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I’ve been asked to lend a hand with plenary chair duties, so I won’t be updating the liveblog post any further. If anyone would like to keep up the play-by-play and commentary, you can do it in comments here.

Today is the fourth day of the USSA National Student Congress, and it’s the big one.

The central item on today’s agenda is a full day of plenary sessions, at which the Association’s members will debate policy positions, constitutional amendments, and the group’s agenda for the coming year. As delegates enter the session, they will also cast secret ballots in USSA’s officer elections, which are contested this year for the first time in recent memory.

Several cozwntentious issues are on today’s agenda, though it’s impossible to say just which of them will make it to the floor — in years past, some of the most potentially divisive proposals have been withdrawn or dramatically altered at the last minute.

I’ll be here all day, so be sure to check back for updates.

6:45 pm | I’m going to be lending a hand with chair duties for the rest of the evening, so my liveblogging of today’s sessions has come to a close. If y’all want to keep the discussion going, though, you can do it at this open thread.

5:35 pm | The delegates have passed a resolution on veterans’ issues, and broke for dinner. Back in an hour and a half.

5: 20 pm | A resolution calling on USSA to implement a program under which students would “serve as third-party observers” in on-campus labor negotiations just failed by a six-vote margin.

5:15 pm | A resolution on the abolition of corporate personhood, the first in the “Externally Focused” section, failed. Arguments against it centered on the fact that a large number of administrative resolutions had already been passed, and that the Association’s time and energy are limited.

5:05 pm | The rest of the resolutions in the diversity section all passed as well.

My lack of comment on the last few individual resolutions should not, by the way, be taken as a negative comment on the resolutions or the debate that went along with with them. This was a great crop of proposals, and the floor debate brought out a variety of really interesting and important issues. In several cases, the resolutions themselves were amended from the floor in ways that strengthened them significantly.

4:45 pm | The resolutions supporting cultural, ethnic, and diversity departments, advocating an information and advocacy campaign on gender-inclusive bathrooms, and supporting diversity programs all passed.

4:21 pm | A second motion to end debate passes. The main motion fails — I counted about ten votes in favor.

That was the last item in the constitutional amendments section, so we move on to the “Diversity” section. First up: A resolution on accessibility for students with disabilities.

Also in this section:

• “Advocating for Cultural, Ethnic, and Identity Departments and Programs”
• “Concerning Gender-Inclusive Bathrooms on College Campuses”
• “Cultural Resource Expansion and Development” (passed at the beginning of the plenary)
• “Increasing Women’s Representation in Higher Education Administrative Positions”
• “Institutionalizing Diversity”
• “Women’s Centers on All Campuses”

4:08 pm | An amendment is proposed to change the proposal to a “male collective,” dropping the issue of sexual orientation and changing the body from a formal caucus to a meeting space at conferences. After a question from another delegate the name is changed to “man-identifying collective.”

4:04 pm | A motion to end debate fails.

4:00 pm | I’m not going to try to summarize the debate, but I’ll note that it’s been calm and civil, even a little subdued, so far.

3:52 pm | As the amendment is introduced, literally half the delegates get in line to speak at the “con” mike.

3:50 pm | The motion to direct the board to revamp the diversity guidelines failed. The plenary moves on to consider the constitutional amendment proposing the creation of a Sraight Male Caucus.

3:30 pm | A motion has been put forward proposing that the USSA board of directors revamp the Association’s diversity guidelines “to encompass all areas of diversity equally.”

3:25 pm | The constitutional amendment creating an Undocumented Students Caucus, renamed the “DREAM Students Caucus,” has been approved by the plenary.

3:20 pm | The first constitutional amendment on the agenda has just been approved — the USSA Private College Caucus has been replaced with the Minority Serving Institutions Caucus. The plenary now moves into discussion of the creation of an Undocumented Students Caucus.

3:07 pm | CSC chair just asked for a drum roll … Victor Sanchez has been elected vice president of USSA.

3:06 pm | The CSC has reported that Lindsay McCluskey has been elected USSA president.

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Yesterday I wrote a piece about USSA’s upcoming officer elections, which feature a somewhat rare contested race for the vice presidency. On Twitter last night, Berkeley delegate @kmmcbride responded: “in your post you say in the past the outgoing vice selects their successor? Isnt that #problematic ?”

It’s a good question and, as good questions often are, a somewhat complex question.

Certainly the situation I described isn’t ideal. But it has been, historically, an attempt to accommodate the multiple challenges that an organization like USSA faces in maintaining its student-led status.

USSA, more than most student organizations, depends on its elected leadership. As I noted above, it has no Executive Director or other long-term appointed staff. Because it is a national organization, its board of directors can play only a limited oversight role. Although it maintains institutional relationships with other groups, it doesn’t exist as an affiliate or subsidiary of any of them. And unlike many student organizations of the past, its officers have always served short terms of office and then moved on.

In a country where most national student organizations flame out after seven or eight years at the most, USSA has survived for more than six decades. But its continued existence is by no means guaranteed. A loss of confidence in the Association by its membership or reckless financial decision-making could destroy the organization within a very short time — and almost has, several times in the past.

So the USSA president and vice president have by necessity worked  closely together, and the tradition of the vice president stepping up to the presidency after his or her term of office has evolved from that, as a mechanism for providing continuity within the Association. The “veep one year, president the next” setup, though entirely informal, has persisted without serious challenge in USSA for decades.

Which brings us to the question of how the vice president becomes vice president.

I know of no Congress since NSA became USSA in 1978 in which it has even been so much as alleged that the officer elections were anything but free and open. Any delegate has the right to run subject to the USSA constitution and bylaws, and elections are conducted according to fair and transparent procedures. Any influence which any officer — or anyone else — exerts in the process exists within that context.

But within that context, it’s reasonable and appropriate that the officers — particularly the outgoing vice president — should take an interest in who their successors will be. Under the “veep one year, president the next” setup, the Association’s future will most likely be in the hands of the winner of the vice presidential election in just a few short months.

And so the outgoing vice president has often taken on the responsibility of recruiting a strong candidate to run for his or her position, if no such candidate has stepped forward on his or her own. Remember that running for office in USSA means putting aside any other plans or opportunities you may have for that year — someone who is running as a serious candidate must be prepared to drop everything after the Congress and move to DC immediately if, and only if, they win. It’s not something that people tend to do on a whim. It’s a serious decision, not taken lightly.

So given that the outgoing vice president has a legitimate interest in making sure that there’s a strong candidate  for that office — a worthy candidate who can gain the support of the membership — and given the immensity of the decision to run, it’s not surprising that it often happens that only one such candidate appears. It’s the natural result of a complex process. Problematic? In some ways, yes. But natural, and not unreasonable.

And of course this year, for the first time in recent history, there are two serious candidates for the USSA vice presidency. Each has, from what I’ve been able to gather in the last twenty-four hours, significant support among the delegates, and so far neither has been formally endorsed by either of the Association’s sitting officers.

It’s an interesting development, and a healthy one for the Association.

I arrived in Los Angeles for the annual Congress of the United States Student Association early this afternoon, just in time for officer nominations, and those nominations suggest that there’s an interesting Congress in store.

USSA has two national officers — a president and a vice president. For many years, each year’s vice president has run for president at the end of his or her term, and has won. This informal practice has ensured that each year’s president has had a year’s experience in the Association’s national office before taking over.

That apprenticeship is particularly significant given USSA’s structure. The Association does not have an Executive Director or  any other permanent staff — with the exception of its office manager, all USSA’s employees serve short terms. The organization, unlike many student and youth organizations, is led by its elected officers, who are invariably recent college graduates themselves.

So the office of USSA president is a big and complex one, and it would be difficult for anyone to walk into it and be effective without having served a year as veep first. It’s possible, certainly, and there’s nothing in the USSA constitution to prohibit it — each year’s presidential election gives the Association’s membership an opportunity to block the outgoing vice president from becoming president — but it’s not something that has happened in the Association’s modern history.

Which is why it’s interesting that the competition this year is in the vice presidential slot.

USSA officer elections are often uncontested, with the outgoing vice president selecting his or her successor, and the Congress ratifying that choice. (For more on this historical background, see this followup post.) But this year there are two legitimate candidates for vice president — Daniel Ramos of Colorado and Victor Sanchez of California.

I’ll have more on this race tomorrow.

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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