Jon Campbell

jcampbell1@gannett.com | @JonCampbellGAN

ALBANY — Bernie Sanders was railing against income inequality in Binghamton long before he ever set foot on the presidential campaign trail.

Sanders, now competing with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, spent the spring 1990 semester teaching college classes in upstate New York, including a masters-level course at Binghamton University.

And the Sanders of 1990 — then coming off an eight-year stint as mayor of Burlington, Vermont — sounded quite a bit like the Sanders of 2016.

"The gap between rich and poor is growing wider and wider," Sanders told a group of BU faculty and students, according to a May 1990 article in the campus' faculty newspaper. "The richest 1 percent of the population have one-half America's wealth, while the richest 10 percent control 80 percent of the wealth."

Compare that to Sanders' victory speech Tuesday in New Hampshire.

"We will not accept a rigged economy in which ordinary Americans work longer hours for lower wages, while almost all new income and wealth goes to the top 1 percent," he said Tuesday.

Sanders' BU class actually met in Norwich, Chenango County, according to the faculty newspaper. At the same time, Sanders was a visiting professor at Hamilton College in Oneida County.

The BU class — Affluence and Crisis — examined "fundamental questions about the distribution of wealth in the U.S."

"There is a steady decline in living standards for the middle class, with those in the lowest social class moving down and out to the streets," Sanders told the BU students and faculty then, according to the article. "We have 3 million people sleeping on the streets. Where is the moral outrage?"

Sanders upstate stint came just before he was elected to the House of Representatives in November 1990, representing Vermont. He served eight terms before he was elected to the Senate in 2006.

Here's a look at a pair of 1990 articles from the BU faculty newspaper, which were provided by the university: