Two decades before flower power bloomed at American colleges, student leaders seeded higher education with big ideas. One of them was that students should have a louder voice in campus, national, and global affairs.
So, in 1947, a group of young activists founded the National Student Association, which would quickly help transform campus culture, from Cambridge, Mass., to Berkeley, Calif. Their story appears in a new book, American Students Organize: Founding the National Student Association After World War II (American Council on Education/Praeger, 2006).