1986: A LOOK BACK: Student life (12/28/86)

1986: A LOOK BACK

Student life

The first bit of student news in 1986 was that SUSK, the Ukrainian Canadian Students' Union, had decided at its three-day national winter conference not to join the newly revitalized worldwide Central Union of Ukrainian Students (CeSUS). SUSK delegates who attended an international student conference in December of 1985 had withheld their endorsement of a document calling for CeSUS's revival pending approval from the SUSK membership at large.

SUSK's winter conference, an annual event held in western Canada, attracted more than 50 students to Winnipeg on February 14-16.

Meanwhile, down under (from the Canadian perspective, that is) in the United States, Ukrainian Student Outreach continued its activity. Meeting on February 16 in New Brunswick, N.J., student leaders voted to replace the three-member USO coordinating body with a council of student club presidents. The students also decided to participate in the announced congress of the then-defunct Federation of Ukrainian Student Organizations of America (SUSTA).

Once SUSTA was re-established at a conference held April 11-13 in Chicago, Ukrainian Student Outreach quietly withered away, having provided an impetus to the revival of the Ukrainian student movement in the U.S.

The 50 or so delegates at the SUSTA congress elected Andrew Futey, 20, a student at George Washington University, as president.

Two months later, SUSTA members came to Washington to learn how to deal with the government and the bureaucracy, as well as with the news media, during a weekend seminar on lobbying, campaigning and media relations organized for the students, as well as other interested community activists, by the Ukrainian National Information Service. The conference was called Washington Horizons II.

SUSK members gathered in their nation's capital in May to learn the techniques of successful lobbying and then put them into practice by informing their federal legislators of the Ukrainian community's concerns about the Deschenes Commission of Inquiry on war criminals in Canada.

TUSM, the Ukrainian Students Association of Mykola Michnowsky, continued to be active in the United States this year as always with its own particular agenda of demonstrations, human-rights campaigns and ideological seminars.

CeSUS representatives, meeting in Washington in August, discussed by-laws changes and decided to convene the organization's next congress in March of 1987.

| Home Page |