The judgment on the value of rsa to lse is just not warranted by the facts. It is significant t hat Brewster and Cockburn do not mention rsa in their account—except in the 'Note on History and Structure' where they remark that the officers of the lse Union 'have played an active part in nus and rsa'. This involvement tells us very little about the recent struggle, in which the Union leaders (David Adelstein included) have been pushed from below. And as your account remarks, in the sitin, a more militant unofficial leadership, in which Socialist Society members were prominent, made much of the running. At the same time, support from outside lse was not organized by rsa—students joined the sit-in and the march very largely without the prompting of any organization. When the Union did try to make contact with students in other Universities, it did not go through rsa. Nor can rsa have been responsible for most of the messages of support—Brewster and Cockburn say there were 357 of these, far more than the number of colleges that rsa is organized in!
As for the value of lse to rsa, this is not easy to judge (not least because rsa has been pretty well dormant this last term). We can, however, say that there has been no mass rush to enrol; in lse, where its insignificance is apparent, this is certainly true, and if it is otherwise elsewhere, the gains are largely unmerited. And this in more senses than one; for one should dispute the criteria on which your writers judge the rsa's potential.
For socialists, anyway, the prime aim should be to ensure that there are students who are committed to aiding the socialist movement outside the University (for socialism is not and never can be a movement of the intellectuals). And if it is important, for this, to participate in the struggle within the University, this means that the two struggles cannot be separated. We cannot, for example, first attempt to create a corporate student consciousness, and then try to politicize this. The critique of education can only be based on the revolutionary criticism of society; the demand for control over the content of education finds meaning in the struggle for control in society at large. It is therefore imperative that socialists do not muzzle their criticism to make it acceptable to partners in any coalitions, or because they have to be elected to offices by people who are unable to share their position.