By Charles Haviland BBC News, Colombo

A court has refused to grant bail to IUSF leader, Udul Premaratne, but some other students were granted bail

Twenty-nine students were arrested and some were later granted bail, while more than 200 more have been suspended; several faculties are closed.

Accusations have been flying between the students and the government and last Tuesday in Colombo about 250 students staged the latest in a string of protests.

The mood in many of Sri Lanka’s 15 universities is increasingly dominated by confrontation rather than learning.

Private universities

Most of the protestors come from a big student union affiilated to a small but influential opposition party, the JVP, once a militant group which 20 years ago staged a bloody insurgency completely separate from the Tamil war.

	IUSF wants better hostel facilities and an end to plans to open private universities

The union, Inter University Student Federation (IUSF), says it wants better hostel facilities and an end to plans to open private universities on the island.

The student leader, Udul Premaratne, who accused the government of using its might against anyone that questioned it.

Moments later he was arrested and his colleagues say he is being mistreated in detention.

But this is a propaganda battle and the government says the student unions themselves have behaved thuggishly and have been violently initiating, or “ragging”, new students.

A crowd, said to be supporters of a populist government minister, staged an anti-JVP demonstration by a campus. Some of them physically attacked a student as he walked in.

That came after 26 people were injured when the student union stormed the higher education ministry.

The minister says 1,000 students will be arrested if necessary as the universities are, as he put it, restructured.