—Rick Santorum, today.

Over four State of the Union addresses, including his “unofficial” SOTU in February 2009, the president had never used either term before.

In fact, one has to go back thirteen years, to President Clinton’s call in his final SOTU in 2000 for “a constructive effort to meet the challenge that is presented to our planet by the huge gulf between rich and poor,” to hear a president use the R-word in that way in a State of the Union. (Clinton referred to the poor several other times in that speech, as did George W Bush on a few occasions, most recently in 2008.)

I don’t want to make too much out of terminology. Presidents, including Obama himself, have used such phrases as “the wealthiest” in past SOTU speeches, and speaking and acting are of course two very different things too.

But the blunt language of rich and poor, previously absent, is absent no more.

Thanks, Occupy.

Update | A friend points out another difference:

2011 SOTU: “If we truly care about our deficit, we simply can’t afford a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Before we take money away from our schools or scholarships away from our students, we should ask millionaires to give up their tax break.  It’s not a matter of punishing their success.  It’s about promoting America’s success.”

2012 SOTU: “If you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up. You’re the ones struggling with rising costs and stagnant wages. You’re the ones who need relief. Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”

The change is unmistakeable.

Those two victories stand out — both at Berkeley, where the administration has often responded to peaceful protest with police violence and mass arrests, and as a national model, as library occupations have been among the most successful actions mounted in the current wave of student mobilizing.

It’s tempting to argue that such victories hold lessons for future organizing, and in some ways they clearly to — the fact that something is working is a pretty good reason to keep doing it. But it’s not a reason to stop doing other things with less immediate payoff, as one library occupier writes at Reclaim UC.

I’ll let her take it from here:

One lesson we may take from this is that direct action works. In fact, in the case of the Anthropology Library, it has consistently worked. And we should take this moment to celebrate the significant manner in which direct action has restored part of the basic functioning of the university and—at least in this one case—reversed the terribly damaging policy of an increasingly profit-oriented administration. [...]

In the nearly three years of student uprisings, the library occupations have earned us our only concrete, measurable successes. But the wrong lesson would be that by keeping our demands small, and by staying “reasonable,” we may achieve our goals. What we have won here is a band-aid for a university system suffering from hemophilia. Don’t get me wrong: we need band-aids—we need lots of them—but our small, reasonable, achievable demands will fail to produce either the university or the society for which we fight. They will simply bandage up the tools of class reproduction.

Our greatest successes over the last three years have been neither concrete nor measurable. And although a good deal of thought must be put into what “Occupy” is and represents, there can be no doubt that at the beginning of 2012, we stand on an entirely different ground from where we were a year ago. This shift has been effected not by policy enacted or reversed, but by on-the-ground organizing and a growing consciousness of and a willingness to act—to take direct action—against the structures of domination of which we have become a part.

This victory is only a victory if we use it as a springboard for further escalation and further growth.

I couldn’t agree more. Go read the whole thing.

A quarter of the cuts came in California, which slashed its higher ed budget by 13.4%, but in percentage terms, ten states cut more. Three states’ cuts topped 20%,  with New Hampshire clocking in at an incredible 41.3% decline.

And though the budget crunch bore the blame for a lot of cuts in 2009 and 2010, the latest round is taking place in an environment of growing state revenue — according to the Chronicle, aggregate state tax revenue has risen nationally in each of the last seven quarters. Meanwhile, higher ed spending is now 4% lower than it was in 2007, and still dropping.

And of course the brunt of these cuts are being felt by students, in many cases by those least able to pay.

The latest such revelations are utterly mind-boggling:

In the mid-1980s married police officer Bob Lambert, deep undercover in the environmental and animal rights movements, engaged in at least two long-term sexual relationships with at least two activist women, one of whom became pregnant. Lambert was involved in the child’s life for two years before breaking ties with its mother, whom he never informed of his true identity.

And in another case an unnamed police officer deployed in a political group fathered a child with an activist, then disappeared from her life without warning when his assignment ended. Although he never re-initiated contact with either, he tracked them both through ongoing police reports on the woman, who remained under surveillance for her political activity.

Eight women duped into sexual relationships with undercover officers between 1987 and 201o are now bringing lawsuits against the London police force, charging that the officers’ acts were illegal and condoned by department higher-ups.

The sexual relationships were allegedly part of a larger pattern of misconduct in the undercover operations, which are also said to have involved officers listening in on conversations between activists and their lawyers and falsely testifying under their assumed identities at activists’ trials.

Ravi is said to have spied on Tyler Clementi twice via webcam while Clementi and another man hooked up in the two students’ dorm room, and to have livestreamed the feed online, encouraging his Twitter followers to tune in. Clementi sought help online and from his RA before committing suicide by jumping off the George Washington bridge a day later.

At a hearing on Friday, neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys raised objections to televising the trial, which is likely to begin in March. The judge in the case indicated that he would allow the broadcast to take place if the camera’s operation was unobtrusive within the courtroom.

To date, the controversy has centered on Schwyzer’s history of gross personal misconduct and on the content of his writing. (Schwyzer’s disclosure last year of a 1998 attempt to kill his girlfriend and himself sparked the current clamor, drawing new scrutiny to his earlier admissions of sexual activity with his students and to various troubling statements he’d made.)

In his defense, Schwyzer and his supporters regularly contrast his reckless past with his sober present, couching their arguments in the language of forgiveness and redemption. Schwyzer’s bad acts are behind him, they say, and the controversies over his current writings are properly understood as debates within feminism, debates among friends and allies.

To fully understand why so many remain so hostile to Schwyzer, though, we need to look beyond his past misdeeds and his problematic writing, and examine the ethics of his recent public acts.

A week ago Healthy is the New Skinny, an organization Schwyzer helped to establish in 2010, announced that they had decided “to end all ties” with him. In a statement, the group declared that Schwyzer had not fully informed them of his past when he became involved with their work. Similarly, the sex education organization Scarleteen recently announced that they would be removing several pieces Schwyzer had written for them from their website.

This weekend I asked Scarleteen executive director Heather Corinna whether Schwyzer had made the group aware of his past before coming on board with them. She said that he had not.

When Schwyzer was approached to write for Scarleteen in 2009 he knew that he had for years engaged in sexual activity with his students. He knew that he had a personal history of domestic violence. But he withheld these facts from Scarleteen — a group that provides sex education and crisis counseling to young people — and in so doing deprived the organization of the chance to make an informed decision as to whether to be affiliated with him.

The question of which elements of his past a person like Schwyzer is obligated to divulge to a group like Scarleteen is a thorny one, and if he had simply concealed facts from them that he had similarly concealed from the rest of the world, the ethics of his choice could perhaps be debated.

But when Schwyzer started writing for Scarleteen his history of sexual misconduct with students was, though unknown to them, a matter of public record. He had first admitted those relationships online in 2005, and had written about them extensively since. And when he later described the attempted murder of his girlfriend in a blogpost, he again chose not to notify them.

Schwyzer’s failure to reveal such potentially explosive information was an act of appalling recklessness. As a small non-profit working in the field of teen sexuality, Scarleteen relies on fragile networks of financial and institutional support — support that is precarious in the best of circumstances. (As a group co-founded by Schwyzer himself, Healthy is the New Skinny was compromised even further by their association with his name.) By acting the way he did, Schwyzer put feminist organizations, organizations he has championed, at serious risk.

I’ve previously discussed the fact that Schwyzer has quietly taken steps to scrub from his blog statements that pose difficulties for the rehabilitation of his reputation. I’ve suggested that his behavior has needlessly exacerbated the damage the current controversy has done to feminist communities. And the ugly revelations just don’t seem to stop.

This is the third blogpost I’ve written about Schwyzer. I expect it’ll be the last. I have no interest in condemnation for condemnation’s sake. But because Schwyzer’s best writings and best acts have moved so many people, I do think it’s important to be clear that this isn’t just about whether a person can be redeemed. It’s not just about the role of men in feminism. It’s not just about folks not liking some of what he has to say.

It’s about the fact that he continues to behave recklessly and dishonestly. It’s about the damage he’s done, in the very recent past, to causes and principles that he claims to value. It’s about the fact that despite his promise to withdraw from feminist spaces, the harm he’s doing to feminist institutions is ongoing.

That’s a problem. And it’s not going away.

Note | In an email to me, Heather Corinna said she regrets not vetting Schwyzer more thoroughly before he started writing for Scarleteen. The organization has long had policies in place requiring disclosure of relevant past conduct by those volunteers who do direct service work with Scarleteen’s clients, and the group is now extending those policies to cover guest writers on their website.

Update | A friend just pointed me to a January 17 video interview, posted online this afternoon, in which Schwyzer made the following remarks:

“I wrote many pieces for Scarleteen.com, a well-known, wonderful site that teaches young people about sex ed — I think it’s the best sex ed site for teens there is. Scarleteen dissociated itself from me, and actually took down many of the pieces that I’d written, acknowledging that the pieces themselves were valuable, but that my past so thoroughly compromised those pieces that they could not stand behind them.”

I asked Heather Corinna about this, since it was my impression that he’d only written a handful of pieces for them over a period of years, and she said my impression was essentially correct. He’d written two posts for their website and contributed content to two more. (They took one of those four pieces down before the current scandal broke, after deciding it didn’t meet their needs.)

Schwyzer was never a regular volunteer at Scarleteen. He never did direct service work for them. He wrote three or four pieces for them. That’s it.

And because of that marginal relationship, they have been the target of some anger and confusion in recent weeks, from clients and friends with legitimate questions about how they wound up affiliated with a man with a history of domestic violence and sexual predation. And how does that man respond? By exaggerating the extent of his relationship with them. By wrapping himself in their mantle. By pulling them close at a moment when to do so can only compound the trouble he’s already caused.

Oh, and what did Scarleteen actually say when they took down his stuff? They said this:

“Previously unknown information about this writer and his history has recently been made available to Scarleteen, information and history with which we have very serious conflicts. For the benefit of the safe environment we always aim to create for our users, and in accordance with the ethics and practices of our organization as a whole, we no longer wish to be associated with him or his work, which is why his contribution here was removed. He had contributed to two other pieces, one of which was removed, and the other of which is down while we create a new piece instead. We apologize for the loss of content any of our readers found of value, and intend to make up for that loss with new content.”

What’s going on here?

Well, mostly he’s just doing better with everybody. Paul’s numbers have always been highest among young voters, and they’ve generally been rising among under-30s more or less in proportion with how they’ve risen in the electorate as a whole.

But even so, the sheer magnitude of Paul’s youth support has got to be a little worrying for the party. Assuming that he’s not going to wind up the nominee — and everybody in the Republican establishment is making that assumption — that’s a lot of young people to bring back into the fold in November. And with Obama putting up huge numbers among under-30s in national polling on the general election, the GOP is going to need every young voter (and campaign worker) it can get.

The most obvious cause for panic in the Ron Paul youth polling, of course, would be a possible third-party run. But while Paul hasn’t unequivocally repudiated that idea, most observers think it’s not going to happen. (Here’s one really big reason why not.) Even with him on the sidelines in the fall, though, some of his young supporters may hesitate to pull the lever for Romney or Gingrich.

And there’s another reason for concern too. In Iowa and New Hampshire, youth support for Paul rose at about the same rate as his share of the overall vote — in Iowa, for instance, he got 2.1 times the votes in 2012 as in 2008, while his youth support was 2.3 times higher this time than last. In South Carolina, though, he tripled his support overall while quadrupling it among the young. If this trend continues and we see an accelerating youth rejection of establishment candidates, that could mean bigger headaches in the general.

Paul took 3% of the Florida vote in 2008, winning 5% of the youth vote. He’s polling at 9% there now, which is pretty much in line with his cycle-to-cycle improvement in the first three states, so assuming he winds up with about that total, we’d expect him to get something like 15% of young voters — and that’s with him largely ignoring the state.

If his Florida youth numbers are a lot higher than fifteen percent, or they come it at a ratio above about three times his total share of the state vote, we could be seeing the start of something interesting.

And of course that “something new” was itself part of what created OWS. Students occupied NYU and the New School in 2008, UC and CSU in 2009, and those actions, those occupations, formed a part of the history that the folks who occupied Zuccotti Park drew on last fall. (Student Activism is Back, Micah White declared on the Adbusters blog three years ago, reporting on a wave of occupations in the UK and the US.)

Today’s New York Times picks up the story where it stands now, with a thorough, thoughtful article on the present state of the Occupy movement on American campuses. Occupy, it says, is “turning on its head the widespread characterization of today’s young people as entitled and apathetic,” creating “a giddying sense of possibility” for a new generation of activists.

Sounds about right.

His question:

I’ve been looking into starting graduate school in 2013. I found myself naturally drawn to [a private college in New England] but after some basic research I get the feeling that despite their claims of championing social justice & democracy, there does not seem to be a legitimate accredited representative student body on campus. I find myself doubting that I will ever be able to truly enjoy my educational experience at a school that doesn’t have progressive/radical student representation.

So my question to you is: do you have a basic list of some schools in the states that have such representation? I know the Student Union model varies quite intensively between Canada and the USA, but I’m still hoping there may be a few schools out there that have the sort of Union I’m looking for.

My response:

It’s a good question, and not one that has a really straightforward answer. Instead, some general thoughts.

The basic unit of campus representation of students in the US is generally the student government, sometimes called the student association or something similar. (Graduate students and undergrads are typically organized separately.) Student governments range from very weak to fairly strong, with a few general trends visible.

First, and probably most importantly, student governments at public colleges are usually more robust than those at private institutions. Public universities are responsive to political pressure in ways that privates aren’t, and they tend to be more likely to have policies in place ensuring a measure of student autonomy and representation in campus governance. When student activists fought for university reform in the late sixties and after, it was in the public universities that they had the most success, and those successes are still visible on some campuses today.

A second indicator of the strength of student government is the existence of a statewide student association, or SSA. SSAs are most often constituted as federations of student governments within a public university system, and they tend to be established outside the control of the university itself. (In contrast, campus student governments generally exist within the university governance system, and are subject to administrative interference.)

The presence of an SSA in a university system is an indication that the student governments within that system have a history of students’ rights organizing. Many SSAs also foster a culture of student engagement with university governance issues while representing a check on administrative meddling in student affairs. Similarly, campuses that are members of the United States Student Association are generally at least a bit more likely to have activist student governments.

Looking beyond the student government world, some sites of institutionally significant student organizing to keep an eye out for are graduate student employees’ unions, Occupy-affiliated mobilizations, and chapters of groups like Students for a Democratic Society. These groups aren’t directly embedded in university governance like the ones discussed above, but they often represent a pro-student force in campus struggles.

So. That’s what I came up with. I’m eager to hear from y’all on this — I suspect that some of you may have different and better advice than I do.