When I was covering student politics in the State University of New York system, I attended something called the Ray Glass Memorial Student Organizing Conference a few times. This was an annual legislative conference hosted by SASU, the statewide student association that also functioned as an off-campus lobby group.
I could never quite figure out who Ray Glass was, except that he wrote an essay called “Are Student Governments Obsolete?” that was a founding document for SASU. The article made the case that traditional student government was useless, granting students only token input on crucial issues of university governance. He described student government as being like the toy steering wheel a child would play with in daddy’s car — only most student government leaders pretend that it really works.
I also knew that Ray had been killed (as a pedestrian) by a drunk driver some time in the mid-’70s.
SASU has faded, or rather it was faded, into history. Much of what I covered as editor of Student Leader News Service in the early ’90s was how SUNY’s then-chancellor, Dr. D. Bruce Johnstone, had viciously dismantled the political apparatus and funding sources that enabled SASU to exist, turned local campuses against it, eventually creating a situation wherein the organization could no longer support itself or any meaningful work. After a monumental, expensive statewide effort, Johnstone turned student input on statewide issues back into the toy steering wheel that student government is theoretically supposed to be. Johnstone viewed students as the enemy with a vengeance that seemed personal, and which I still don’t understand. I have more to say about this but not today.
Decades on, I never stopped wondering about Ray. I wanted a copy of that article, but there was nobody to ask; I could not find it online; none of the SUNY archives around the state that I called had it. What I discovered the existence of, though, was a collection of documents donated in 1985 by SASU’s staff to SUNY Albany’s special collections. Though the article I was seeking was not indexed, I thought it was worth a look; it had to be there somewhere. I discovered this in the midst of Cosmic Confidential, the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves, and it took me about five months to get there; that day was today.
More than 120 cubic feet of SASU files exist, only loosely categorized. I invited Amanda to the library (a journalism date, my favorite kind) and after providing her a brief orientation, we dove into the boxes, or rather, leafed through page by page, to see what we could find. What I saw amazed me: a student organization that wrote persuasive legislative memos, exchanged reams of correspondence with state officials, lobbied for financial aid and budget equity, trained students how to visit their legislators and that knew the state and federal education budgets on a line-by-line basis.