A “protest and party” against university student fee increases turned into a riot last night, as a mob trashed Telegraph Avenue businesses, breaking windows, overturning garbage cans, and indulging their incoherent rage against adults. The riot followed an invasion of of the university’s Durant Hall, which was closed for renovation. There protesters broke windows, sprayed graffiti, and otherwise made a mess.

This happens with relative frequency, the shops along Telegraph Avenue being some sort of symbol of “capitalism” to East Bay radicals. Read, for example, this account of a Feb. 2008 “action.”

Flickr photos from last night’s rampage are here.

This morning, staff, non-tenured faculty and graduate student instructors at University of California campuses begin a three-day strike to protest the imposition of tuition hikes at the public university. Their website is UCstrike.com and you can follow events on twitter using the #ucstrike hashtag.

According to the strikers’ website, tuition increases this decade have meant that the cost of an undergraduate education has tripled since 2000. They lay the blame not only at the national economic crisis but the university’s commitment to over $1 billion in new debt for construction of new facilities, saying the system favors “construction over instruction.”

The strike is timed to coincide with a meeting of UC regents in Los Angeles. The governing borad is expected to approve new fee hikes.

Kent Nagano is leaving his post as Music Director of the Berkeley Symphony, but not before conducting one last concert on Thursday, Sep. 18.

The program at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus features Mozart’s Symphony no. 41, Bruckner’s Symphony no. 7, and a tribute fanfare commissioned by the organization to honor Nagano’s service.

Nagano, who also has posts at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and the Bavarian State Opera, remained with the Berkeley Symphony long after he had become a world-famous conductor. His production of Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges with the Opéra National de Lyon came to San Francisco several years ago, and it remains the best single live performance I’ve seen in my life.