NSA Breaks with IUS

The turning point came in 1950. Student associations of the free world decided to split from the Communist-run IUS. Tactics such as levelling germ-warfare charges against the United States convinced many associations that IUS could not be reformed. A meeting in Stockholm established the International Student Conference, now the largest international student organization in the world.

The wide base of the ISC deeply affected policy within NSA. A great number of Latin American, African and Middle Eastern student associations joined ISC, bringing with them their concern for politics. Suddenly, student issues were no longer travel, hostles and book stores, but prisons, persecution and Peron.

The change led to the expansion of NSA's international activities in the early fifties. A major factor in the success of the international program was the new respectibility which NSA had acquired. A large grant of money by the Ford Foundation testified to the stable character of the Association, and opened the doors to later grants by all the major foundations.

Participation in the international conferences led to the rethinking of the phrase "students as students." It became evident that NSA couldn't continue to avoid the issues that were of vital importance to students in colonial areas and newly independent countries. The suppression of student rights in Paraguay or Cuba or Algeria were issues of burning importance at an ISC conference, yet at an NSA Congress they were merely "political issues."

Nuclear Tests Condenned

The reinterpretation of the nature of student problems progressed rather imperceptively throughout the fifties. Today the concept of student problems includes issues which affect students of foreign countries in their role as students. The furthest the definition has even been stretched was on the nuclear testing resolution passed by the Twelfth National Student Congress in August. The resolution was tied up with concern for international student issues.

Before this summer's resolution the Congress had simply "encouraged its members to inform themselves on nuclear bomb testing as a subject of vital concern to the educated student." But the Twelfth Congress made a specific, though moderate, stand on the testing issue by expressing 'its confidence in the resolution of the ISC concerning 'a definite agreement on the suspension of nuclear weapons tests.'" USNSA (at the 8th ISC at Lima, Peru) backed that resolution in order to block a counterproposal by three Communist-dominated student unions to censure only the United States for continuing tests.

Proponents of the broad interpretation of the "students as students" phrase on issues concerning students of foreign countries maintain that USNSA occupies a unique position in world affairs. They claim that because of its contact with other student groups, which assert considerable political pressure in their own countries, NSA has its fingers on the pulse of world politics. A former NSA International Affairs vice-president said that because of his contacts with foreign student leaders, the NSA files in Philadelphia had a more accurate picture of the Cuban Revolution and the Icelandic Elections than the State Department.

In order to continue contact with world-wide student movements, as well as to strengthen the free world's ISC, asserts the "liberal" wing of NSA, American students should continue to accept world-wide student issues as their own. The more conservative group which favors the textual meaning of the moderately-worded resolutions, frequently contributes negative votes on the grounds that as a student organization the NSA lacks the qualifications to judge an issue.

The Student Council reports favored the more restricted interpretation of the phrase "students as students." The report recognized the fact that "our relations with foreign student unions demand that we take an interest in their problems, which are often of a political nature."

However, it set up a series of "tests" which should form the basis for international political issues. The first criteria rejected the conception of any foreign student issue qualifying as an issue affecting American students. Other tests were that the issue must be important, and that it be free of direct implications outside the academic community.

The report applied its criteria to the controversial Algerian resolution passed by the August Congress at Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. In doing so it modified the sharp criticism of a similar resolution passed the year before by the 1958 Student Council Report on NSA. The 1959 report says that "the Algerian resolution is acceptable in so far as it is a protest against certain acts of the French government," but claims that it goes beyond the role of "students as students" when it advocates a specific political solution, the independence of Algeria, since the stu- dent problem is only a small part of the whole problem of Algeria.

The nuclear testing resolution also qualified only partially under the Student Council committee's tests. The report said that "it is legitimate to pass a resolution that expresses a desire for effective and definite disarmament and does not call for any specific way of achieving this disarmament, and thus does not involve military and strategic considerations outside the role of a student as a student."

Opponents of NSA have pointed to these very issues, at least semi-political in nature, in claiming that since the college delegates are only vaguely aware of the issues involved they cannot purport to represent even the students at their own schools. The end result of the NSA Congress, the critics maintain, is that policy declarations are made which seem to represent the whole American student population, but actually represent only the personal views of the delegates present.

Another aspect of NSA which had come under fire was the haphazard and confusing organization of the plenary sessions, during which the Congress acts on resolutions and mandates. At the 1958 Congress only 25 of 100 bills ever got to the floor. The rest were sent off to the National Executive Committee for final disposal.

Supporters assert that the National Student Congress only claims to represent directly the student governments of the member colleges. Furthermore, they say, foreign student leaders realize that the resolutions of USNSA do not necessarily represent the views of "American students."

However, the more liberal elements of NSA maintain that the representatives actually do represent American students to the extent that delegates are enlightened, intelligent members of the student community. They point to the fact that NSA resolutions have followed the general trend of student thought in the dozen years since NSA was founded.