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Campus Politics Making a Comeback
The debates may not be as passionate as they were in the days of the Vietnam War and South African apartheid, but undergraduate politics, prodded by a newly invigorated right, is enjoying something of a rebirth.
by Annie Murphy Paul
December 1996
To much of the outside world, Yale represents a bastion of political liberalism. And according to a recent poll in the Yale Daily News, fully 77 percent of undergraduates still consider themselves moderate or left of center. But the general rightward trend of the nation at large is being reflected in the Yale student body, however belatedly, and the results are giving rise to some of the hottest debates on campus in more than a generation.
Lest anyone forget, last year’s upheaval over the return of a $20 million grant from Lee Bass ’79 was sparked by Light and Truth, a conservative magazine funded largely by outside sources but led by student editors. And while that publication hasn’t dropped any more bombshells, veterans of the anti-war protests of the 1970s or the divestment rallies of the 1980s might have been surprised by a recent meeting of the Yale Political Union, traditionally the formal setting for undergraduate debate. The P.U. already had two right-of-center groups, the Tory Party and the Party of the Right, in addition to the Liberal, Independent, and Progressive parties. But changing times are swelling the ranks of conservative students, and have created divisions among them. On October 9, the dissension broke out into a full-fledged floor fight over the addition of a new party to the 62-year-old Union. Overcoming attempts to pass a constitutional amendment making it more difficult to establish a new party, right-wing students succeeded in enabling the Conservative Party to become an official member of the Union, the first one to be added in 11 years. If the latest addition to the P.U. does not mean a fundamental shift in the student body’s political geography, it does serve as a reminder that political debate on campus—while nowhere near as heated as in the days of the Vietnam War, civil rights, and South African apartheid—is taking a new and increasingly active form, much of it expressed in community activism.
The development could only have pleased A. Whitney Griswold ’29, President of the University from 1950 to 1963, who as a young professor founded the Political Union as a forum for political discourse at Yale. As it did in Griswold’s time, the Union organizes debates, invites speakers, and sponsors the activities of its parties—as of October, all six of them. Its current president, Veronica Tucci ’98, favored admission of the new conservative group. “We welcome all points of view,” she says. “The only thing we don’t accept is apathy.”
Of that there is little to be found. The P.U. is the largest student organization on campus, with 1,800 undergraduate members at last count. It has its own constitution, a ten-member executive board, and an annual membership income of more than $20,000. Its debates are frequently broadcast on C-SPAN, and many of its alumni have gone on to careers in politics.
The Union’s main attraction may be its impressive roster of speakers, which in recent years has included Ted Turner, Ross Perot, and CIA director John Deutch. The Union offers no honoraria to its guests, so those invited speak only for the reward of facing a bright and curious audience. P.U. events often draw capacity crowds, eager to hear speeches on even the most involved of topics. Many members of such audiences leave before the student debates, which follow the speakers, ever get started, but those who stay behind constitute the Union’s dedicated core, a group of perhaps 100 students who are a breed unto themselves. Bright, knowledgeable, and loquacious, these political enthusiasts can tell you down to the last sub-clause why they favor or oppose a legislative bill.
Not that they share a single ideology—far from it. The P.U.’s half-dozen parties are distributed across the political spectrum, and while differences between groups may seem minor to outsiders, each offers its members a distinctive community. The Party of the Right, for example, is a small but tight-knit group whose members invariably adjourn to Mory’s after P.U. debates. The more genteel Tory Party is populated by students partial to bow ties for gentlemen and high heels for the ladies, and whose whose debating style—discreet hisses, stamps, and claps of approval or disagreement—pays homage to their English role models.
The singular character of each party, and the intense loyalties they inspire, have led some students to complain of excessive partisanship and politicking within the Union, especially at voting time. Elections for the chairmanship of each party and for positions on the executive board are held every semester, so that the Union is in a continual state of campaign fever. Alex Barry ’98, chairman of the Tory party, says that the intense angling for votes should not come as a surprise. “Most people in the Union are very driven, and many have political ambitions,” he says. “When you bring a lot of them together and make them compete in elections, politicking is bound to happen.” Rob Siegel ’97, chair of the Progressive Party, concedes that “there’s a constant tug of war over who has the power,” but says that most P.U. members “wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“In the real world, hard-core politicking goes on all the time, and it’s no fun,” says Siegel. “In the Union it’s fun because the stakes are so low. What do you win? A few free dinners at Mory’s.” Those dinners, however, which the P.U. president, vice president, and speaker share with Union guests, mean a private meal with the likes of Camille Paglia and Caspar Weinberger—an opportunity that many are willing to fight for.
But elections, dramatic as they may be, are not the P.U.’s only purpose. Participation in Union debates forces students of various political convictions to confront and respond to other views. “In the P.U., it’s not enough to say ‘I believe such-and-such,’” says Veronica Tucci. “You have to be able to say, ‘I believe such-and-such, and here are the reasons why.’” Articulating those reasons requires superior speaking skills, abilities that the Union seeks to develop in its members. Rob Siegel says that in his case, at least, such constant practice has paid off. After two years of debating, says Siegel, “I’ve gone from a nervous, unclear speaker to a very relaxed—if not perfectly lucid—public speaker on the fly.”
Those who wish to speak at a P.U. meeting must also become familiar with the parliamentary procedures codified in Robert’s Rules of Order, which are observed with special enthusiasm by the Party of the Right. (The P.O.R. is also known for its instigation of an annual tussle over its unofficial patron saint, the beheaded King Charles I of England. On the anniversary of Charles’s death, the party traditionally motions for a moment of silence in his honor.)
Although many aspiring Yale politicos revel in the P.U.’s formality, other students look elsewhere for a looser style of political discourse. Some have found it in the Yale Black Political Forum, a three-year-old organization that has already brought an impressive group of speakers to campus, among them Jesse Jackson, Anita Hill, Henry Louis Gates, Bobby Seale, Nadine Strossen, and Patricia Ireland. Forum president Jaime Harrison ’98 says that he prefers his group’s informal question-and-answer format to the P.U.’s rule-bound procedures. “They hamper debate, instead of helping it along,” he says. The Forum’s acting co-chair, sophomore Mordica Simpson, adds that “the P.U. wouldn’t have invited a lot of the guests that we’ve had, because they might not feel that those speakers would have things to say that would interest their members.” Simpson cites a speech given to the Forum last year by Calvin Butts, a minister from Harlem. “Reverend Butts gave a really affecting talk about re-spiritualizing the African American community,” she says. “His themes were certainly applicable to the larger Yale community, but I’m not sure that other organizations would have taken the initiative to bring him here.”
Despite their burgeoning presence on campus, some conservatives also feel left out of the University’s mainstream political culture. The Tory Party and the Party of the Right have been around for decades, but these are largely “debating societies,” in which conservatism is considered on a purely abstract level. “We try to stay out of real politics,” says Tory chair Alex Barry. But a surge of conservative activism has recently begun under a rejuvenated Yale College Republicans organization. These self-proclaimed “grass-roots activists,” whose numbers have grown under the current leadership, say they want to break what to offer an alternative to the left-leaning views held by many Yale students. “A lot of people come to college unsure of their political beliefs, and they fall into the liberal Democratic camp because that’s what’s easy, that’s what’s popular,” says College Republicans executive vice president Travis Seegmiller ’98.
To get their message out during the recent presidential election, the College Republicans mounted a vigorous publicity campaign, producing two weekly newsletters, cultivating relationships with campus newspapers and radio stations, and sponsoring events like debate-watching parties and a “blitz” of the Yale Bowl to distribute Dole-Kemp fliers, stickers, and balloons. But despite their success in attracting several hundred new members, they say they continue to feel like an embattled minority. Seegmiller says that when he displayed a Dole-Kemp sign in his bedroom window, it was splattered with eggs, and that after he appeared next to Bob Dole in a Yale Daily News photograph, he was greeted with comments from classmates like “I didn’t know you were like that,” and “How could you be so blind?”
In self-defense, the College Republicans and other campus conservatives have armed themselves with facts and statistics, ready to counter what they describe as liberal brainwashing. Debbie Schmuhl ’00, director of the College Republicans’ Women Voter Education Project, says that she does as much reading for the political group as she does for Directed Studies. “A lot of students don’t want to be labeled as either liberal or conservative,” says College Republicans president John Mihaljevic ’98. “They will support us once they hear about our positions.”
The group may be on to something for while some undergraduates arrive at Yale with their political outlooks fully formed and graduate with their beliefs intact, many others find their political convictions challenged or even changed during their student years. “College prompts a lot of people to re-examine the political attitudes and beliefs they grew up with,” says Veronica Tucci. “They may end up endorsing the same views, but now they have reasons and evidence to back up their ideas.” Emily Satterthwaite ’97, editor of the Yale Political Monthly, says that being at Yale pushes many people to become more liberal. “There’s so much diversity here, so many different kinds of people, that you can’t stay narrow-minded,” she says. College conversions also go in the other direction, however, sometimes as a result of a first brush with the “real world.” Even Satterthwaite, who calls herself an “arch liberal,” says that she has become more conservative at college: A revelation came during a summer job, she says, when she saw the bite taxes took out of her paycheck. Debbie Schmuhl, who says she was “an ardent Democrat” in high school, became an equally ardent Republican when she found that her views as a “pro-choice feminist” were welcomed by the College Republicans.
Whatever beliefs they eventually choose, many Yale students say they were originally drawn to the University by its rich political history. The number of current and former presidents and members of Congress with a Yale degree convinced Jaime Harrison that New Haven was the place to launch a political career. (One such alumnus, former U.S. senator and governor of Connecticut Lowell Weicker ’53, returned to Yale this fall to teach a class called “Leadership in the Politics of Governing.”) Caela Miller’s father attended graduate school at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his stories of the Black Panthers trial impressed upon her an image of Yale as a hotbed of political activity. Now a junior, Miller is the voter registrar of the Yale College Democrats, and with a staff of 13 she has helped to register more than 1,000 students this year. “It’s important that Yale students register in New Haven, because we are residents of the city, taking advantage of city services,” says Miller. “We need to have a voice other than that of the Yale administration.”
It was the city of New Haven itself that got 1996 graduate Josh Civin involved in politics: “I wanted to write about the city for a campus magazine, so I started bicycling though the neighborhoods of New Haven and talking to the people I met there,” he says. “After a while, I realized that I wanted to get involved with the issues, not just write about them.” Civin started by volunteering for local campaigns, and in the fall of 1994 he was elected alderman of Ward One, a district that encompasses eight of Yale’s residential colleges. Last year, he was elected to a second term. Being a city official, says Civin, has been an education in the realities of municipal politics. “As an alderman, I’ve found that local government is really about constituent services—whether the snow gets cleared, whether the stoplights work, the really mundane stuff that matters in people’s daily lives,” he says.
While the College Republicans chose this year to focus most of their energies on the Presidential campaign, their Democratic counterparts were heavily involved in local races for alderman, senator, and representative. “Because of its small size, New Haven offers a unique opportunity to get involved in local politics, see how it works, and make a difference in the outcome,” says Charles Borden ’97, president of the Yale College Democrats. Even the highbrow debating societies involve themselves in the fortunes of the city, by working with hunger and homelessness charities. But Civin and others say that Yale students must also recognize the often-neglected link between community service and politics. “Yale students do a lot of volunteer work, and I think it’s important that they combine it with the advocacy of changes that will make that help less needed,” he says.
However they choose to get involved, Yale students as a group seem especially well-informed and politically active. More than 80 percent of them are registered to vote, thanks to the efforts of Miller and other student registrars. “I’m tired of being labeled part of the ’do-nothing’ generation,” says Jaime Harrison. “There are enough excited, engaged, and aware people here at Yale to totally shatter that kind of stereotype.” And yet, despite their demonstrated interest in politics, relatively few Yale students say they plan to run for office once they graduate. Harrison is one exception: He hopes one day to be governor of South Carolina, his home state. But for the most part, undergraduates say they have little interest in becoming politicians.
Caela Miller attributes that disinclination to simple economics. “Most Yale students have to support themselves completely after they graduate, and a lot of them have student loans to pay off,” she says. “A job as a union organizer or an environmental activist just doesn’t pay that well.” Others point to a deeper disaffection with politics that has seized much of the rest of the country. “I could never be a politician, because it debases you too much,” says Emily Satterthwaite. “You have to make too many compromises.”
Such disillusionment with public service has not dimmed Yale students’ enthusiasm for politics itself, however. As David Cooke, a member of the Yale College Republicans, says of his classmates: “We want to be responsible citizens and informed voters. Even if we never run for elected office, everyone who gets involved with politics at Yale will have a sense of how the process works, and how a citizen can best contribute to society.”  |
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