But not all student activists want to work on a national level. Many, in fact, feel that working to establish a national network is counterproductive and that a more effective way to work for political change is to focus on local issues and local change.

"I think there are some people who actually don't want a national network. They think it would be necessary to have a centralized structure. I can't see it. There is not all that much power for a national network to handle," Hodos says.

"There are two different movements in student politics today," says Kornbluh. "One is focused on national networking, following the Students for Democratic Society (SDS) model, and the other is focused on local activism." The SDS was the leading radical student organization of the 1960s.

"Although NSAN has now been created, I do not really know what it is there for," says Kornbluh. "I think there is something a little floppy about it. It responds to a need created by the media to be like the 1960s. The media will not believe that there is activism going on unless they see protests, but there is activism, however, even if it does not look like the 1960s."

Students at Yale declined invitations to attend the meetings of NSAN following the Rutgers Conference, Ritter says. "In general, you can only make a difference in the place where you are," says Ritter, who attended the Rutgers conference but chose not to get involved with NSAN.

"Maybe if the network formed a student lobby, they could become really powerful. But the emphasis has got to be on grass roots. It is important to be in contact with people in your own area," Ritter says.

"Organizing on a national or regional level takes a lot of commitment to compromising and listening to different viewpoints. I see a great danger that NSAN and other organizations could fall into a hierarchical structure," says Crissie Damon, a junior at the University of Vermont.

The question of whether the recent surge in student activism is merely a fad or capable of producing lasting change remains unanswered. "What we are looking at right now might become a new student movement," says Thelwell, who witnessed the beginning of 1960s movement.

"There's a reason the '60s revival is happening now," wrote Richard Goldstein in an article in The Village Voice in March. "At the end of Reagan's tether, as the economy falters and the yuppie shivers in his power tie, we sense an opening again--but to what?"