United States Student Association

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The United States Student Association (USSA), founded in 1947, bills itself as the oldest and largest student association in the United States. It has a historical and current commitment to diversity and breaking the barriers to educational access imposed by inequality and discrimination. It strives to build a movement that is representative of the diversity lacking in political institutions, and organize to alter the relations of power.

USSA was formed by a merger of the National Student Association (NSA) and the National Student Lobby (NSL); and it later absorbed the National Student Educational Fund (NSEF).

Its political activism was cited in a 1995 lawsuit concerning the University of Wisconsin's mandatory student fee. In University of Wisconsin v. Southworth 529 U.S. 217 (1999). In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the university's right to subsidize political speech with student fees.

Vision

The student members of the United States Student Association work together with a vision for a just society in which generations of representative leaders understand their power and engage and empower diverse communities to create social change.

Mission

The United States Student Association, the country's oldest and largest national student-led organization, develops current and future leaders and amplifies the student voice at the local, state, and national levels by mobilizing grassroots power to win concrete victories on student issues.

The United States Student Association Foundation ensures the pipeline of effective student leadership by facilitating education, training and other development opportunities at national, state, and local levels in advocating for issues that affect students.

Core Beliefs

USSA believes that education is a right and should be accessible for any student regardless of their socio-economic background and identity. We believe people who are affected directly by issues of access to higher education should be the ones identifying the solutions that make education accessible to them. Therefore, USSA is dedicated to training, organizing, and developing a base of student leaders who are utilizing those skills to engage in expanding access to higher education and advancing the broader movement for social justice.

History

By Angus Johnston, USSA National Corporate Secretary, 1990-1992

INTRODUCTION

Although discussions of the student movement frequently begin and end with the radical activism of the 1960s, the real history of the movement in the United States begins far earlier. American students have been organizing on a national level for nearly a century, and USSA has been an important part of that organizing since the end of the Second World War---as a nascent national student union in the late forties, as a liberal assemblage with secret government ties in the fifties, as a cautiously activist organization in the sixties, as a radical antiwar cadre in the early seventies, and as a broad-based progressive advocacy group in the eighties and nineties. Today USSA remains the largest, most inclusive student association in the nation.

THE BEGINNING: Internationalism, Antiracism, and Students' Rights

In 1946 students from the United States and 37 other countries met in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to launch the International Union of Students (IUS), a confederation of national student unions. Although strong national student organizations had flourished in the United States in the 1930s, each had disbanded by the end of the war, and the Americans returned from Prague convinced of the need for a fresh start. Hundreds of students attended a planning meeting in Chicago that December, and the Constitutional Convention of the United States National Student Association (NSA) was held at the University of Wisconsin at Madison the following summer.

Although it was founded with an eye on the international stage, NSA paid close attention to campus concerns from the beginning---drafting a Student Bill of Rights and working to strengthen student government and expand access to higher education. The Student Bill of Rights was a milestone in American student history---one of the nation's earliest and most comprehensive articulations of the proposition that students were deserving of adult respect within the university.

From the beginning, some NSA members argued that the association should avoid taking on political causes, but others contended that the membership had a right to address any problem that affected students, and a responsibility to consider issues of national concern. NSA discovered early on that there was no easy way to make the distinction between 'political' and 'non-political' actions---when the association went on the record in opposition to educational segregation at its first meeting, it alienated many white southern schools, and when it elected Ted Harris, an African American from Pennsylvania, to its presidency in 1948, it drew condemnation again.

In 1951 NSA condemned "McCarthyism" after a lengthy debate on whether capitalizing the term would be too personal an attack on Senator McCarthy himself, and in 1953 the association condemned South African apartheid, but only as it affected higher education. This careful liberalism drew harsh criticism from both the right and the left in the fifties, with conservatives accusing NSA of being a Communist front while the Communist Party denounced it as fascist.

THE COLD WAR AND THE CIA

The US government took a new interest in student politics as the cold war got underway, particularly once it became clear that IUS had aligned itself with the Communist bloc. Although NSA embraced a range of student voices, the group's leadership was generally moderate, and NSA's relationship with the government was a comfortable one. NSA broke all ties with IUS in 1948, and soon created a competing international student group, allied with the United States and its allies.

The 1950s brought financial difficulties, and in 1951 three of NSA's five staff positions were eliminated. When the CIA made the association a secret offer of large-scale funding the following year, the NSA president accepted. For the next fifteen years, a clique of "witting" officers and staff worked closely with the CIA, while others in NSA leadership, particularly those who worked solely on domestic issues were kept in the dark. CIA-backed foundations underwrote as much as eighty percent of the total NSA budget some years, and CIA-linked alumni wielded significant influence in the association.

During this period some officers and staff used their positions to gather information on student leaders abroad for the agency, and some alumni worked to ensure that NSA took "correct" positions on controversial questions. Although a few of the association's leaders later claimed that their co-operation had been coerced, for the most part the students were motivated by sincere belief in the rightness of the government's cause. Self-interest played a role as well---high-ranking NSA leaders obtained draft deferments and other help from the government, and some went on to work for the CIA more directly when they left the association.

THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SIXTIES

By the end of the 1950s NSA was becoming more politically active, and in 1959 the group hired an alumna named Constance Curry to open a civil rights office in Atlanta. When student sit-ins against segregation began to spread throughout the South in early 1960, Curry provided funds and logistical support to the activists, and when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was organized that spring, she was made a member of its executive committee.

NSA played a vital role in the wave of student activism that rose in the early 1960s. Many of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) became involved in national activism through NSA, and thousands of students got their first glimpse of the civil rights and antiwar movements through NSA events. Although SNCC and SDS were often critical of NSA's national leadership, they relied on the association for volunteers, publicity, and national communication.

At the same time, right-wing criticism of NSA grew sharper. At the 1961 Congress the newly formed Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) attempted to seize power in NSA, charging that it was controlled by the "far left." In 1966 a California Congressman attacked NSA on the floor of the House, citing a State Department grant that had funded a trip to Vietnam by the NSA president, and urging Congress to "consider requiring the Department to cease its support of this radical organization which is subverting American foreign policy." By this time, NSA "radicals" were receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the CIA.

THE CIA CONNECTION EXPOSED

By the mid-sixties, many of NSA's incoming officers were perturbed by the CIA relationship, but while they attempted to disentangle themselves from the agency, the association continued to request and receive CIA money.

Eventually the question of how to resolve the dilemma was taken out of NSA's hands. Michael Wood, a former staffer who had been informed of the arrangement, told a reporter from Ramparts magazine, which broke the story in February 1967. The Ramparts article exposed the CIA's links to a long list of supposedly independent organizations, and sparked a national scandal.

Many of the NSA insiders who had been kept in the dark felt betrayed by the revelations. Students who had considered the association an independent force for change faced a crisis of faith, while activists on the left took the news as confirmation of liberalism's corruption. NSA's presidents from 1952 to 1964 signed an open letter, which stated that agency funding had never compromised NSA's independence, but their protestations carried little weight with the growing radical wing of the student movement.

BACK FROM THE BRINK

NSA was in crisis. The organization was in debt, with no chance of obtaining funding at remotely the levels it had previously taken for granted. Its leadership had been discredited in the eyes of many supporters, with some calling for the association's officers to be impeached. A few students pledged new support to the group, but others argued that NSA had no choice but to disband. SDS planned a counter-conference at the 1967 Congress to bring that argument to NSA's door, and many students assumed that it was only a matter of time before the association ceased to exist.

Instead of self-destructing, though, NSA remade itself. With the CIA relationship dissolved and most of the old guard gone, delegates reveled in their new freedom, proving their independence with radical stands that would have been unthinkable a year earlier. The 1967 Congress passed a resolution endorsing the Black Power movement's struggle "by any means necessary," and withdrew NSA from membership in the cold war international group it had founded. Delegates cheered when a network television commentator called NSA "a left-wing radical outfit."

That same Congress launched one of the most extraordinary campaigns in American political history. Allard Lowenstein, a former NSA president and Democratic activist, persuaded the group to initiate a task force to attempt to deny Lyndon Johnson renomination for President in 1968, replacing him with a candidate who was committed to ending the war in Vietnam. This "Dump Johnson" movement led directly to Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy's antiwar candidacies for President of the United States, and culminated in LBJ's stunning March, 1968 announcement that he would not seek re-election.

NSA, THE NATIONAL STUDENT LOBBY AND USSA

NSA now reached out to constituencies it had slighted in the past. The 1969 Congress featured workshops on gay rights and a new pledge of support to activists of color, and in 1971 the association elected its first woman president, Marge Tabankin. At the same time, however, the ideal of liberal-left coalition that had guided NSA through the previous decade evaporated as the association's membership was further radicalized by assassinations, government brutality, and the continuing war. In the chaos of the time SNCC faded away, SDS shattered, and NSA turned toward more radical attempts to achieve social change.

In 1972 NSA's president traveled to North Vietnam to gather evidence of US violations of international law, hoping to lay groundwork for a war crimes trial. Actions like these earned NSA a place on President Nixon's infamous "enemies list," and caused division among activists as well. In 1971, a group of California students broke away, dissatisfied with NSA's militancy and focus on the war. They formed a new group, the National Student Lobby (NSL), to lobby the states and the federal government on issues such as economic access to higher education.

But the pendulum was already swinging back. In 1974 NSA created a separate foundation to carry out non-political work. This move allowed the association to become more involved in lobbying, and encouraged cooperation with NSL. In August 1978 a joint meeting of the two groups overwhelmingly approved a merger, naming the new group the United States Student Association. Leadership was chosen from the ranks of both, and at the prodding of the National Third World Student Coalition, today known as the National People of Color Student Coalition (NPCSC), new guidelines were put in place to ensure the diversity of campus delegations.

GRASSROOTS LEGISLATIVE WORK AND STUDENT ACTIVISM

USSA won legislative victories on a variety of issues in the years that followed. Direct funding referenda and other new income sources provided financial stability, and made it possible for the organization to provide new services. In the early 1980s USSA began to provide organized assistance to state student associations, and in 1985 the group co-sponsored the first Grass Roots Organizing Weekend (GROW) for campus leaders. In 1991 USSA entered a new era of activism with the hiring of its first regional field organizer.

The association took a bold step toward multicultural leadership in 1989 when the Congress mandated that people of color fill half the seats on USSA's Board of Directors. The diversity of the NPCSC delegation guaranteed that no racial group would gain a majority of seats, and ensured communication and organizing across racial lines at the highest levels of the organization. In succeeding years similar amendments ensured the representation of women and lesbians, gays and bisexuals on the board, and USSA entered its second half-century with a model of multiculturalism that was based on coalition and commonality of interest.

CONCLUSION

In 1949 an educational journal declared that NSA was charting a course "between the extremes" of American political thought, and two decades later Newsweek reported that NSA's membership extended "to the right of Bill Buckley and to the left of Tom Hayden." That both of these statements remain true today is a testament to USSA's strength, and indicates the unique position that the United States Student Association occupies in American history.

USSA is the oldest and largest student group in the country, and in many ways its story is the story of the last half-century of the American student movement. Few advocacy organizations have been as successful in adapting to changing times, and no group has ever educated and inspired to action as many students.

Coalitions

National People of Color Student Coalition
National Women's Student Coalition
National Queer Student Coalition
State and System Student Association Coalition

Staff

USSA hires four full-time Association staff members and seven full-time Foundation staff members:

President (elected by general membership)
Vice-President (elected by general membership)
Organizing Director
Legislative Director
Trainings Director
Student of Color Campus Diversity Project Director
State Student Association Project Director
Electoral Project Director
Communications & Technology Coordinator
Alumni & Development Director
Student Labor Action Project Coordinator

External links

USSA

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