NSA: Out of the Doldrums

Feudin', fussin', and a-fighting have occupied the National Student Association for the first year and a half of its existence. The new federation of American college men and women has spent so much of its time politicking, seeking Reds under beds, and just plain organizing, that many of its best friends are fearful that NSA shall soon die of exhaustion. Last summer's national convention in Madison proved little else than that student organizations can waste time as magnificently as anyone else. And that is old news.

There may however, be new news and bright news coming out of the regional convention at Radcliffe next weekend. Rumor has it that Northern New England's NSA people are properly fed up with caucusing and are ready to do a job. The big job on this weekend's agenda is a proposal that colleges in this area accept European displaced persons for study and research.

Details are not yet available on this project. Somebody still has to figure how to pull students out of DP camps, how to get them across the ocean, how to support them in this country. But the State Department has told an NSA official that it likes the idea, and if NSA can now interest colleges in a feasible project, the DP plan may somehow, someday succeed.

Even the vague outlines are immensely exciting. This nation has shrugged off the isolationism which followed World War I, but it remains largely ignorant about the new manner of man living across the Atlantic. The displaced person, booted about Europe for the past 15 years, can tell Americans much of the new loves and new hates of the 1948 continental. Peace depends in part on enlightened leadership in Europe, and United States universities can help displaced persons to support such leadership. But peace also depends on an America which has evolved beyond the dark ages of its own aloofness. Here is where the visiting DP could pay us back.

Delegates to the Radcliffe meeting should snap at this new project, as should colleges in this region. It is the happiest idea NSA has had in a long while.