[A decades long right-wing assault on membership organizations led
to the collapse of the US Student Association in 2017. What can
organizers take away from the last decade of organizational death in
the student movement?]
[[link removed]]

WHAT DSA CAN LEARN FROM ORGANIZATIONAL DEATH IN THE STUDENT MOVEMENT
 
[[link removed]]


 

Beth Huang
October 10, 2023
The Forge
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A decades' long right-wing assault on membership organizations led
to the collapse of the US Student Association in 2017. What can
organizers take away from the last decade of organizational death in
the student movement? _

,

 

USSA is dead,” my friend told me over the phone. I felt like I had
been punched in the gut, even though for years I had known that I
would eventually hear these words.

After seventy years as the nation’s largest student association, the
United States Student Association (USSA) failed to elect new
leadership in 2017. Years of membership decline, restructuring of
grantmaking portfolios in large private foundations, and toxic
infighting fueled by shallow but maximalist expressions of identity
politics had led to the collapse of USSA, an organization with a
membership (on paper) of 1 million students at the very end.

USSA’s collapse was the third time I had experienced organizational
death before turning 26. Each one hit hard, but we can learn from
each. The Democratic Socialists of America is a vibrant member
organization and far from the death spiral of the end years of USSA,
but because I see shadows of the dynamics in USSA, I want to share my
lessons from the student movement with DSA leaders today.

First, for some context, I was a student leader within USSA from 2010
to 2013 and then staff from 2014 to 2016. As a student, I was an
active leader in the United Council of University of Wisconsin
Students, a statewide student association affiliated with USSA, from
2010 to 2013. I was staff coordinator of the Student Labor Action
Project (SLAP), a joint project between USSA and Jobs With Justice
from 2014 to 2016.

USSA’s membership was institutional. Both student governments and
statewide student associations could join by paying dues. USSA then
represented the total number of students covered by member campuses
and within statewide student associations.

Looking back, USSA’s biggest contribution to the left was developing
extremely responsive movement leaders, especially among people of
color, across the progressive movement. In my cohort of USSA student
leaders and staff, our alumni have gone on to elect governors in
battleground states, organize every type of worker, run the Iowa
caucuses for Bernie Sanders in 2020, ban corporate spending in
Minnesota state elections, lay the groundwork for federal student debt
cancelation, and build movement organizations across the left.

United Council represented 140,000 students on 23 of the 26 public
university campuses in Wisconsin and was a member organization within
USSA. A University of Wisconsin Board of Regents governing policy
enabled United Council to run referendums that determined affiliation
during student government elections every two years. After winning a
referendum, students at that campus paid $3 per semester, leaving us
with a dues base of about $850,000 and a budget that was 95% dues
funded, an anomaly that seems impossible in the student and youth
movement today.

United Council provided my understanding for what multiracial
working-class mass membership organizations look like. We held four
membership conventions and one diversity summit (mostly focusing on
students of color and queer students) every year. About 200 students
from every corner of the state came to each convention to learn from
each other, vote on leadership, and make decisions about the direction
of the organization. Hmong students from rural northwestern Wisconsin,
Black student organizers from UW-Milwaukee and UW-Parkside (the only
Minority Serving Institution in the state), cheesehead donning
working-class white students from small college towns, and a few stuck
up activists and even more arrogant suit-wearing student government
representatives from UW-Madison would hang out in a cheap hotel close
to a UW campus, drink until 4am, go to workshops all day, and do it
all over again four times per year.

During my senior year of college, from 2012 to 2013, I was the Vice
President and Chair of the Board of Directors of United Council. After
five years of constant 5.5 percent tuition hikes, we were campaigning
for a tuition freeze, or at least a lower cap on tuition. United
Council bought the email lists of all 26 University of Wisconsin
campuses and used the email software Salsa to get thousands of
students to contact their legislators about freezing tuition.

This made United Council very visible during a politically dangerous
time, just two years after Governor Scott Walker and the Republican
legislatures gutted public sector labor unions. Despite only winning
46 percent of the vote in the 2012 election, the Republicans expanded
their majority in the legislature in 2013 because of extreme partisan
gerrymandering in Wisconsin in 2011. They used this strategy to turn
the state into an illiberal democracy –– most recently threatening
to impeach a Democratic-aligned judge whose 10 point election victory
swung the state’s highest court away from the GOP. In the 2013
budget, we won the tuition freeze, but in the omnibus amendment that
gave us our greatest victory in several years the GOP eliminated
[[link removed]] the
Board of Regents policy that contained the membership dues structure
of United Council. We were easy pickings for the movement
conservatives who had hated United Council for the 25 years since
their days as students.

We were not alone in facing reactionary attacks. The Goldwater
Institute had lobbied state legislatures to decimate
[[link removed]] the
Arizona Student Association’s dues structure just months earlier. In
one year, the right-wing destroyed the only two statewide student
associations in battleground states in USSA’s membership, but at the
time we couldn’t quite grasp these attacks as the death knell that
we understand them to be today.

These attacks fit into a larger strategy, dating back to a memo by
Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in 1971
[[link removed]] which
called for purges of left-wing elements from college campuses and
outlined a blueprint for the rise of the conservative movement. Long
before the legislative attacks on United Council and the Arizona
Student Association, right-wing student government leaders often
disaffiliated with USSA in their budget cycles. It often took years to
bring back USSA membership, which was only $0.25 per student per
academic year. Several cohorts of progressive student government
leaders at UW-Madison had tried to revive USSA membership from 2009 to
2014, when we were finally successful in spring 2014.

By the time I joined staff in January 2014, USSA only had member
campuses in California, Oregon, Washington, and Massachusetts. With
each passing year, leaders of student governments made up a smaller
share of students involved in USSA, and more identified as activists,
many of whom were students of color who had lost their student
government elections at predominantly white campuses and had beef with
the student government. The shrinking of student governments
affiliated with USSA led to an organizational identity crisis. Was
USSA a mass organization that served a membership through affiliated
student governments and statewide student associations, or was USSA an
affinity group for student activists, particularly students of color,
to find political home?

The decline in dues and subsequent identity crisis locked USSA into a
death spiral. Decline in membership dues from both student governments
and statewide student associations made USSA more dependent on
foundation grants. But in 2012, the Open Society Foundation
restructured their grantmaking portfolios and did not renew a $250,000
grant to USSA. Weeks before I left staff in June 2016, conversations
about cash flow and layoffs dominated our staff meeting agendas, and
the USSA president was frantically reaching out to our program officer
at the Ford Foundation about when a grant would be paid out.

Years of declines in membership dues and foundation grants continually
shrank the USSA budget, and thus our staff, and we were then unable to
take advantage of opportunities which could have helped us revive
ourselves. For example, USSA had been forced to cut its communications
staff in the early 2010s which meant we had a weak digital
infrastructure in 2015 when Sen. Bernie Sanders started mainstreaming
our long-time demand of free public higher education. If we had had a
digital organizing infrastructure we could have recruited new student
organizers and started the pipeline for more member campuses.

Instead, the disinvestment had taken its toll. USSA had active student
organizers on many campuses, but years of organizing have taught me
that no volunteer or committee could have realistically built out the
digital infrastructure. Dedicated staff was needed to build complex
systems, which weren’t ready when we needed them. Similarly, when
USSA didn’t have the funds to rehire a training director, I took on
the work to coordinate 5-6 weekend-long organizing trainings per fall
semester in various regions with shorter follow up trainings in the
spring semesters. I secured host campuses, prepared student organizers
to lead the trainings, and recruited new student activists to these
trainings on top of my normal job responsibilities of seeding new SLAP
chapters and developing leaders. I found a lot of purpose in this
work, but I truly never could work those hours again.

Eventually, Jobs With Justice stopped funding the SLAP Coordinator
position, and I became the last SLAP Coordinator, which ended in June
2016. No one gave me a real reason for ending the position, but I
assume that Jobs With Justice didn’t want to fund a joint project
with a version of USSA that was clearly on life support. I tried
merging the 15 chapters first with United Students Against Sweatshops
and then with Young Democratic Socialists of America after hearing
that College Students for Bernie was merging into YDSA. Ultimately,
the leadership of USSA and JWJ blocked the mergers from happening, and
I had to move on from student organizing. After I left SLAP, though I
had been “organizing to replace myself” all along, it was not
enough, in part because high turnover makes the student movement
uniquely vulnerable to loss in institutional memory. The chapters
teetered for an academic year but then folded, and the trainings
mostly ended. With no SLAP chapters and no training program, activity
in issue campaigns and campus organizing trainings across USSA both
steeply declined within a semester.

Nothing was left in USSA other than factional infighting, often along
the lines of identity. When I was still on USSA staff, at the 2015
national convention, the tensions over the identity of USSA, whether
we were a mass org or an affinity group, boiled over. Racial identity
caucuses, which were always part of USSA’s organizational DNA, split
out of the main convention and called for their own space outside of
the convention itself. At this point, running a cohesive national
campaign rooted in multiracial class solidarity seemed impossible,
even when the demand for free public education was gaining momentum.
The infighting created easy opportunities for bad faith actors. These
bad faith actors took over a sparsely attended convention in 2017 and
stopped the election of a new president and vice president.

That’s when my friend called me to share the news that USSA was
dead.

Each one of the organizational deaths, United Council in 2013, SLAP in
2016, and USSA in 2017, has left me with an indelible lesson about the
fragility of organizations. And I’m familiar with a lot of
organizations. Since my six years in the student movement, in addition
to being a DSA rank and file member, chapter co-chair, treasurer of a
nationally endorsed DSA city councilor’s campaign, and national
leader on the Growth and Development Committee, I’ve worked with
hundreds of 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and 501(c)(5) organizations in
coalitions, as staff, on nonprofit boards, as the executive director
of a nonprofit for five years, and now as a funder. As a side note, a
501(c)(5) is a labor union. An organization’s tax status or
structure does not alone determine its virtues or vices. Some 501c3s
lead politically visionary work, and some labor unions condone sexual
harassment.

In large part because of my familiarity with these other
organizations, I believe in DSA. DSA is the most unique organization
that I’ve encountered in my 14 years in the progressive movement.
DSA has a set of strengths that most organizational leaders would
salivate over: active members who devote thousands of volunteer hours
every week, a base of tens of thousands of small donors who are
decades younger than the donor base of most organizations,
volunteer-initiated chapters in every state in the country, hundreds
of elected officials, and genuine bonds of camaraderie and solidarity
across the organization.

But I keep the lessons from the student movement in mind every day as
a leader in DSA, knowing that our beautiful, unique organization needs
continual reinforcements to be more resilient. That’s why I’m
sharing my main lessons for DSA from these three organizational
deaths. They include:

*
Campaigns with material demands create leadership ladders while
dampening infighting. I saw this all the time during the tuition
freeze campaign with United Council. These campaigns were the backbone
of SLAP chapters, which eventually became the most actively organizing
base within USSA. However, it was rare that I saw a compelling
national campaign in USSA, other than a few reactions to federal
legislation, whereas the state-level and campus organizing was often
inspiring to outsiders and compelling to new activists and seasoned
organizers alike. Compared with USSA, DSA has had a much better track
record of running national campaigns, such as when we were running the
DSA for Bernie campaign and during the PRO Act campaign. Campaigns
create a leadership ladder within the organization and allow people to
define their politics in relation to each other, rather than in
opposition to each other. In USSA, without active campaigns,
organizing turned inward and infighting became toxic.

*
Members are the organizational lifeblood, but staff are the arteries.
Some tasks require thousands of people to participate while others
need a few people to create and then steward a system so it’s not
chaotic and has longevity. As a staff member at a union and then at
several nonprofits, I have always seen myself as a facilitator and
steward of the communications systems between members, allies,
funders, and other stakeholders of the organization. When I was the
SLAP Coordinator, my job was to train students to analyze power on
their campuses and run campaigns based on this power analysis, but not
to run the campaign myself. DSA has a talented staff that creates the
infrastructure for thousands of members to participate, from
coordinating event space for virtual and in-person gatherings to
processing reimbursements and dues share payments to on-boarding new
leaders after a chapter has gone in and out of hiatus. DSA is not
simply a place where people are employed. The staff of DSA, both those
in the union and the middle management and directors outside of the
union, provide a cohesive structure that thousands of members use and
DSA leaders should not take for granted.

*
We need to make the case to inactive members about the
organization’s impact. While United Council activated thousands of
students to email and call their legislators about a tuition freeze,
we never were able to get more than 200 students (out of 140,000
students on member campuses) to our conventions on a regular basis.
When the Republicans attacked the dues structure, we only had those
200 students (if that) to stand up for United Council. USSA’s
leadership to membership ratio was far worse. By the end, only dozens
of students were truly involved in USSA, and the organization had no
connection to the supposed 1 million members, not even an email list.
While DSA has a very different membership model from United Council
and USSA, the paper membership of both organizations reminds me every
day that we need more than email actions. We need real relationships,
including with people who do not currently have the time or resources
to be active in DSA. This can be as simple as regular phone banks to
check in with at-large members or special programming for parents.

DSA membership is currently in decline from 95,000 in 2021 to 78,000
today, which is still 16 times larger than when I joined in 2016. Many
chapters have become defunct and eventually have been dechartered in
the past two years. In some ways, the decline in chapters makes sense.
In tandem with the membership boom, members outside of metro areas
formed chapters in large but fairly sparse geographic areas. The
leadership in most of these chapters turned over three or more times
by 2020. While going from in-person to remote was easy for these
chapters at the onset of the pandemic, these sprawling but sparse
chapters struggled to return to in-person activity, and many leaders
gave up. Without hard, maybe even heroic, efforts, reviving these
chapters that have limited numbers of members but large geographic
areas will be difficult. Organizing statewide formations likely will
be key to involving members who were organized into chapters but now
are at-large even if it cannot be a substitute for organizing a real
base.

But I don’t believe DSA is in crisis. DSA is not locked in the death
spirals of USSA, not vulnerable to right-wing attacks on our dues
structure like United Council, and is not a project floating away from
its anchoring organizations like SLAP. I see the vibrancy of DSA
everyday. I’m constantly inspired by the vision of our Socialists
in Office on the migrant crisis
[[link removed]], the
solidarity with striking workers on every picket line from Los
Angeles [[link removed]] to Detroit
[[link removed]] and
beyond, and the victories on public power
[[link removed]] that
chart the path for a Green New Deal. Every campus that had a SLAP
chapter now has a YDSA chapter, and I’m constantly blown away that
YDSA has over 150 chapters. At the 2023 DSA convention, I told a
University of Oregon YDSAer that they were living out SLAP’s wildest
dreams in their campaign to unionize undergraduate student workers. My
heart swelled when queer comrades at the national convention shared
that DSA was the largest membership organization in the US fighting
for trans liberation.

Although DSA is not in imminent crisis, we need leaders who will set a
positive vision to raise the funds to meet our budget. DSA is not
immune from the hard reality of staff layoffs happening across the
broader progressive ecosystem [[link removed]].
In just six weeks, the Solidarity Dues drive has raised nearly
$400,000 from 600 of the most dedicated members increasing their dues
to 1% of our incomes (average $47 per month, substantially higher than
the average $12 monthly contribution), and the Recommitment Drive in
2022 raised nearly $200,000 by renewing 6,000 members. While I don’t
know if the Solidarity Dues drive will be sufficient in solving the
problems that we face and it certainly hasn’t yet even met our 2023
income goal, connecting our membership to our fundraising is our
pathway forward.

The biggest challenge facing any dues drive but also DSA itself is
making the case for the impact of the national organization. It’s
time for us to weave together a cohesive positive vision for how labor
solidarity, downballot electoral success, queer liberatory organizing,
and material victories for a Green New Deal impact our members’
everyday lives and chart a path for building working-class power. We
need to define this vision through action, so that we define our
politics in relation to each other, instead of only against each
other. It’s time that we truly act like we have a world to win.

 

_Beth Huang co-chairs the Growth & Development Committee of the
Democratic Socialists of America and has served in various
leadership roles within DSA since 2017. She was on the Board of
Directors of the United Council of UW Students from 2011-2013,
including one year as chair of the board from 2012-2013, and was the
Student Labor Action Project Coordinator at the US Student Association
from 2014-2016. Currently, she works as the Civic Engagement &
Democracy Program Officer at the Tides Foundation._

 

_The mission of The Forge is to elevate the strategy and practice of
organizing through the sharing of ideas, methods, history, and
inspiration, and by building connection and community among organizers
and between sectors of the progressive movement.  _

_The Forge is made possible through the support of our community. By
becoming a subscriber, you’re fueling the Forge community —
helping to strengthen our movement by providing a forum for organizers
to sharpen our strategies, exchange tactical innovations, and build
the power we need to win. To subscribe, click here
[[link removed]]. To learn more about our
current subscribers, click here
[[link removed]]. _

_The Forge is a publication; the views expressed in the pieces we
publish do not necessarily reflect the views of the journal._

* student movement
[[link removed]]
* United States Student Association
[[link removed]]
* DSA
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]