Lesbian high schooler Constance McMillen has won her lawsuit against the Mississippi school district that refused to let her attend prom with her girlfriend.

The school agreed to have a judgment entered against them in the case on Monday. They will establish what the ACLU — who brought the suit on McMillen’s behalf — called a “comprehensive nondiscrimination and nonharassment policy that covers sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.”

And they’ll pay her an additional $35,000 in damages. Plus court costs.

The ACLU’s suit charged that the district violated McMillen’s freedom of speech — in addition to forbidding her to attend with her girlfriend, they also banned her from wearing a tuxedo to the event. When the story broke in the media the school arranged for her to attend a rescheduled alternative prom, but that turned out, bizarrely, to be a fake.

The United States Student Association conducted its plenaries yesterday in sessions that began at 10:30 am and continued until nearly two o’clock the following morning. Along the way, the Association addressed more than forty items of business.

Tensions ran high before the plenaries over two resolutions — a proposal to create a “straight male caucus” within the Association and a call to overturn the board of directors’ opposition to Arizona’s SB 1070 law. But though emotions remained raw throughout the discussion of both bills, debate itself was civil and courteous on both sides.

The resolutions cast a spotlight on USSA’s long-running battles over constituency representation and the scope of its activities. With both being resoundingly defeated on the plenary floor, the short-term result in each case was to affirm the membership’s commitment to its traditional course. Conversations throughout the Congress in recent days, however, demonstrated that students from across the organization’s political spectrum are actively seeking out new ways to resolve the disputes.

Although most of the day was taken up by votes on administrative resolutions — a number of which will have real significance for USSA going forward — the real meat of the plenary was the consideration of what are known as “action agenda” items.

USSA’s action agenda items constitute its core organizing campaigns for the year. This year, two such items — a student vote campaign and the Association’s work on the federal budget and appropriations — were locked in as organizational mandates. That left the plenary to decide which of seven other proposals it would direct the organization to work on.

Two of the seven were withdrawn during the course of the plenaries, folded into administrative resolutions that the Association would engage on a smaller scale. Another three — on campus sexual assault prevention, university admissions reform, and support for free and universally accessible education at the community college level — were either tabled or voted down. In each case, a significant portion of the plenary expressed strong support for the proposals themselves, but argued that they were either too ambitious or not yet fully enough developed for the Association to take on as full-fledged organizing campaigns.

That left two campaigns that USSA did embrace, and will be taking on.

First, there’s the DREAM Act, one of the Association’s biggest projects in the year just ending. Stalled just short of the finish line in Congress, the Act would provide undocumented youth who were brought to the United States as children with a path to citizenship through college education.

Second, there’s a new Economic and Education Recovery Campaign, whose centerpiece is lobbying for the Local Jobs for America Act in coalition with USSA’s longtime partner Jobs With Justice. As the proposal for the campaign put it, this action item seeks to bring together “USSA member campuses, student labor organizations, [and] local community and civil rights organizations” to help the Association “build its organizing capacity and recruit new members.”

Those are the highlights of the session, but there was obviously a lot more. Congress attendees, feel free to pipe up with your own perspectives!

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.