Student government used to be a gentler world, home to clean-scrubbed kids engaged in harmless resume-building. They’d lobby on behalf of their classmates for more parking, lower tuition and better cafeteria food. At Harvard, the council was once so boring that even Al Gore couldn’t stand it, quitting after just a year. The issues haven’t changed, but lately the tactics have. On campuses from coast to coast, elections now look like the food fight in “Animal House.” From Duke to Portland State to UCLA, campus newspapers recite a litany of misbehavior: ballot-stuffing, bribery, vandalism and rumor-mongering.
Several forces drive the nastiness. One is increased competition, as new constituencies on campus–minorities and gays, for example–discover they can get things done through student government. “It used to be traditional groups–the Greeks, the jocks–would be the presumptive nominees,” says Stacy Lee of the U.S. Student Association. “Now races are becoming more wide open.” Since campus elections still usually have low turnouts, just a few extra votes can change the outcome, creating big incentives for cheating. Adult politicians get a share of the blame, too, for introducing students to tactics like attack ads and impeachment. “People have seen how it’s worked in Washington,” says Tim Young, president at Portland State University.
Young’s predecessor, Chocka Guiden, was one of Portland State’s first African-American presidents, and she fended off impeachment charges last year. “I was accused of, I guess, bribery,” she says, calling the charge “frivolous.” The next campaign was particularly vicious. Two election committee members had their cars vandalized. One candidate reportedly had a breakdown and required counseling. “My GPA went from a 3.7 to a 3.3,” says Estelle Love, an election commissioner who oversaw recounts (by hand) of 12,000 ballots.
At many campuses, e-mail is now the electoral tool of choice, which can lead to new problems. Last spring fraternities at UCLA received an e-mail that appeared to be from a minority candidate opposing the Greek slate. “Go ahead and have your frat parties while raping women,” it said. “Your system of oppression, sexism, homophobia and racism will never survive.” Uproar ensued. The e-mail turned out to be fake; the perpetrator was never caught.
Other schools face constitutional crises long after the election. At the University of Missouri at St. Louis, student president Darwin Butler has been in jail since last fall, according to the school newspaper, after pleading guilty to stealing a credit card. That makes him ripe for impeachment. There’s just one problem: the student council can’t get enough members to show up to hold a legitimate impeachment vote. So an acting president will run the government until the next election in April. Daniel Fuhr knows how difficult it can be to govern from a jail cell. In 1995 he beat steep odds to become president at South Dakota State by attending a half-dozen keg parties a night, bonding with voters over beers. But after taking office, a series of alcohol-related arrests landed him in jail, and opponents initiated a recall election. “It’s hard to get out and ask for votes when you’re behind bars,” Fuhr says. “They don’t let you make a lot of phone calls.” He lost. Now a soybean farmer, Fuhr, 24, hopes to run for Congress someday.
He wouldn’t be the first student-pol to make it big. Example in chief: Bill Clinton, former freshman class president at Georgetown. “A lot of the issues we saw on campus we see here at the White House,” says Setti Warren, student president at Boston College in 1991 and now a special assistant in the Clinton administration. Warren’s arch-rival at BC, Steve Howard, is now a Vermont political consultant who says seeing candidates–including himself–get in trouble for stretching college-campaign rules makes him urge clients to toe the line. “I learned the importance of being honest, knowing the rules and not pushing the envelope,” he says.
As college campaigns become filled with dirty tricks, new opportunities are emerging for students who can run a clean, sophisticated race. Last spring Ben McAdams, a former White House intern, ran for president at the University of Utah. He used Federal Election Commission filings to line up $3,000 in donations. Studying campus demographics, he realized many of Utah’s students were married with kids, so McAdams proposed subsidized child care, a big vote-getter. Since Utah holds its election via the Internet, his campaign funneled voters to computers it had set up around campus. McAdams won by 32 votes.
Back at Harvard, vice president John Burton’s future hung in the balance during three hours of debate last week. Burton’s running mate, president Fentrice Driskell, opened the session by quoting Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Council prosecutors compared Burton to Richard Nixon. But the debate hinged on whether the gay-rights buttons were a “freely available resource,” defined by election rules as a material any candidate could have utilized. The sides engaged in endless parliamentary jousting. “This is just as boring as C-Span,” muttered one student, as another backbencher covertly studied Edith Wharton. Just before the final vote, Burton addressed critics who’d called his actions “slimy.” “Am I slimy?” he asked, holding his arm out to a supporter who rubbed it. “No.” Then council members solemnly deposited secret ballots into a plastic CVS pharmacy bag. More than half the council voted him guilty–but the count fell 12 votes shy of the two-thirds majority necessary to remove him from office. “People at Harvard go crazy sometimes,” Burton said afterward. “They always have to win, and when they don’t, they think someone must have cheated.”
It’s counterintuitive, but some experts see benefits from a new generation of politicians being dragged through the mud of campus elections. Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, says the divisiveness is forcing candidates to learn to build bridges. “This is a first lesson in coalition building, in broadening bases,” she says, citing the increase of mixed-race tickets. Monty Cooper, a Georgetown University senior, received racist hate mail when he ran for vice president two years ago. “It showed me the difficulties a black candidate would have in a majority-white situation,” he says. “I’m glad it happened… It toughened me.” Cooper needs all the toughening he can get. Someday he hopes to run for office in his home state–South Carolina.
