>I also recalle
>reading several accounts of a rather contentious national conference of
>that movement where there was a split between the folks who wanted a
>hierarchical national organization and those who wanted a network.
>The Nation - October 16, 2000
>
>The Student Movement Comes of Age
>Liza Featherstone
>
>[...]
>
>But Eugene, like Madison, Wisconsin, which was also well represented
>at the meetings, has an intensely process-oriented student activist
>culture. Passions raged over the proposal to establish an elected
>governing body that would decide many of the questions that are
>currently left to conference calls open to the entire membership or
>to paid staff in the group's Washington, DC, office (who are not
>elected). The anarchists and radical democrats in attendance worried
>that such a body would turn USAS into a "hierarchical" and
>"bureaucratic" organization; one even warned, in an address to the
>plenary, that if the group adopted this structure "we'd be no better
>than a corporation." Others took a dim view of such arguments.
>George Washington University student Todd Tucker observed, "It just
>seems so stupidly American, like, 'I won't take orders from anyone.'
>It's John Wayne, not even Bakunin!" The controversy inspired
>twenty-nine hours of plenary meetings, two of which lasted past 3
>AM; at several junctures, anarchists walked out of the room and even
>burst into tears.
The full text was posted here, and is archived at <http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0009/1629.html>. (It's not on The Nation site.) And you, Chuck, posted two responses under the subject head <http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0009/1634.html> and <http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0009/1635.html>.
Doug