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This post is the last in a series of twelve counting down the top dozen student activism stories that will be making news on the American campus in the new academic year. Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more!

When I first conceived this series almost a month ago, I had only a rough idea of which stories would make the cut. It took me about a week to come up with a stack of candidates, and a few more days to cull the list down to twelve. Even after I started writing, I kept messing with the list — bumping some stories up, others down. I even pulled one or two at the last minute to make room for others I’d missed in my first draft.

But there was never any question as to which story was going to take the top slot.

The crisis now facing American public colleges and universities is actually two crises — an ongoing crisis, decades in the making, and an acute crisis now entering its second year.

Public funding for public higher education is disappearing. Tuition and fees are soaring, class sizes are climbing, faculty lines are disappearing. Programs are being slashed. Whole institutions are contemplating abandoning their identity as public colleges and universities.

We are at a crossroads in American public higher education. No story is bigger.

Most of you have probably already seen this, but those of you who haven’t need to.

I posted last week about the ongoing epidemic of anti-gay bullying in our nation’s schools, and about what I’m doing to help stop it. Queer youth are targets for an incredible amount of abuse, and the effects are devastating — a recent wave of highly-publicized suicides are just the tip of the iceberg.

And that’s why I’m so impressed by Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project.

What Dan and his husband have done is put up a video on YouTube talking honestly about their experiences as gay teens — what they faced from their families, their schoolmates, their teachers — and then talking, in detail, about when and how it got better. About how they found communities of support. About how they left the bullies behind. About how their parents’ initial hostility slowly melted into deep love and acceptance.

And then they invited other lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to post their own stories about how things got better for them. It’s a great idea. It’s a great resource. It’s amazing. Yay.

Last Friday I slotted in California’s crackdown on student protest as number four on my list of the top student activism stories of the new year, and that story is already beginning to heat up.

As the invaluable blog Reclaim UC reports, Berkeley held a series of pre-hearing conferences with student protesters last week. By RUC’s account violations of Berkeley’s judicial procedures were rampant — administrators ignored a deadline for bringing charges, scheduled conferences in conflict with confidentiality rules, and adopted internally inconsistent policies as to which version of the code of code of conduct they were relying on.

These issues seem to have prevented the pre-hearings from going forward as originally planned, but a Twitter report from campus says that actual hearings themselves are beginning today nonetheless.

Update | Reclaim UC says today’s hearing has been canceled.

“Marijuana use does appear to foster alientation, towards both the family and society in general. In school and college settings, the tendency of users to form subcultures hostile to prevailing social customs and activities is well known. … It remains to be seen what sort of society will emerge as a generation so heavily associated with marijuana attains the position of leadership.”

— From The Marjuana Epidemic, a 1981 Heritage Foundation report by Stuart Butler, PhD.

Yesterday I posted briefly about George Orwell’s well-known 1942 claim that pacifism is “objectively pro-fascist,” and his later repudiation of that argument. Here’s the whole passage in which he disavowed the idea — it’s from his column, “As I Please,” in the December 8, 1944 edition of the left-wing London weekly Tribune.

Later this week I’ll have another post up discussing this column, and its applicability to contemporary political debates, in more detail.

“For years past I have been an industrious collector of pamphlets, and a fairly steady reader of political literature of all kinds. The thing that strikes me more and more — and it strikes a lot of other people, too  —is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point. When I look through my collection of pamphlets — Conservative, Communist, Catholic, Trotskyist, Pacifist, Anarchist or what-have-you — it seems to me that almost all of them have the same mental atmosphere, though the points of emphasis vary. Nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a “case” with complete disregard for fairness or accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them. The same propaganda tricks are to be found almost everywhere. It would take many pages of this paper merely to classify them, but here I draw attention to one very widespread controversial habit — disregard of an opponent’s motives. The key-word here is ‘objectively.’

“We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are “objectively” aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the “objectively” line of talk is brought forward again. To criticise the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore “Trotskyism is Fascism.” And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.

“This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. For there are occasions when even the most misguided person can see the results of what he is doing. Here is a crude but quite possible illustration. A pacifist is working in some job which gives him access to important military information, and is approached by a German secret agent. In those circumstances his subjective feelings do make a difference. If he is subjectively pro-Nazi he will sell his country, and if he isn’t, he won’t. And situations essentially similar though less dramatic are constantly arising.

“In my opinion a few pacifists are inwardly pro-Nazi, and extremist left-wing parties will inevitably contain Fascist spies. The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, that has made political prediction in our time so remarkably unsuccessful.”

More soon.