United States Student Association
Student Activism Blog

Yesterday Gregory Cendana, president of the United States Student Association, made a speech billed as a State of the Student Union, posting it as video and text on USSA’s website and promoting it heavily on Facebook and Twitter. The speech describes American student life as “on the brink of fundamental change,” and pledges USSA to taking a leading role in making the 2010s a “decade of student power.”

The US Student Association, founded in 1947 as a federation of American student governments, has played many roles in its six-decade history, from service work to radical activism to federal lobbying. With this speech Cendana articulates a vision of an Association that bridges the divide between the legislative politics of Washington and the grassroots activism of America’s campuses.

Cendana’s speech is longer on federal policy positions than on specific plans for supporting America’s current wave of activism, and it tends to view that activism through the lens of electoral organizing, USSA’s primary focus. But with the March 4 national day of action just two weeks away, the speech amounts to a timely and high-profile embrace of that organizing project.

Earlier this month, USSA announced that their next National Student Congress will be held at UCLA this July. As students in California and beyond work in the coming weeks and months to build that state’s recent uprising into a sustained national movement, the role that USSA chooses to play will be well worth watching.

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