Popped into Paul’s Books just now, like I always do when I’m in Madison, to check out their education section. By far the best collection of obscure student movement histories of any bookstore I’ve ever been in.
Anyway, I was flipping through the shelves and stumbled across a book called “The Dignity of Youth and Other Ativisms,” which I’d never heard of, by a sociologist I’ve never heard of.
It’s a collection of essays and book reviews, mostly about high school students, and I was about to close it and put it back when a glimpse of something caught my eye. I thumbed back and there it was: “U.S.N.S.A.”
I come across references to NSA in books from this era all the time, and usually they’re not of much interest. But this was different, it turned out. Better. Way better. The author had “twice been a speaker at national meetings of the United States National Student Association,” most recently in 1963 (the book was published in 1965), and a big chunk of the preface—eight dense pages—is devoted to his impressions of the National Student Congresses he attended.
There’s a tremendous amount of great stuff in here, and I’m immensely frustrated not to have found it while I was working on my dissertation. Some excerpts:
“It is not tedious and boring; neither is it, in the usual sense, exciting and interesting. These are not the right dimensions along which to place the experience, which is psychedelic rather than intellectual. Within a few hours, as the emotional pressure of the meeting gradually builds up, other aspects of “Psychedelic Rather Than Intellectual”: A 1960s Sociologist Observes the National Student Congress |:
