Ever since California history instructor Hugo Schwyzer’s admission last week that he’d had sex with multiple students over the last several years, it’s been obvious that he could not ethically continue to teach at Pasadena City College. Schwyzer has made it clear from the start, however, that he has no intention of resigning, and in an interview yesterday he explained why. He is remaining in his position, he told the Daily Caller, in an attempt to coerce his employer into offering him a disability settlement payout.

The students he taught and mentored at PCC, meanwhile, face mounting harassment and public humiliation, with a conservative blog openly speculating yesterday as to the names of the women he slept with.

On the day after his initial admission, Schwyzer indicated that he was “looking very seriously” at filing a mental illness disability claim against Pasadena City College, implying that if PCC came to a settlement with him he would be willing to walk away from teaching there. Yesterday he made that quid pro quo much more explicit.

“My goal is to get this disability pay,” Schwyzer told the Daily Caller yesterday. “Once we’ve established that, I can move forward and leave the college and everyone can be happy.” His leverage in this attempt to wring financial concessions? “You know how hard it is to fire someone with tenure.”

This is bald extortion, and it’s unconscionable. PCC wants him out, and he has no intention of coming back, but unless they accede to his financial demands, he’ll stick around to make their lives more difficult.

And what of his students?

Well, in that same interview Schwyzer revealed new particulars of his sexual relationships with them. He never raised the grades of the young women he slept with, he told the Caller, because “the only students I was interested in were already A students.” When he pursues one of his students sexually, he said, “it’s not just a pretty face” that attracts him. “It’s also intellectual ability.”

This pattern of gratuitously disclosing the salacious particulars of his past sexual relationships is one we’ve seen before from Schwyzer, but it’s particularly repulsive in the context of these teacher-student relationships. The more he gossips about his sexual life with these young women, the more detail he shares — and history suggests he’s likely to share a lot more — the more he violates the privacy of those whose expectations of him as a teacher he’s already betrayed, and the more fodder he gives others to violate it.

And it’s not just him. Yesterday a right-wing blog printed the names and identifying details of two of Schwyzer’s former students, hypothesizing that one of the two was the anonymous student who first disclosed her affair with him. The blog linked to Schwyzer’s past praise of one of them on his blog while passing along unsourced rumors about the relationship status of the other.

Each of these two students is now the subject of internet speculation and slander. Why? Because Schwyzer won’t shut up, and won’t quit PCC without extorting a payoff.

The student who revealed Schwyzer’s sexual misbehavior has attracted unwanted attention as well. In a Tumblr post several days ago she complained of harassment by Schwyzer supporters who had discovered her real name, and yesterday she expressed frustration with college attorneys who have been pressuring her to assist with their investigation.

All this is only going to get worse as the fall semester, and the administrative investigation of Schwyzer, get underway. Rumors and gossip will spread, on campus and online. The women Schwyzer slept with, and those who knew, will come under increasing pressure to work with administrators who are (rightly) attempting to remove him from the classroom. Bottom-feeding bloggers will continue to dig, smearing and harassing an ever-growing circle of young feminist women whose only mistake was trusting Schwyzer to be an ethical teacher and a decent human being.

All this is inevitable for as long as Schwyzer continues to fight the college’s attempt to remove him. The investigation will continue, as will the media circus.

When he stops, it stops.

Update | There’s been quite a bit of vigorous and productive discussion of this post on Twitter from the perspective of disability rights, particularly on and around the timelines of @civilwarbore and @Blackamazon. Though none of what follows is a direct response to either CWB or BA, I want to take a moment to address a few of the issues that have come up in my conversations with them and others. These questions are difficult, and these discussions are important. I hope they continue here and elsewhere.

First, I didn’t intend anything in this piece to be taken as a criticism of the concept of disability settlements in general or psychiatric disability settlements in particular. I hope that was clear, and if it wasn’t, I’m making it clear now.

Second, it is absolutely unfair and unjust that in this country health insurance is so often conditional on employment. It’s not right that people lose health insurance when they lose their jobs. But that doesn’t mean that nobody with health insurance should ever be fired. If Schwyzer loses his health insurance as a result of his years of violating the rules of his college and the ethics of his profession, that’s unfortunate. But it’s on him.

Third, I’m not a lawyer, and I have no opinion on the legal merits of Schwyzer’s apparent current strategy of hardball negotiation with Pasadena City College. By all appearances, he is preparing to defend his interests vigorously, as is his right. But PCC has a right and an obligation to defend their interests just as vigorously. Where their interests — and specifically the interests of the students of PCC past, present, and future — conflict with Schwyzer’s, I believe that it is appropriate that the students’ interests, not Schwyzer’s, prevail.

Finally, I think it’s important to reiterate that Schwyzer’s insistence on campaigning for a financial settlement in public is itself deleterious to the interests of the students whose trust he has already betrayed. If he does not have the decency to resign his position, he should at the very least have the decency to shut the hell up.

Thursday Update | Citing “pressure from the public and the PCC community,” Hugo Schwyzer has announced that he is resigning his teaching position, effective January 1. As he is on medical leave for the fall semester, this means he will not set foot in a PCC classroom again.

Schwyzer’s application for medical disability retirement is apparently still pending, and is not directly affected by his resignation. The PCC general counsel said yesterday that the college’s investigation of his sexual misconduct will continue.

The 2013-14 academic year is shaping up to be a pivotal one for the American student movement. Developments both on-campus and off promise to shape the landscape of higher ed organizing in huge ways.

All this week I’ve been posting about the big upcoming stories I’ve got my eye on as the fall semester gets underway. On Tuesday I put up the first set — on Janet Napolitano’s new position at the head of the University of California system, the rise of divestment campaigns targeting Israeli policies and fossil fuels, and the new tuition alternative proposals being floated in Oregon and elsewhere. Wednesday I wrote about President Obama’s plans for higher education funding, the possible resurgence of campus occupations as a student organizing tactic, and the future of the United States Student Association, and Thursday I discussed the Dream Defenders, student voting rights restrictions, and student debt organizing.

That’s nine, which means there are three more to go. Here they are:

3. Cooper Union’s fight to stay tuition-free.

Cooper Union is one of America’s great colleges, and for nearly all its history it’s been free to attend. (Incredibly selective, but free to attend.) In the last several years, as a result of a series of failed investments and poor management choices, Cooper has dug itself a big financial hole, and the college’s administration and trustees have decided that imposing tuition is the way to dig out.

There are a long list of problems with this plan, not least the fact that Cooper’s tuition policy is a major reason it draws the student body it does — start charging tuition and the applicant pool gets shallower. Lower the quality of the students, and the college’s reputation suffers. To shore up the reputation, you start spending more on all sorts of things … which then means you have to raise tuition again, further degrading the applicant pool.

Cooper Union students occupied the president’s office for three months this spring and summer demanding a reversal of the tuition policy and other reforms. They ended that occupation having won a number of concessions, prominent among them a negotiated process for tuition review. That process is getting underway now — if it succeeds, it’ll be one of the biggest campus organizing victories in recent memory. If it fails…

If it fails, Cooper will get real interesting again real quick.

2. Campus affirmative action returns to the Supreme Court.

Last fall the United States Supreme Court heard a case that had the potential to end affirmative action in college admissions — or to shore it up, in one form or another, for at least the next few years. The justices sat on that case for nearly the entire year, only to announce in the closing days of their term that the lower courts had mishandled it and needed to go back and try again.

That case, Fisher v Texas, will be making its way back through the court system this year, while a new case — Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action — reaches the Court’s docket for the first time. In Fisher, the court was asked to rule on the constitutionality of a particular affirmative action plan. In Schuette, they’ll be examining a state ban on the consideration of race in college admissions. And if last year was any indication, we’ll all be waiting for answers for quite some time.

1. Legislative attacks on the state student association movement.

Last year saw Republican state legislatures move to eliminate the existing funding streams for to major statewide student associations — the Arizona Students Association and Wisconsin’s United Council. This year both of those organizations will be working to rebuild on a new footing.

As I’ve written many times before, statewide student associations are an essential component of student power organizing in the United States. They provide crucial infrastructure and continuity for campus efforts, they combine grassroots advocacy work with legislative lobbying, and they facilitate necessary coordination both among states and between state-level and national activism.

An attempt to take down two SSAs in a single semester — one of those, United Council, being the country’s oldest and most historic — is a chilling assault on the ability of American students to organize as they choose. The fate of ASA and UC, and that of the nation’s other SSA’s, which could well come under similar assault in the coming months, will shape the landscape of American student activism for decades to come.

The 2013-14 academic year is shaping up to be a pivotal one for the American student movement. Developments both on-campus and off promise to shape the landscape of higher ed organizing in huge ways.

All this week I’ve been posting about the big upcoming stories I’ve got my eye on as the fall semester gets underway. On Tuesday I put up the first set — on Janet Napolitano’s new position at the head of the University of California system, the rise of divestment campaigns targeting Israeli policies and fossil fuels, and the new tuition alternative proposals being floated in Oregon and elsewhere. Yesterday I wrote about President Obama’s plans for higher education funding, the possible resurgence of campus occupations as a student organizing tactic, and the future of the United States Student Association.

What’s next? Here’s what’s next…

6. The Dream Defenders

When George Zimmerman was acquitted in the murder of Trayvon Martin this July, dozens of young activists took their anger and their resolve to the Florida statehouse.

They occupied the offices of Governor Rick Scott in protest. They demanded a repeal of Stand Your Ground. They drafted a new model law to protect their rights and those of their peers. They won a meeting with the governor and a fall hearing in the state legislature.  And after thirty-one days, they left.

But they’ll be back.

5. Student voting rights under attack.

With the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision gutting Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act last term, they opened the doors to new restrictions on voting in nine states and dozens of local jurisdictions. In those parts of the country and beyond, students will be in the sights of legislators seeking to impose new barriers to electoral access — as a young, liberal, transient population that has a more difficult time than most securing certain forms of identification, students represent a group that conservatives have both the means and the motive to disenfranchise.

The big battles over student voting rights will heat up in the fall of 2014 with the country’s midterm elections. But there are a long list of local elections taking place this fall, primaries to follow in the spring, and lots of legislative and organizing jockeying to come throughout the next fourteen months.

4. Student debt campaigns roll on.

The amount of attention paid to America’s student debt crisis in recent years is to my mind one of the great underappreciated signs of the force and potency of the contemporary student movement in this country. American students and graduates have been drowning in debt for a long time now, but it’s only in the last few years, as protests against banks and tuition policies have become a regular campus occurrence, that the rest of the country has started paying attention.

And yes, they’re definitely paying attention. The organizing conducted by groups like the Student Labor Action Project, the United States Student Association, and Strike Debt got a tremendous amount of attention last year, and with new tuition policies, new federal regulations, and new legislation on the drawing board, they’re sure to garner much more. The current trajectory of American higher education is unsustainable. Student debt activists are pointing the way to a new future.

Early this morning Pasadena City College history instructor and internet-famous male feminist Hugo Schwyzer, who has been conducting a slow-motion self-immolation all summer, interrupted his online hiatus to offer yet another admission of wrongdoing.

This one is likely the most significant yet.

In a brief middle-of-the-night blogpost, Schwyzer admitted that a pseudonymous accusation posted on Tumblr a few days ago was true, and that he has been conducting sexual relationships with students for more than five years:

“Until recently, I maintained that I had stopped having sex with students enrolled in my classes in 1998. That is not true; I started sleeping with students again in 2008, well before my psychiatric breakdown of earlier this year.

I have no intention of naming names or of discussing numbers, save to say that the allegations “Meagan” makes are true and that I did indeed have sex with more than one adult student. There is no excuse for this behavior, and I do not expect anyone to defend it.

I will convey this information to the college, and I expect this will be a factor in discussions about my future as an history instructor.

I am deeply sorry for having maintained a lie for so long, and extend my apologies to the many whom I’ve wronged, including those who fiercely defended me against charges that turned out to be true.”

As he indicates in this post, Schwyzer was nearly fired from Pasadena City College in 1998 for sexual contact with students — dozens of them, by his most recent account. He has attributed his success in keeping his job at that time to the fact that he had just been granted tenure when the allegations surfaced, and to the fact that PCC did not then have clear written policies outlawing student-teacher sex.

The charge of sleeping with his students subsequent to 1998 is one that Schwyzer has consistently and adamantly denied, even as he has acknowledged an ever-growing catalogue of improper behavior. (Only weeks ago, he admitted having written a series of private text messages in which he fantasized about having sex in a classroom while his students watched and masturbated.) But now those denials have been shown to be false.

Schwyzer says his admission that he slept with multiple students who were enrolled in his classes will likely “be a factor in discussions about my future” at Pasadena City College. But it should be more than a factor. It should be decisive.

To have sex with your students is a profound violation of your moral, ethical, and pedagogical obligations to them. At PCC, where Schwyzer teaches, it is also a direct violation of college policy.

Today’s revelations make it abundantly clear, if it wasn’t before, that there is no place for Schwyzer in the classroom. Not now. Not ever.

Schwyzer should resign from PCC immediately. If he refuses to resign, he should be fired. Period.

Update | Schwyzer expanded upon his most recent confession in a YouTube video, posted last night. In it, he said that between 2008 and “very recently” he conducted sexual relationships with three different students who were enrolled in his classes when the relationships began.

In the YouTube video Schwyzer acknowledges that his ongoing violation of PCC policies “may impact my relationship with the college,” and says he is “willing to face whatever consequences may come” on that front. But that’s a statement, it should be noted, that could mean anything or nothing. Either they’ll fire him or they won’t. If they do, either he’ll sue them or he won’t. However any of that shakes out, he’ll be facing the consequences of his actions whether he likes it or not.

What Schwyzer doesn’t say — in the video or in the blogpost — is that he intends to resign from PCC. For years now, as evidence of Schwyzer’s misbehavior has accumulated, he has consistently stonewalled and deflected for as long as he could. Only when those options were exhausted has he ever admitted error or wrongdoing. He has never, to my knowledge, chosen to resign from a feminist project or step back from a feminist space — each time he has withdrawn it has been because he was forced to, and each time he has sought to spin the withdrawal as a freely chosen gesture.

Schwyzer is a serial sexual predator. He has abused his position as a college instructor for his own sexual gratification repeatedly over a period of decades. He has no business teaching. He cannot be trusted around students. There is no legitimate path back into the classroom for him.

If Schwyzer fights to keep his teaching job, as he has always done when his actions have placed it in peril in the past, he will cause PCC needless expense, embarrassment, and distraction. He will force the students whose trust he violated to testify against him, or to lie for him. If he is successful in his attempt, he will place his new students in an untenable position.

Should he resign? Of course.

He should have resigned years ago.

Second Update | The general counsel of Schwyzer’s community college has released a statement on his confession, and it’s pretty blistering:

Yesterday Mr. Hugo Schwyzer, a faculty member of the college, released statements publicly on the internet that he has had sexual relations with his students as recently as 2011 while an instructor at the college.

Such conduct, if confirmed as true, would be a grave violation of college policy warranting termination.

The college does not in any way condone or tolerate such conduct by any faculty member.  All of us in the college are outraged by Mr. Schwyzer’s statements about his conduct.  The college is acting swiftly to conduct an investigation and to hold Mr. Schwyzer accountable for his actions while an employee.

It seems clear that they’re committed to firing him at this point. We’ll see if it actually happens.

Morning Update | The local Pasadena paper has a story up on yesterday’s developments, and while it mostly rehashes what was already known, it does include two new pieces of information.

First, in an interview Schwyzer gave the paper yesterday, he again confirmed the allegations made by the anonymous former student on Tumblr. (As has become a recurring pattern this summer, Schwyzer reached out to the media from a mental health facility he checked himself into after his latest internet confession.)

Second, Schwyzer gave no indication that he’s considering resigning his teaching post. Indeed, he said that he is “looking very seriously” at the possibility of filing a psychiatric disability claim, suggesting that accepting such a claim could be an “end around” for the college. Apparently he has no intention of quitting, and plans to fight back if PCC tries to fire him.

One other point: It could be a matter of selective editing or poor questioning, but although Schwyzer says in the article that he regrets the “fraud and hypocrisy” involved in his writing in opposition to age-disparate sexual relationships while he was engaged in such relationships himself, and though he describes himself as “a terrible male feminist” who “damaged the brand of male feminism,” he never addresses the specific moral or ethical implications of his repeated use of his students for sex.

September 10 Update | Schwyzer has made the terms of his attempt to extort PCC into granting him disability pay explicit, and granted an interview in which he gossiped about his sexual relationships with his students. Meanwhile, the student who outed him is getting unwelcome attention from PCC administrators, and a right-wing blog has published the names and personal information of two students who they suspect — on virtually no evidence — of having been his sexual partners. New blogpost here.

The judge who gave former teacher Stacey Dean Rambold to thirty days in jail for the rape of 14-year-old student Cherice Moralez announced Tuesday that he will be conducting a new hearing to revisit that decision.

In the notice filed yesterday for the new hearing, the judge declared that the mandatory minimum sentence for Rambold’s crime appears to be two years, rather than the thirty days claimed by the defense prior to sentencing. “In this Court’s opinion,” the notice states, “imposing a sentence which suspends more than the mandatory minimum would be an illegal sentence.”

In plain English, here’s what appears to have happened:

The judge sentenced Rambold to fifteen years in prison, but suspended all but thirty days of that sentence. In doing so, he relied on a claim by the defense that a thirty-day sentence was the minimum legally available given the circumstances. In his order yesterday, he said that claim was apparently incorrect, that the proper mandatory minimum was in fact two years, and that he did not have the power to suspend any part of a mandatory minimum sentence.

The hearing will take place on Friday afternoon. Unless the defense can show that the judge’s analysis of the law is incorrect, it looks like Rambold will wind up with a new sentence of at least two years in prison.