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As I mentioned earlier this week, the United States Student Association’s annual Congress starts today at UCLA. What follows is a short history of USSA and its predecessor, the National Student Association — it’s the latest revision of an essay that I wrote for distribution within USSA when I served as its national secretary as an undergrad in the early 1990s.

–Angus Johnston

Although discussions of American student movements frequently begin and end with the radical activism of the 1960s, the real history of those movements begin far earlier. American students have been organizing for centuries, and USSA has been an important part of that organizing since the end of the Second World War — as a newly-created national student union in the late forties, as an increasingly activist association of student governments in the sixties, as a radical antiwar outfit in the early seventies, and as a broad-based advocacy group in the eighties and nineties. Today, with a growing membership and a powerful lobbying presence in the country’s capital, USSA stands as the largest, most inclusive national student association in the nation.

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