The US Student Association Enters the Occupy Era
The United States Student Association’s Legislative Conference is not a place where you expect people to get arrested. Each year several hundred students from across the country, many of them elected representatives of their campus student governments, gather in a DC hotel for a weekend of speeches and workshops on federal legislative issues. On Monday they head to the capital to make their case to members of Congress in one-on-one sit-downs.
This year was a little different.
The student government leaders were there as always. There were the lobby role-plays and the legislative fact sheets and the mediocre hotel food with the worse than mediocre vegetarian options. But at this, the first USSA national gathering of the Occupy Wall Street era, there was something else as well.
Workshops on campus organizing took up more of the conference schedule than they have in the recent past, and even panels on electoral work carried titles like “Occupy the Ballot.” A workshop on “radicalism in the
This year was a little different.
The student government leaders were there as always. There were the lobby role-plays and the legislative fact sheets and the mediocre hotel food with the worse than mediocre vegetarian options. But at this, the first USSA national gathering of the Occupy Wall Street era, there was something else as well.
Workshops on campus organizing took up more of the conference schedule than they have in the recent past, and even panels on electoral work carried titles like “Occupy the Ballot.” A workshop on “radicalism in the