there were 12 initial amendments proposed for the bill of rights, 10 got approved and 2 didn't and thus got dropped. What the college student realized was amendments usually don't have expiration dates (newer ones added expiration clauses in the bill) and thus the 18th century ratifications were still valid.

so essentially the student realized that amendments clearly defeated in the states are still "technically" alive and pushed a dead amendment. People just didn't really realize this before. Similarly technically the speaker of the house doesn't technically have to be a member of the house of representatives because of vagueness in the constitution but no one has ever really run with that.

So essentially what happened was in the 80s a college student realized this amendment had a short cut around congress towards ratification and he pushed states to ratify this hypothetically popular amendment (congress can't pass raises for itself polls pretty well).