Student Vote Lacks Punch

Shortly after three radicals and a liberal mayor were elected to the Berkeley City Council in April, 1971, one local businessman predicted domination of local elections by student radicals would be the wave of the future.

"We have a large number of Marxists who came to this area from all parts of the country, and they're using Berkeley as a guinea pig," he said. "This is the start. It's going to spread to Madison, Wis., and Cambridge, Mass., and places like that."

His prediction was way off target.

Students in university communities have generally played a negligible role in local elections since the student-backed slate took office in Berkeley. And Harvard undergraduates have been no exception.

Why, when the 18-year-old vote has made the potential impact of students on the political processes greater than ever, are most undergraduates indifferent to local elections?

Political observers are currently having a field day dissecting the student's psyche in search of the answer. But in focusing on the student, they often bypass obvious features of the university itself, and the university's relationship to its environs. Any explanation for why Harvard students never affected local elections as their peers at Berkeley once did, mandates a closer look at the universities themselves and their relationships with the local communities.

In Berkeley the university is well-integrated with the community. A large black population, about 35 per cent of the total, has interests similar to those of the left-liberal student sector. Opposition to a hard-line police department and support for low-income housing and rent controls provided a common cause for Berkeley students and black residents. The rest of the population, consisting largely of middle- and upper-middle-class whites with ties to the university, is traditionally liberal and therefore sympathetic to student opinions.

The Cambridge population, on the other hand, is dominated by working-class ethnic communities. The privileges of Harvard students--a minority of whom are working-class ethnics--makes them an obvious target of community hostility. This attitude is hardened by Harvard's expansion tendencies, which, in the context of the limited space available in Cambridge, leads to continual clash with surrounding communities. Students are caught in the middle of this struggle. Although they don't make the decisions themselves, they are held responsible by victimized residents. When Harvard forces people out of their neighborhoods, the students are often saddled with the blame.

All this leads to the attitude, cited in no uncertain terms by Mary Amato, a candidate for the city council. "The students are hated by the community," she recently said.

The result is that local politicians cannot appeal to students without antagonizing residents. The town-gown split is very real in Cambridge, and efforts to bridge it seldom meet with success. The student community is simply isolated from the other populations within the city. Politicians commonly use Harvard as a target in order to gain support from the community. Witness the proposals of such politicians as Al Vellucci, who a few years back wanted to pave over Harvard Yard and make it a huge parking lot.

Yet student apathy certainly cannot be wholly explained in terms of hostility from the community. The Grass Roots Organization (GRO), which consists of people interested in basic structural change in Cambridge government, is sponsoring a slate of seven candidates who support programs for more blue-collar jobs, neighborhood control of police, and low-income housing projects. But this program, which is similar to that offered by the Berkeley radicals in 1971, has attracted little student interest. Saundra Graham, the only incumbent among the seven GRO candidates, says that student reaction to her campaign has been minimal. "The students are simply unaware of what's going on," she explains.

One explanation for this lack of interest may be the geographical diversity of the Harvard student body. Ninety-five per cent of the students at UC Berkeley, which is a state-run university, are from California, and a large part of these are from the Berkeley area itself. Students there have an immediate stake in local politics.

At Harvard, 80 per cent of the undergraduates are from outside of Massachusetts. Students tend to pay more attention to urban renewal in Akron, Ohio, or rent control efforts in Eugene, Ore., than they do to alleged police brutality in Cambridge or to the implications of Harvard expansion.

There is good reason for this. Urban renewal in Akron, Ohio is likely to affect friends and family of the Akron-born student. But due to Harvard's peculiar insulation from its environs, most issues of Cambridge elections have little impact on undergraduates here.

One student refers to Harvard as the "Vatican" of Cambridge. The University's red-brick buildings are often mistaken for ivory towers by students who find all their needs satisfied by Harvard's own resources.

Similar peculiarities accounting for student apathy in local elections could probably be found at every college campus. Emphasis on the unique regional factors is no substitute for more generalized explanations of political indifference amongst students, but it is one component of an answer--one that is often given short shrift.

Those who elected the radicals to the Berkeley City Council had a vision. "What we want is more room to build a revolutionary society," said one student, "a society with more equitable tax distribution, with stricter rent controls, with new low-cost housing, with more parks and child-care centers." Yet, two-and-a-half years after the initiation of the radical experiment, the vision is gone. Berkeley remains the same. And so does Cambridge. Here the vision extends no further than a reading cubicle in Lamont Library