DIRTY TRICKS ON CAMPUS:
Mohr, Anthony
DIRTY TRICKS ON CAMPUS ANTHONY MOHR Vocational training for would-be politicians Dateline August 6, 1968, the Hilton Plaza Hotel, Miami Beach. The eve of the Republican National Convention. I was...
...After bumbling through several farcical years, "Their one big monumental achievement was voting themselves out of existence...
...I was a member of Richard Nixon's campaign staff...
...He's a printer, and I sent this pamphlet to him...
...In such an atmosphere, issue-oriented campaigns must become anomalous...
...Even though the proof was solid and even though many of the offices were cliffhangers, members of the administration closed their eyes...
...Item: USC deserves another mention...
...In these same discussions, others always recount their own adventures from college days, stunts designed to foul up student elections...
...President Norman Topping virtually suspended student government after this incident, and eleven days after, one of the societies surfaced with Watergater Dwight Chapin as co-chairman...
...Lyndon with his hand on some Negro fellow...
...On paper these bureaucracies appear formidable...
...The only way abilities can be tested are in practice—in the leagues, the classes, and the clubs...
...They get all the excitement of the political fray with none of the risks...
...Man, did those folks squawk...
...It was hot that day in Los Angeles, and they were about to conclude their business, forge a hall pass, and go to the beach...
...And one major stimulus is the attitude our schools foster with respect to electoral politics...
...One particular remark surfaced from that night in Miami Beach: "I used to play dirty in school and still do...
...Item: University of North Carolina—in 1966 two political parties dominated student government, and undergraduates ostensibly picked their candidates at open conventions...
...and many intelligent people have embraced it over the years...
...The Georgia county chairman receded from my memory until the morning of June 17, 1972, when events at a plush Washington apartment complex reminded me of his tale...
...The delegate paused and gulped his bourbon...
...The first stage was disillusionment...
...No one would have known what happened if one of the others had not demanded a recount...
...Svensk outpolled every one of the official candidates...
...He looked much more innocent than he was...
...At many affluent high schools the races become a spending contest...
...As a last minute prank, the fraternities on campus decided to support the lad and stuffed their ballot boxes for him...
...Within a year the victors were admitting their desire to do nothing for the voters, and the voters loved it...
...Suddenly a scraping noise vented from a heating duct above the blackboard...
...the winners remained on and made sure their student council would be wild with apathy...
...They just don't know what they are talking about...
...The stunt was grounded in the nascent competition between the fraternities who traditionally ran student government and the campus left which was reaching for control...
...The night of the final election, supporters of one Bob Svensk, an unannounced contestant, slipped the following notice under every door on campus: "Bob's qualities are manifold: a beautiful Nordic facade keeps well hidden not only his intelligence but his indifference...
...Item: California State University, Northridge...
...Sometimes it seemed that the voters wanted to be duped...
...You could hear 'em clear across the holler...
...There are freshmen representatives to girls leagues, pep club representatives on the sophmore class council, senior class observers on the honor board...
...Ludicrous as it may sound, student government is the first political experience most Americans live through...
...The minority includes the leaders, experts at gathering votes and inept at keeping promises...
...Every year at USC is a Watergate," says journalism professor Fred Coonradt, who has advised the Daily Trojan since 1948...
...The winner by five votes was the principal's favorite...
...was unable to locate North College, and was thus unable to figure out what the issues were this year...
...Ten years ago a Beverly Hills High election was rocked by wholesale ballot stuffing...
...I played dirty in school and still do...
...I let him ramble...
...They emerge from the learning laboratory as skillful, amoral politicians whose memories of fun with the ballot box are not about to go away...
...He easily won...
...Item: Wesleyan University—in February 1967 fourteen people vied for the college body council...
...A protracted flashback through some of these anecdotes is revealing: Item: The night before a nomination assembly at a midwestern college in 1968, four campaign workers kept their opponent up all night...
...No one believed his story...
...That evaporated when the administration coldly told student council that the problem would be solved their way...
...Elections at that high school usually had been issue-oriented, at least to some extent...
...The idea is rather seductive...
...In many schools the most significant feat attainable by student leaders is the date and location of the yearly prom...
...Viewed in this context, the learning laboratory is dangerous...
...This is no secret...
...Item: Again, Stanford—one night twenty masked Delta Tau Delta men kidnapped antiwar Student Body President David Harris and shaved his head...
...Someone observes that at least seven members of the Nixon White House passed through the University of Southern California and played key roles in that school's government...
...Each class has its own popularly elected kadership...
...I'm the Gut Man of the county...
...Plenty of "ratfuckers" remain behind, alumni of scores of educational institutions...
...We found out which copies were going to the white suburbs and slipped pamphlets into every one...
...Actually, a magnificent high school career suggests untapped potential, and there is no doubt that—the fall social world having floated into the past—he does have considerable time to devote to campus affairs . . . "Bob...
...If our fiefdom existed at the sufferance of three adults, then at least we would enjoy it and not even bother serving our constituents...
...To those who graduated during the morally grey era of the mid-1960s, the effects are so obvious that they require no mention...
...Often college elections are won by the contender who insists that government is a farce...
...Small wonder that anybody who would like to do something constructive with his time ventures nowhere near the local student body office...
...Everyone at UCLA knew that their leaders "ate at Lawry's and went flying around on ASUCLA money," one privately admitted...
...One girl in Orange County filed for an office and was branded a Communist...
...He claimed that he was a county chairman and consistently "beat those Democrats' asses...
...and on that particular night, I was helping some delegates get drunk...
...It falters at the point where a new student leader finds that he no longer can do anything...
...The only reason they appear here is to underscore the warning that Richard Nixon's resignation does not signal the final exorcism of political rot...
...Although the majority ignore it, they cannot avoid being touched...
...The Chief Justice of Student Court never called a single session...
...Buddies and girl friends ended up in every appointed office...
...In college the spoils go to the carefree behaviorists who view the whole structure as a testing ground for pop sociology, more amenable to pranks than to effective legislation...
...At other schools fist fights and name-calling are rife...
...and when he grinned, he could pass for the parish priest...
...Almost every college and high school in the United States has some form of student government...
...To fulfill a campaign platform is to court sharp reprimands, with harsher sanctions not far behind...
...for systems following the concept beg people to be at once manipulative and competitive but then encourage the victors to do nothing more than gloat, virtual rois faineants...
...He took another swallow...
...Some of us still believed in the learning laboratory...
...One afternoon in November, 1964, several student officers were talking strategy in a classroom...
...At the University of Cincinnati, fraternity candidates used to admit that then-platforms were devoid of issues and still won...
...The only place where imagination counts is in the campaign's mechanics...
...I've got it on my college record," the jurist explained...
...But the inescapable conclusion is that the USC ethos is not unique...
...Richard Buck, a former class president at Dartmouth, remembers that school's Undergraduate Council...
...The administration did nothing...
...These anecdotes are shared with glee...
...Item: Stanford University—in the mid 1960s a group published fake polls showing that campus opinion either supported an issue in their campaign platform or opposed a suggestion of their opponents...
...At another Northern California high school, three people planted dope on a candidate and forced him out of the running...
...I'll bet we got Barry [Goldwater] two thousand votes that night...
...I got some of the boys together...
...He shifts from a campaign that probably went quite unsupervised by school authorities to a life frustrated by a maze of rules and guidelines...
...Probably because they do not perceive the student candidate as a threat, most principals and deans never bother to monitor him until he wins...
...Well, I got this friend, see...
...and we staked out the town newspaper at 3 a.m...
...Who really cares...
...He ran off a few thousand copies...
...Yergin went on to insist that student goverment functions as a laboratory "for students to work together as learners and members in effective undertakings...
...The total number of ballots far exceeded the number of registered voters...
...Writing in the Beverly Hills High School newspaper ten years ago, Yergin expressed his disgust with "an ignorant minority which, reaping the benefits of others' efforts, screeches that student government is a farce...
...he likes it here and hopes that everyone else does...
...The loser, one Richard Dreyfuss ("American Graffiti," "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravetz"), was anything but safe in the deans' eyes...
...One caucus rented several pornographic movies and advertised that they would be screened the night of the conventions...
...He smiled as he asked the question, almost with anticipation...
...There is no accountability for being a lazy student body president...
...Even then I dismissed him...
...Yergin's logic is fine as long as there are "effective undertakings" from which one learns...
...We should pause at the Beverly experience because it collects the themes underscoring this article...
...Only no one resigned...
...For the fun of it we lifted refreshments from after-game dances and disposed of them at private parties...
...California Assemblyman Walter Karabian '60 captures the mood well when he recalls, "They didn't regard it as an exercise in democracy, just fun...
...In a burst of magnanimity, school principals* usually add boys and girls leagues, club relations boards, and spirit committees, all with their respective hierarchies...
...Then he insisted on revealing one of his pranks: "Back in '64 someone mailed me an LBJ pamphlet, you know, one of those they circulated around Harlem...
...They offered to create the position of "corresponding secretary" for the loser, but the girl curtly rejected it...
...That American educators have overlooked these consequences for so many years is surprising...
...Every 15 minutes they called his house...
...in the garage of some newspaper delivery-boy...
...At 5 a.m...
...Such impotence is due to a maxim that school officials hold dear: student government is a learning laboratory in which participants role-play at democracy without hurting anybody...
...At USC secret societies often pumped over $4000 into a single campaign...
...Phase Three took longer to crystallize...
...Ballot box stuffing has been commonplace on that campus, but it seldom is checked because, in the words of one graduate, "everyone's too apathetic...
...Anybody who has been around an American school, however, knows that their government is usually a travesty...
...Yet the campaigns are precisely where people get hurt and where incipient bosses could use a lesson in sportsmanship...
...Most students opted for skin, and the interlopers had the nominating conventions to themselves...
...Assemblyman Karabian remembers that one time a secret society "painted insults all over the jock fraternity house so they'd get mad enough to go vote for the [secret society's] candidate who was a football player...
...When he disconnected the phone, they reported it and the phone company put a howler on the line...
...I acknowledged that he was clever and eventually moved on to another delegate...
...No great insight is necessary to realize that the storytellers enjoyed their work...
...In high school the upshot is to abandon the learning laboratory to children who only want another college qualification...
...Ain't that fun...
...Now even that pretense vanished...
...Item: Vanderbilt University, 1970...
...The remark occurs in most Watergate-related conversations...
...The result is that winning elections is the only challenge and the only reward...
...they sent an ambulance to the house...
...The experience cannot be judged on price—no matter what is read or told...
...It worked...
...One particularly gangling man was detailing his exploits in a Georgia county...
...At present its veterans may be the most glaring extrapolation of an overgrown "in crowd," but scores of other colleges and high schools in the country have produced similar cliques...
...One of the most lucid defenses comes from Daniel Yergin, a former student body president...
...The contests were admitted popularity polls...
...Campaigns required no substance, just form...
...Under their cloaks USC men stuffed ballot boxes, ransacked campaign headquarters, bribed opponents out of races, distributed illegal material, burned ballots and spread manure around polling places to prevent women from voting...
...The student president, an accomplished wrestler, walked outside and found his rival perched atop a phone booth with his ear against the other side of the conduit...
...And on February 17, 1961, someone broke into the University office and stole the entire USC election code, every single copy...
...The politics they learned was called "ratfucking," and the term lingered through the Nixon years...
...but on the morning of President Gerald Ford's inauguration, a small article in the Los Angeles Times suggested that Americans are prepared to dismiss the past year's scandals as a national aberration, a fluke in our otherwise virtuous character...
...I don't care anymore...
...It is understood that although Watergate was a serious attempt to usurp a large number of civil liberties, the affair was perpetrated by a number of overgrown fraternity boys who had yet to shed their notion that electoral politics was pure sport...
...Hence the Wesleyan experience...
...Later on the way to the beach, one person chimed, "God, can you imagine what real politics must be like...
...His short hair was sandy-colored...
...I love politics," he said with a slur, " 'cause I like to play dirty...
...No office would change hands except the secretary of the senior class, in which the margin had been a single vote...
...Colleges usually slap on additional organs like dorm councils and inter-fraternity committees...
...In fact there is a premium on nonfeasance...
...He shouldered the lad and marched back into the meeting, where all had a good laugh and then sent the intruder away...
...Rigging the student council was great sport, the same kind of fun that my friend from Georgia experienced at 3 a.m...
...Dwight Chapin, Tim El-bourne, H. R. Haldeman, who attended USC until 1946 but graduated from UCLA, Gordon Strachan, Donald Segretti, and Ron Ziegler...
...What is not realized is that even though the nightmare is over, the potential for future bad dreams will remain until we attack the stimuli...
...ROTC was a roaring issue that year, and the one candidate for student president who was an ROTC cadet seemed a sure loser...
...I cannot begin to count the number of hall passes that were forged...
...Two secret societies dominated the campus...
...If nothing else, what they see is another subconscious reason to shy away from the real thing...
...Michael Guhin of the staff of the National Security Council also graduated from USC, but has been unconnected with Watergate...
...In any event Bob's happy...
...The reason: they were frightened that the student body presidency would change...
...This usually involves a council presided over by elected officers...
...The next phase was resignation...
...The next few elections saw flagrant abuses of the rules, ranging from unauthorized publicity to telephone threats...
...The following morning the lad performed abysmally and lost...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 13
