxence Valade, is said to have lost an eye. Another, Alex Allard, reportedly has a fractured skull. Tweets from fellow activists in the last hour suggest that each has emerged from his coma.

In the wake of these events, student union leaders and government officials announced that they had reached a tentative agreement to end the strike. The details of the agreement, which would have to be ratified by votes of the groups’ membership, are set to be disclosed tonight at 8 pm.

Update | There’s still quite a bit of ambiguity about the nature of the supposed deal, but here’s what’s been reported so far. First, all of the striking student unions are said to have “signed” the agreement, but their signatures do not appear to constitute an endorsement, as the Vancouver Sun reported that “their representatives said they would not recommend acceptance or rejection of the accord.” Martine Desjardins, president of FEUQ, one of the striking unions, told a reporter that today was “not the end” of the strike, but “the beginning of the end.”

6:50 pm Update | For context, here’s the proposal released Thursday by CLASSE, the largest and most radical of Quebec’s major student unions.

7:05 pm Update | Here’s an excellent glossary of terms connected to the Quebec student strike, including the strike hashtag #GGI, which stands for grève générale illimité, or unlimited general strike.

7:45 pm Update | The student unions will announce the terms of the proposed agreement in a joint press conference scheduled to get underway in 15 minutes. If the province makes significant concessions, this could be a game-changer for student activism in Canada and beyond. Stay tuned…

8:00 pm Update | Livefeed for press conference is here: http://webtele.piczo.com/?cr=4. Select ‘canada français’ & ‘LCN’.

8:40 pm Update | Still following the press conference tweeting and livetweeting my own thoughts. Looks like the offer is a mixed bag for Quebecois students, but with significant concessions from the government. It’ll be interesting to see how the ratification votes play out, and how this qualified victory is received in the rest of Canada and elsewhere, particularly in the US. More soon.

May 8 Update: The Chronicle has discontinued Naomi Schaefer Riley’s blog and distanced itself from Amy Lynn Alexander’s tweets. Details here.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has taken a lot of heat this week for a fatuous, obnoxious takedown of the discipline of Black Studies posted by Chronicle blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley. Riffing off the sidebar to a separate Chronicle piece, Riley attacked in-process dissertations by young Black Studies scholars as axe-grinding, politicized, and irrelevant even as she admitted she hadn’t read a single word of any of them. (Perhaps strangest of all, she dismissed 1970s housing policy and black midwifery as subjects intrinsically unworthy of academic study.)

The Chronicle has posted an editor’s note about the controversial blogpost, but has mostly stayed quiet otherwise. Last night, however, a representative of the paper appeared on Twitter to respond to the Chronicle’s critics.

It got weird pretty quick.

Amy Lynn Alexander, “Editorial Promotions Manager” at the Chronicle, is new to Twitter. Her Chronicle account was created in March, and she’d only tweeted from it a few dozen times before this week. After a couple of tweets on the Riley piece on Wednesday, she entered the online discussion with gusto yesterday evening.

As Alexander waded into the fray she festooned her tweets with sarcastic asides, random capitalization, and textspeak. When folks expressed surprise at her lack of professionalism, she added awkward, self-justifying hashtags like #PR101, #MediaLiteracy, and #LanguageMaven to the mix.

It’s an embarrassment, frankly. In one representative exchange, Alexander twice accused grad student “TressieMC,” author of the first and strongest rebuttal to Riley’s piece, of “flaking” when Alexander tried to discuss the issue with her on the phone (“I made good faith effort 2 parlay & you umm Flaked” and “Evil Ol’ AA here extended 2 @tressiemcphd a civil, adult phone talk: her reply? “Sure,” w #. When @Chronicle_Amy rang? Flakery” were the quotes), then chided TressieMC for calling her on it: “careful: no one called you a flake. Pls back read.”

All in all, Alexander tweeted nearly fifty times last night, returning on two separate occasions after saying she was done for the evening. This morning has seen two dozen more tweets so far, many of them snarky replies to academics who’ve expressed dismay at her behavior.

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes her employer to ask her to back away from the keyboard.

A federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit brought by UC Berkeley activists who claim the they were unconstitutionally targeted for arrest in a 2009 campus protest can go forward.

Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler says the students have made a “plausible” case that the university’s police chief and vice chancellor for student affairs violated their First Amendment rights during the Wheeler Hall occupation, in which sixty-six peaceful demonstrators were arrested, cuffed, and transported two counties away for booking.

This isn’t a full victory for the students, just permission for the lawsuit to go forward — technically, a denial of the defendants’ motion to dismiss the suit. But it’s still a major vindication of the activist perspective on an event that many of us have long seen as an appalling violation of students’ rights.

Syrian forces fired live ammunition into crowds protesting the government at the Aleppo University campus Wednesday night, killing at least four. The BBC reports:

One student in Aleppo, Thaer al-Ahmed, said there was panic and chaos as security forces personnel and members of the Shabiha militia fired live rounds and tear gas to disperse a protest by about 1,500 people outside their dormitories on Wednesday night.

“Some students ran to their rooms to take cover but they were followed to their rooms, beaten up and arrested,” he told the Associated Press. “Others suffered cuts and broken bones as they tried to flee.”

Activists say the killings followed a shift in government tactics at Aleppo, a city that the Associated Press says “has remained largely loyal to President Bashar Assad and has been largely spared from the violence that has plagued other Syrian cities.” Until a few days ago used only tear gas and batons against protesters at the university.

Some two hundred students are said to have been arrested yesterday, and new protests against the violence are taking place today.

Quebec’s ten-week student strike, now the longest in the province’s history, is reaching a critical point.

Although government officials continue to reject students’ demand that they reverse a planned tuition increase, Quebec education minister Line Beauchamp said Sunday that she is willing to meet with student leaders to discuss demands for reform in university governance. That concession was echoed the next day by Quebec’s premier, Jean Charest. Both insisted, however, that they would not meet with representatives of CLASSE, the group which represents the largest share of the striking students.

Various acts of vandalism and disruption have taken place in connection with the student strike in recent days, walls spray-painted and windows broken at a government minister’s office and the placing of bags of bricks on subway tracks. There have also been allegations, so far unconfirmed, that unused molotov cocktails were found at one minister’s office during the investigation of an act of vandalism.

Meanwhile, the length of the strike is raising questions as to whether the current semester will be able to be completed. Some Quebec campuses have closed their doors during the strike, while others have continued to hold classes. Students at some closed campuses have requested court injunctions forcing the universities to reopen. At campuses that haven’t closed, activists have asked university officials to make accommodations for striking students.

At McGill University in Montreal, where the final exam period for the current semester began today, activists blocked four campus entrances for an hour this morning.