If the recently concluded Student Assembly elections, marked by intrigue, libel and indecency, have made you skeptical of the worth of student politics, then you are not alone. These problems have a historical precedence at Cornell. And in the past, right-minded students on campus have been involved in several attempts to make the Student Assembly more responsive, efficient and representative of student interests.
In 1967, James Maher ’66 ran for the President of the Student Assembly on a popular platform to abolish the Student Government at Cornell. He described himself as a sensible abolitionist candidate and criticized the Student Government for squandering its funds without representing the students. Just like today, the membership of the Student Assembly was essentially seen as a resume booster and Maher blamed it for helping 4 students get into Law School each year. It even had a committee to discuss US foreign policy in Vietnam.
“I, James P. Maher, appeal to the vast majority of students who are in college to live, love, study and graduate. I appeal to the Cornellian who is not in every activist hootenanny, who declines to wail in protest every time the Sun blows its bugle.”
Maher pointed out that the candidates for the Student Government made “inspired, grand and visionary pledges” but within a few weeks of their election, they slipped into ambiguity, hypocrisy, factionalism and self-righteousness. Since people had lost interest in this useless and ineffective body, he offered a real alternative:
“I plead with you to stumble out to the polls just once more for, if elected, you will never hear of elections again. If elected, I will abolish the Student Government at Cornell.”
“I pledge to consider my election a referendum to end the Student Government in which only a fraction of the student body participates, only 25% vote, and from which only vested interests benefit.”
“No one, on grounds of change or progress, has yet devised a JOB for the Student Government. Why, then, do we perpetuate this annoyance? We are neither aware of being governed, nor do we feel that we should be.”
“We must let spontaneous groups represent student interests, as they arise, rather than perpetuate useless committees which preside over interests which have long vanished. Let us reevaluate. Let need dictate structure, not vice versa.”
“Vote for me and clear the air of unhappiness, frustration, accusation, resignation, boredom and outright idiocy. Elect Maher President. He gets things done (away with).”
Maher accused his opponent Richard G. Birchall ’68 for perpetuating a “frail of referendums, sit-ins, sit-ons, burn-ups, pawn-offs”. One of his more radical opponents was Howard A. Rodman ’71, the Editor-in-Chief of The Cornell Daily Sun who subsequently, became influential in the Writers’ Guild of America. Rodman tried to turn the Student Government election into a contest over mobilization against the Vietnam War. “It is the conduct of the war,” he wrote in the Sun, “and only the conduct of the war that concerns us today”.
Maher responded to Rodman in a letter to the Sun as follows:
“For too long our unimaginative and presumptuous Student Government has nauseated us with its spasmodic radical frothings; the prolonged death throes of cynical high school bureaucratic dropouts. Only the creation of the two party system at Cornell, as embodied in the Maher Proposal, can restore a sanity-balance to the increasingly intolerable student political scene.”
This aspect of the “Maher Proposal” is more than relevant today when each candidate for the SA President ritually repeats the sacred list of “diversity, inclusion, outreach and engagement” at every single forum.
Maher also staged a wake to signify the death of the Student Government, highlighted by his emergence from the coffin on the steps of the Willard Straight Hall. In opposition, an obituary was published in the press in which the death of the Student Government due to “senility and mistreatment” was mourned. Paul A. Rahe ’70, who denounced Maher as “a rebel without a cause”, read the eulogies:
“Friends, Cornellians, Students. I come to bury the Student Government, not to praise it. The evil that an organization does lives after it. The good is oft interred with its constitution. So let it be with Student Government. The noble Maher hath told you Student Government was ambitious. If it were so, it was a grievous fault. And grievously hath Student Government answered it.”
But despite his strong abolitionist platform, Maher lost the race to Birchall who was endorsed by the Cornell Union of Students (CUS). In those days, the Constitution of the Student Government required the President to win by an absolute majority. Maher polled 400 votes more than Birchall but due to the presence of 4 candidates, he had to face his opponent in the run-off. But the first first run-off was cancelled when incidents of ballot-stuffing and electoral malpractices were discovered. In the wake of the scandal, Maher proclaimed a personal reward of $50 “for the information instrumental to the discovery of the dastardly malfeasant who deliberately and surreptitiously stoked well over 350 bogus ballots into the maw of the polls”. In the second run-off, Birchall won the presidency of the Executive Board by 117 votes and the CUS-endorsed representatives gained a majority in the Student Government.
But Maher did not capitulate. He launched a campaign against Birchall again in 1968. This time the 9 member Executive Board of the Student Government was replaced with a 50 member Cornell Students Association (CSA). The abolitionists won a majority in the Association. By one account, their number was 30. Birchall, who was now the head of a defunct Executive Board, sulked but could not do much besides casting aspersions on the abolitionist plan.
The abolitionists wanted to abolish their own positions in the CSA. But once elected, the CSA refused to abolish itself or hold a referendum on Student Government by an 18-10 vote. Instead, it elected two of its members to represent students on the Faculty Committee of Student Affairs (FCSA). But Maher still made a strong appeal to the CSA to dissolve itself as soon as possible as most students were disillusioned with its proceedings and their participation was dwindling. Some other abolitionists pledged to vote again on dissolution and the CSA was duly abolished after two months of its commencement.
Continued student apathy and poor turnouts prompted the FCSA to reexamine “the entire role of students in the decision-making process at Cornell”. Some of this restructuring is reflected in our current Student Assembly. James Maher, aged 59, passed away in a plane crash in Honduras in 2004. But his imaginative and provocative campaign to end the Student Government should remind us that permanence is the illusion of every elected body that fails to live up to its mandate and descends into low skullduggery. The Student Assembly is no exception to this rule.
