“The attacks on higher education continue, and there has not been a national student voice to respond to what’s happening,” said Tiffany Dena Loftin, UC Santa Cruz alumna and a prominent national labor organizer. 

A lively but watchful crowd of students stood in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.. Although most had flown in on a red-eye just that morning, they were ardently focused on the speaker’s words. 

“There have been students who have been fighting back. There have been students who have been organizing,” Loftin said. “There have been students who have been speaking up, but there has not been a coordinated national student voice in many years.” 

A student in a trim black suit, lower back pressed against the hotel bar towards the end of the room, yells out in response:

“There is now!”

After a long hiatus of inactivity, the USSA (United States Student Association) is holding its first legislative conference in years. Students from universities across the country, including UC Santa Cruz, are spending the weekend of March 21 attending workshops, connecting with other student organizers and lobbying policymakers on Capitol Hill. 

The USSA was formed in 1978 from a merger between the National Student Association (NSA) and the National Student Lobby (NSL), two major student organizations at the time. The association operated as a voice at the federal level for students in higher education until 2017, when the organization failed to elect new leadership and ceased operation. 

Prior to their dissolution, the USSA organized for students at every level of higher education and was involved in a variety of legislative efforts, including sponsoring grassroots campus organizing in the 1980s and fighting for lower tuition and student eligibility for credit cards in the 1990s.

Disputes within the organization as well as long-term legislative pressure in the late 2000s from conservative politicians to defund statewide student associations contributed to falling membership in the USSA over several years. In the late 2010s, the USSA found itself without a full staff and lacking a transition team to continue the organization’s work. 

Now, the USSA is back and eager to continue their long history and tradition of involving more students from universities across the nation in federal education policy. 

“For the last eight years, decisions have been made on the federal level without the USSA’s voice, without student voice. We can see how that has impacted students nationwide and how student voice has not been valued because it hasn’t been present and available,” said Kalwis Lo, former legislative director for the USSA. “USSA is coming back to fill a void. That’s very necessary because [that void] has been so impactful for so many years.”

Many students, some having traveled across the country to attend the conference, expressed a strong sense of responsibility to be a part of a national student movement and an optimism for the future of the USSA and what it can accomplish.  

“I hope that [the USSA] can continue to create spaces where students can verbalize the things that they care about and connect with other people and resources that can push those beliefs forward,” said Zaire Floyd, USSA member and journalism student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M) University, a historically Black College in Tallahassee. 

“Having a space like this provides resources for students to act on their beliefs and act on their passions,” Floyd said. “I hope that it can continue to morph into that but bigger, recruit more people, and gain more attention.”

UC Santa Cruz students from various organizations including engaging education, the Student Union Governance Board, the Black Student Union, SOL Council, Bayanihan, the Cultural Arts and Diversity Resource Center, the Student Union Assembly, Enviroslug, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), and City on a Hill Press brought ideas from a Feb. 1 event held at UCSC titled “Our Education, Our University, Our Rights.” At the workshop, attendees shared ideas about student self-governance on campus and developed initial ideas for a Student Bill of Rights, with many of those views becoming central themes at this year’s conference. 

“I feel really blessed to have access to that information through the Bill of Rights event, and then being able to come here and see that these are also issues experienced by other students at other schools,” said Emily Moghadam, UCSC student and SUA representative. “It’s really nice to know that we’re not in a unique situation and that the injustices we face at UC Santa Cruz are also being fought at other campuses as well.”

UC Santa Cruz represented the largest cohort, with 16 students in attendance at the USSA’s national legislative conference. They brought with them ideas that were initially expressed by attendees at UCSC’s workshop event, which Loftin had facilitated as well.

“The Student Bill of Rights that we’re making is to push people at this conference,” Loftin said. “It’s to push people when we get to the conference next year.”

On the first day of the USSA conference, and in the face of ever-growing threats to higher education from the Trump administration, students found understanding in their shared struggle for the rights of students. Despite the deluge of harmful education policies coming from the capital in recent months, those in attendance remained hopeful for the future of a national student movement.

“[The USSA] is being reborn and its rebirth is really beautiful. It’s really revolutionary,” said Khalia Fitzhugh-Crenshaw, UCSC student and member of e2. “Sometimes, when things don’t work out the first time, a rebirth can be even more revolutionary than what you had ever planned before. I feel like that’s what’s happening here.”