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~ 7 ~ NSA Summer Camp Transformations When you return to your campuses and someone asks you, “Why are you knocking your head against the wall to take a position on all the challenges facing the world in the 1960s? After all, when we get out of this place, we have to be concerned with those things. Now, ye gods, we’ve got Chem 313. We’ve got Saturday night Tri Delt formal and the prom three weeks later. We’ve got Homecoming and parents’ weekend and the carnival. We’ve got lots of things to be concerned with. Why are you introducing this kind of havoc into our lives?” I wonder what your answer is going to be to them. —donald hoffman, past president, USNSA, september 4, 1960 M y sophomore year at Southern passed without a great deal of conflict. You needed a B average to run for student office , and my average came to a B−, so I began working instead as the announcer for the ROTC drill team and writing a weekly column in the Southern Digest. I called the column “Campus Exposé,” and wrote about activities on campus, occasionally criticizing the administration’s policies or attitudes. Also that winter, when Paul Lewis appointed me NSA campus coordinator , he and I wrote a series of articles on the issues discussed at the NSA convention. In those articles, I tried to suggest—without being too strident or obvious—the immense discrepancy between the world of the Southern student and the world of those with wealth and power on the outside. “How do you come back to your university and say to your fellow students, ‘Students, from our experiences at the congress, we have found we are behind in our intellectual pursuits and academic endeavors?’ This is something which needs to be said. But will our cries be heard? Will our ideas be understood? Southern is a remarkable institution, comparatively high in the South in its educational and cultural standings, but we must go higher,” I wrote in December. nsa summer camp transformations 65 I didn’t want to turn people off by preaching at them, but I wanted so desperately to pass on some of what I had learned. Increasingly, I viewed the student debates in Minnesota as a signal that we needed to broaden our awareness at Southern and become more serious of purpose. But of course, the distractions of college life, just as Donald Hoffman foretold, kept almost everyone occupied with other, more entertaining things. And certainly I participated in college life just like everyone else, while I used my column to blow off steam—that is, until Dr. Clark decided such a release was no longer needed. My final “Exposé” came out on March 23, 1961. In it, I wrote about the events of a year ago that very week, when the students of Southern had marched on downtown Baton Rouge, exhibiting an unsurpassed spirit of dignity and pride. I asked where that pride had gone. “I speak of the ROTC band and drill team and their splendid march behind the horses in the LSU Livestock Show parade through downtown Baton Rouge even though it was segregated and degrading to the morals and character of any organization forced to take a position in the rear,” I wrote. “As I watched this typical outrageous spectacle, I wondered what had happened to that spirit of dignity and pride which just a year before could easily be seen in the eyes and felt in hearts of every Southern student. Have we cut off ourselves from the real meaning of the ‘cause’ we envisioned a year ago this week? If so, then would it not have been better if the ‘cause’ had never occurred? If our campus is again engulfed in conformity and complacency, then what has been our gain?” I asked not for demonstrations, not for violent action, but simply for manly and dignified actions in our daily lives to regenerate the spirit of 1960. Governor Jimmy Davis, who had been keeping a close watch on Southern since the events of the previous spring, was none too pleased with my article and let Dr. Clark know it. Consequently, Clark called me to his office along with the newspaper advisor, a proud and talented journalist, Thelma Thurston Gorham, and read us the riot act, demanding that I write a retraction of the column. I refused. Exasperated, he told me a couple of times that he had hoped I would be...

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