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Yesterday was the second day of the 65th annual USSA National Student Congress, and it was mostly been given over to workshops and caucus/region/committee meetings. But there was also a lot of discussion in the meetings and the hallways about legislation and regulations to put forward at Monday’s plenaries, and a new electric charge in the air.
The big event of the day was nominations for national officers, which took place at lunch and set up the most interesting, and least predictable, USSA leadership race in a very long time.
For several decades, each year’s USSA vice president has run for — and won — the presidency. This means that running for veep, in practice, has meant setting yourself up for a two-year commitment, since it’s always been correctly assumed that you’d run for and win the presidency the following year.
For a long stretch before and after the time that I was involved as an undergrad, each year’s outgoing vice president/incoming president made it clear who they wanted to work with, and the organization ratified that choice in the vice presidential election. The incoming president had to choose someone who would win, which meant that they had to take organizational opinion into account, but the system wasn’t particularly democratic. My own memory suggests that folks who ran against the insider candidates tended to do so assuming they’d lose, and often made that fact close to explicit by running for president instead of veep.
But vice president races have gotten more contested in recent years, while interest in running protest candidacies for president has declined. When the current president, Victor Sanchez, won the vice presidency two years ago, it was in a closely fought race, and this year there are no fewer than four candidates for veep — each with a real constituency and a plausible path to victory.
The first vice presidential candidate nominated yesterday was Dylan Jambrek (Facebook | Website). Jambrek served as vice president of Wisconsin’s United Council, one of the country’s pre-eminent state student associations, last year, and if elected he would be the association’s first white male officer since the 1980s.
The next nominee was Sophie Zaman (Facebook | Website). Zaman has worked as the director of the Center for Education Policy and Advocacy, a student-run group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the only vice presidential candidate never to have served on the USSA board of directors.
Next to be nominated was Ernesto Zumaya (Facebook | Website). An undocumented student and activist from UCLA, Zumaya would be the third consecutive USSA vice president — and the fourth in five years — to emerge from the University of California system.
Finally the delegates nominated Matt Corder0. Cordeiro is the immediate past president of the student association at Rutgers, perhaps USSA’s most activist member campus, and a founding organizer in New Jersey’s new state student association. (Cordeiro’s campaign has neither a Facebook page nor a website, but he did have the standout line of yesterday’s nominating speeches: “I like long walks on the picket line and revolutions in the rain.”)
A candidate Q & A is scheduled for dinner tonight, and voting will be by secret ballot at tomorrow’s plenary session. If no candidate receives a majority the two vote leaders will meet in a run-off.
Mario Savio. Because Mario Savio.
Today is the second day of the 2012 National Student Congress of the United States Student Association. In this excerpt from my dissertation I describe the 1966 Congress of USSA’s predecessor the United States National Student Association, a meeting that took place in a watershed moment in American student history.
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NSA’s health improved substantially in 1965-66 — attendance at the 1965 Congress had been among the lowest in NSA history, but in 1966 it rose above 250 schools. In the wake of Berkeley and the Vietnam escalation, student activism acquired a cultural resonance that it had not previously possessed. As protest became more pervasive — and as it became a mass-media phenomenon — the task of political organizers changed. At the very moment when campus activists had given up on organizing student governments, they discovered that student governments were beginning to organize themselves.
After Berkeley, an activist self-presentation was increasingly an electoral advantage for a student government candidate, whether that candidate was backed by an organized campaign or not. Across the country, activists were swept into office almost inadvertently by student bodies whose attitudes toward political organizing were undergoing a dramatic and rapid transformation.
In the summer of 1966 the new president of the Stanford student government, David Harris, was one such activist. A leader in campus protests, he had been approached by a leader of the small activist faction in the campus student legislature, and asked to run as a protest candidate for student government president. He would lose, he was told, but in running he would have a platform from which to publicize an activist agenda.
In a field of seven candidates that year, Harris stood out. Fraternities had long dominated the Stanford student government, and while Harris strolled the campus in jeans and what the campus newspaper called a “beatnik-style” haircut, the others campaigned in suits and ties. He ran on a platform that he described later as elimination of the Board of Trustees, student control of student regulations, equal policies for men and women, the option to take classes on a pass-or-fail basis, legalization of marijuana, and the end of all university co-operation with the conduct of the War in Vietnam, and he was a sensation. He led the field in the first round of voting, and a week later beat a fraternity candidate in the runoff, an election that saw the highest turnout in Stanford history. At the NSA Congress that summer he emerged as one of the strongest radical voices in the Association, and soon he would be a movement celebrity — co-founder of the draft-resistance group The Resistance, subject of an Esquire feature on “The New Student President,” and husband of folksinger Joan Baez, whom he met while both were jailed for their participation in a draft protest.
In a 1965 article in the Congress News, Hendrik Hertzberg had described that Congress as “in some indefinable way hipper, more aware that life does not begin and end with resolutions and caucuses, than the one that preceded it.” For all the upheavals of the previous year, though, the 1965 Congress had been a meeting whose most significant speech had been given by Hubert Humphrey, one which had closed with a mass singing of “We Shall Overcome” and the national anthem. The 1965 Congress was certainly hipper than 1964’s, but “hipper” is not the same as “hip.”
The 1966 Congress, at the University of Illinois, would require less equivocation. That year Allen Ginsberg appeared on a panel on drug policy reform, and stayed to give a poetry reading afterwards. (“Language, language … you pour it forth like napalm,” he intoned, in an apparent reference to the plenary.) One delegate put forward a resolution advocating the legalization of homosexuality, and another introduced a proposal to remove the word “God” from the NSA constitution. Longtime Conservative Caucus stalwart Danny Boggs put forward a libertarian argument for the regulation of LSD on the same basis as alcohol, and the plenary itself endorsed the repeal of the nation’s marijuana possession laws.
The center of gravity of the Congress was shifting rapidly. In 1966 each of the political caucuses at the Congress repositioned itself to the left — the Conservative Caucus renamed itself the Moderate Caucus, the Radical Middle Caucus renamed itself the Progressive Caucus, and the Liberal Caucus faced a schism between its liberals and its radicals.
The Liberal Caucus had been formed as an oppositional force, but it now stood at the Association’s heart. In 1966 the caucus didn’t merely debate the merits of pending legislation, it drafted and voted on resolutions of its own, and possessed the delegate strength to bring its proposals to the floor outside of the Congress’s formal legislative process. On Vietnam and the draft its majority position was by now essentially that of the Congress as a whole. This convergence of identity between the caucus and the larger delegate pool left the Congress’s most radical delegates with little incentive to continue to subsume their identity into that of the caucus — as the caucus mainstream gained power in the national office and influence with other delegates, it fell to the radical faction to take up the oppositional role that the caucus itself had previously played.
The radicals proposed their own Vietnam resolution in 1966, one that described the war as an attempt to advance “the American empire … in a calculated barbaric fashion.” The caucus balked — both at the analysis and at the way in which it was expressed — but the plenary majority went much farther in their own resolution than they had at any previous Congress. They declared, by a vote of 181-83 with only ten abstentions, that the United States had ignored the “legitimate aspirations for social revolution” of the Vietnamese people, and that the escalation of the conflict had alienated the Vietnamese, made the establishment of democracy there “virtually impossible,” and brought the world closer to nuclear war. They called for an immediate halt to American bombing and other offensive operations, and for the opening of multilateral negotiations.
On the draft as well as on Vietnam, attitudes were evolving. There was broad opposition among the delegates to the draft as it stood but disagreement about whether to call for immediate abolition or a gradual phase-out, whether to concede the government’s authority to institute a draft under any circumstances, and whether to propose the expansion of conscientious objector status and alternative service as interim reforms while the draft still existed.
The question of tactics divided the liberals from the radicals as much as that of goals, and on the question of tactics an NSA alumnus — 1950-51 president Allard Lowenstein — was a formidable voice at the Congress. Lowenstein argued that opposition to the war should present itself moderately and reasonably. “This country is not as sick as some people think it is,” he said, in a debate with David Harris. “There is a tremendous reservoir of American conscience which can be tapped if we approach it in the right way.” As an example of such a tactic he proposed sending an open letter to Lyndon Johnson from the nation’s student body presidents on the subject of the war. The suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm, $83 was raised from Liberal Caucus members to pay for an outreach mailing, and Lowenstein set to work on the text.
Gene Groves was Phil Sherburne’s chosen successor as NSA president, and he had a long history in NSA. He had been the chair of the Liberal Caucus in 1964, and a member of the NSB the following year. But he had spent the 1965-66 academic year at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and so he had no immediate ties to any American university. To run for office he would need credentials from a member campus.
Groves had arranged with the student government at the University of Chicago, his alma mater, to be seated as an alternate in their delegation. But that placement had been challenged by longtime NSA conservative Danny Boggs — at the time a University of Chicago law student — and overturned by a campus judiciary committee. A few weeks before the Congress Groves approached Roosevelt College, which proved to have fewer compunctions. He applied for admission to their graduate school, and their student government credentialed him while that application was still pending.
Such credentials had in past years been provided to establishment candidates with little fuss, but by 1966 NSA’s membership was growing more restive. Groves’ Roosevelt credentials were challenged, and the issue became one of the consuming debates of the Congress. Ultimately the CSC supported Groves by a vote of 16-7 and the plenary upheld his credentials in a 278-95 vote, but after doing so they closed the loophole that he had used to secure his eligibility for office. They passed a constitutional amendment that restricted campus delegate and alternate seats to individuals who had been “registered and in attendance” at the school in question within the past two and a half years. A student government could, in other words, extend credentials to a recent alum if it chose, but not to a supplicant with no connection to that campus, or to one who, like Groves, merely pledged to enroll in the future. In the Groves battle, as in the ISC election dispute the previous year, the establishment prevailed, but the dispute left them diminished. This is how reform came to NSA — not through the overthrow of the establishment, but through insurgencies forcing insiders to make concessions, and through the leadership clique weakening from within as a result.
At the end of the Congress, Groves faced Danny Boggs in the presidential race. Boggs, running as an anti-establishment candidate at least as much as a candidate of the right, won one-third of the total vote. Significantly, Groves had won more support in the credentials battle than he did in the presidential race — a significant number of delegates appear to have voted to put him on the ballot, and then voted against him.
After astronaut Sally Ride died earlier this week, Andrew Sullivan put up a column criticizing her for remaining closeted as a lesbian until her death. Though her achievements would “vastly outshine” her “flaws,” he wrote, “the truth remains: she had a chance to expand people’s horizons and young lesbians’ hope and self-esteem, and she chose not to.”
When a lesbian wrote to him to say that it was precisely because Ride wasn’t openly gay that she was available (in the writer’s conservative family and community) as a strong, independent, feminist role model growing up, and that “her closet is part of the reason I escaped mine,” Sullivan sneered:
“Which makes Sally Ride what? A role model for staying silent so as not to disturb the status quo? Once you accept the logic of prejudice, even as a tool for other laudable goals, you’ve given the game away.”
And that makes his most recent post on the subject really really weird.
This morning Sullivan returned to the subject of Sally Ride (for I believe the sixth time) to apologize for the tone of some of his earlier comments but to affirm his basic perspective.
“Perhaps a better way of putting this is to point to another American icon, Bayard Rustin. Rustin was both black and gay and was integral to the organization behind the civil rights movement. But because he was gay, and had been arrested for public sex, he chose to be in the background of the movement and not be a spokesman, in case it would do more harm than good. But in his later life, he became a towering figure for many of us looking for role models as out gay men. He was a pragmatist but also deeply principled, like the late Frank Kameny. He faced, like Ride, several layers of discrimination, but he found the strength to break through all of them. …
“No one is required to be a hero. But no one either should be judged too weak or oppressed for heroism. Sally Ride had a choice, as did Bayard Rustin. They are both heroes to my mind in many ways – and far more distinguished human beings than I could ever be. But Rustin’s shoulders are higher and broader. You can see the future from them.”
This is completely wrongheaded.
Bayard Rustin didn’t simply “choose to be in the background of the movement … because he was gay, and had been arrested for public sex.” He was pushed to the background of the movement after his conviction revealed his sexuality to the public.
As a closeted gay man, Rustin had been a prominent organizer within the nascent civil rights movement. As a known homosexual, he was fired from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, shunned by former allies, forced to contribute anonymously or surreptitiously or not at all. His involuntary ejection from one closet, in other words, had the effect of forcing him into another.
This is “the logic of prejudice,” and it’s a logic that Rustin well understood. Rustin didn’t choose, and wouldn’t have chosen, to go public as a gay man in the fifties. That choice was made for him, and it had exactly the negative effect on his life’s work that Ride must have feared disclosure would have had on hers. Bayard Rustin’s life stands as a refutation of Sullivan’s stance, not an affirmation of it.
And Sullivan compounds his error with his use of a fragmentary Rustin quote, apparently lifted from Wikipedia:
“Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new “niggers” are gays. . . . It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. . . . The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people. “
The first thing that needs to be said about this quote is that it’s taken from a speech which Rustin gave when he was seventy-four years old, while Sally Ride died at sixty-one. So to present his words as an attack on Ride’s silence is shoddy and ugly.
But beyond that, Sullivan’s version of the speech is so chopped down as to render its true meaning unrecognizable. Rustin wasn’t arguing, as the excerpt seems to suggest, that the fight against racism had been won. Rather, he was saying that it was because overt racism had been largely driven underground — because “nobody would dare to say any number of things about blacks that they are perfectly prepared to say about gay people” — attitudes toward gays had become the “barometer” of public opinion on social justice issues.
And Rustin went on to identify this position as leaving gays with an obligation to other social justice movements, in an analysis that rebukes Sullivan’s. “Because we stand in the center of progress toward democracy,” he declared, “we have a terrifying responsibility to the whole society.” The gay community, he said, “cannot work for justice for itself alone,” cannot tolerate prejudice in its ranks, and must “recognize that we cannot fight for the rights of gays unless … we are ready to fight for a radicalization of this society.”
A society that leaves young children and the elderly in poverty, Rustin said, is a society that will never grant justice to gays. And so “these economic concerns must go hand-in-hand and, to a degree, precede the possibility of dealing with the most grievous problem — which is sexual prejudice.”
This, like all of Rustin’s life work, is an eloquent statement of the interconnectedness of struggles for change. Where Sullivan claims that marshaling your energy for your chosen battles is “giving the game away,” Rustin understood that any movement to uplift the oppressed must operate strategically, consciously, mindfully. Where Sullivan excoriates Sally Ride for her apparent calculation that she could do more to change society for the better from within the closet than outside, Bayard Rustin would have nodded. He would have understood.
He would have embraced her as a friend, a comrade, a hero.
I’ve just arrived in Madison, Wisconsin for the 65th annual congress of the United States Student Association.
USSA, a confederation of student governments and state student associations, is the oldest and largest student-run national student organization in the country. Founded (as the US National Student Association) right here in Madison in the aftermath of World War II, USSA has since 1960 been based in Washington DC, working as a political advocacy organization as well as a grassroots organizing group.
I served on the USSA board of directors for two years as an undergrad, and a short internal history of NSA/USSA that I wrote then was (if I’m remembering the chronology right) the first piece of real historical writing I ever did. USSA shaped me as an activist, and it’s a big part of why I became a historian.
Occasionally over the years, and more regularly recently, USSA has invited me to come out to Congress to lend a hand. So I’ll be here for the next six days, holding a workshop on student history, leading a tour of the organization’s archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and helping out with chairing plenary sessions. If you’re here at the conference, come say hi. If not, stay tuned for more — I’ll be writing and tweeting (at hashtag #NSC12) a fair amount, I suspect.
studentactivism.net 
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