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SAN FRANCISCO - Student protests spread at California state universities over a big tuition hike Friday, with protesters barricading themselves inside a building at the University of California, Berkeley.
Several students, their mouths covered with bandanas, used a bullhorn to rally hundreds of protesters standing in rain outside an English department building at Berkeley, a flashpoint for student protests in the 1960s.
Police made three arrests and closed off the area, while university officials canceled classes in the building for the day.
The takeover of the building, which began before dawn and was continuing at midday, was the latest reaction to a vote Thursday by University of California regents to raise tuition by 32 percent.
Regents said the move was unavoidable because of deep cuts in state aid to education, but it sparked angry protests at several campuses across the state.
In Los Angeles, where regents met to vote for the tuition increase, 2,000 students protested on Thursday, and police arrested more than 50 students and at least one professor Thursday night at the state university campus in Davis.
About 200 students seized an administration building late Thursday on the campus in Santa Cruz, and remained in those offices on Friday.
The campus in Berkeley, located across the bay from San Francisco, is rated as one of the top research universities in the world.
Its faculty has won 21 Nobel prizes, and it attracts many top international students -- including a high percentage from Asia.
It also was an epicenter of student protests in the 1960s against the Vietnam war and other social issues.
The tuition increases, to begin in January, will raise the basic annual fees for most undergraduate students at California's state universities from 7,788 dollars to 10,302 dollars.
The move comes as the state is facing massive budget deficits caused in large part by the US recession -- which also has led to 12.5 percent unemployment in California and high home foreclosures throughout the state.
State officials said earlier this week that California faces a projected budget deficit of nearly 21 billion dollars, just four months after legislators approved a fiscal plan to close a similar shortfall.
Legislators closed the earlier shortfall in part by making massive cuts to education and other state services.
- AFP /ls
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