Harvard Deaniacs Cope with Dropout

On the night of Jan. 28, Samuel M. Simon ’06-’07 walked into a room in Manchester, N.H. with over 100 other volunteers from Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

He was expecting to be handed a new assignment. Instead, he got fired.

“I was shocked. Walking into the room, I had no idea it was coming,” said Simon, who is also a Crimson editor.

The demise of former Vermont Governor Dean’s campaign—which Dean made official in a concession speech Wednesday—has left thousands of college-age staffers, volunteers, and supporters in the lurch. Harvard students are no exception.

Simon, who had been working as a paid staffer for Dean since June 1, had taken the fall term off to stay on the campaign. The layoff left him with a difficult choice: continue on as a volunteer or return to school.

The bad news came the day after the New Hampshire primary election—and a week before the start of Harvard’s spring semester.

“I went out to lunch with some friends, talked to my [academic] adviser, and decided it made more sense to return to school,” Simon said.

There was only one problem. Simon had already informed Harvard that he would also be taking off the spring term.

“I called my adviser that day at lunch,” he said. The good-humored sophomore in Eliot House was told that his adviser had already begun filing the proper paperwork after reading about the campaign’s layoffs in that morning’s paper.

“Don’t talk trash about Harvard advising,” Simon laughed.

The Party’s Over

With the Dean train finally out of steam, its staffers are left with the pesky question of what comes next.

For Simon, the biggest challenge will be adjusting to Harvard’s schedule, but he seems to be acclimating well.

“I can sleep now,” he joked. “I have three days off every week as opposed to one day off a month” on the campaign.

Others, especially Harvard alums, are still considering their options.

Mike O’Mary ’99-’00 worked as a traveling aide to Dean over the past few months, criss-crossing the country with the candidate.

“The job I had was incredibly exhausting,” O’Mary said.

He’s now looking forward to a short break before he begins at Boston College Law School in the fall.

O’Mary was accepted to the law school last year, but deferred to continue his work with the Dean campaign. Garrett M. Graff ’03, a former Crimson executive, has been a deputy press secretary for the Dean campaign since June.

“The last couple of weeks have not been easy,” Graff said. “We have all invested a lot in this campaign.”

As of yesterday, Graff was one of the remaining staff members still manning the phones at the Dean campaign’s national headquarters in Burlington, N.H.

“I’ll probably be here for another couple of days,” Graff said. “As you can imagine there’s a huge physical infrastructure that needs to be shut down from what has amounted to a $50-million-a-year business.”

Pundits have wondered whether Dean supporters will transfer their efforts to another candidate for the remainder of the Democratic primary.

But so far they just seem to be licking their wounds.

“People who had supported Dean are very undecided about who they’ll work for next,” said Regina C. Schwartz ’06, co-chair of Harvard Students for Dean.

For Graff, the future is “unclear.”

Though the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, none of the workers interviewed found their time a waste.

“Absolutely worth it, I learned more than I ever had,” Simon said.

Some have even managed to have a little fun.

“The governor was here for most of the day,” Graff said yesterday. “We went out back and had a snowball fight with him.”

—Staff writer Michael M. Grynbaum can be reached at grynbaum@fas.harvard.edu.