Thirty years ago, student government was abolished because of inefficiency and apathy. Today, many thing the problems are the same. In 1961, Charles Horner led a group of students on a crusade to abolish student government on the grounds that it was "a powerless waste of money nobody cares about." Thirty-two years later, the debate rages on. "Student government at the time was a creature of the University and was indirectly controlled by the dean of men, a jerk named Robert Longley," said Horner, now a middle-aged political consultant in Washington, D.C. Men's Student Government, as it was known, consisted of two political parties representing different fraternities – the Union party, which counted future accused sex offender Eddie Savitz among its members, and the Red and Blue party, which was led by a young New Yorker with political aspirations named Ed Rendell. Most issues, Horner said last week, revolved around maintaining the status quo and safeguarding the interests of fraternities. As the '60s hit campus and activism began to rise, students became increasingly dissatisfied. Horner and his group, the Student Anarchist League, joined forces with a radically different group, the United Christian Front, presenting themselves at the 1961 Men's Student Government elections. Their objective – to abolish student government. "We're here to fight the farcical atmosphere, general incompetence and overall stupidity of student government by abolishing it all together," read the coalition's campaign statement. "We also disapprove of creeping paganism, galloping government and Mickey Mouse." "The [coalition] was the coming together of two radically dedicated groups," Horner said last week. "Skinhead proto-fascists dedicated to getting rid of Jews on the one hand and Maoist, leftist, Kennedy liberals on the other. It was great." From the beginning, the coalition set out to make a mockery of the elections. "We realize that there are many inherent weakness in student government, and we will attempt to compound the problem and make it worse from within," Horner told The Daily Pennsylvanian on December 6, 1961. "I personally pledge to disrupt all meetings to the best of my ability if I am elected." A few days later, the unthinkable and the absurd happened. While the Union Party and the Red and Blue gained 14 and 12 seats respectively, Horner's coalition won four spots, forcing the traditional parties to cut a deal with them. "We held the balance of power after elections, so we decided to be extremely deceitful, cutting deals with everybody and breaking our word, ridiculing everything in public," he said recently. "Our point was that all this was stupid." The coalition agreed to support the Union Party in exchange for the vice-presidency of the MSG, but continued to disrupt and annoy the body for several months. Eventually, Men's Student Government was disbanded altogether. "It was a moral victory of sorts," Horner recalled, with more than a hint of glee. Fast-forward to 1993. Jonathon Pitt, chairperson of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education, affirms that "student government is infinitely less effective than it was in the '60s." Despite a total budget for student government topping $700,000, even Undergraduate Assembly Chairperson Seth Hamalian concedes there is "a fairly high degree of apathy towards student government." Is the University once again faced with a student government like the one in Horner's day? Is it weak, expensive and ignored by the students? For Pitt, there is no question that students are apathetic. "In the '60s, students would have never let the University get away with stuff like a strict alcohol policy, codes which restrict speech and other restrictive rules," he said. Assistant to the President Nicholas Constan said he believes most students simply have other things on their minds. "People are more concerned with going to practice or their fraternity or even Murph's than they are with banding together to apply Robert's Rules of Parliamentary Procedure," he said. "In any case, at Penn most students are generally happy anyway." Hamalian ascribes apathy to the limited time each student spends at the University. Effecting change requires more than just a couple of years, he said. And Hamalian sees students who do want to get involved in other groups with more specific objectives, rather than a larger organization like student government. One high-ranking administrator had another view. "Generally speaking, people simply tend to outgrow student government when they get to college," he said. "Also, the smarter the student body, the less seriously people will take their student government – at Ivy League schools it's relatively weak, at state schools it's relatively strong." For student government to succeed, Constan said, it needs the student body's backing so the administration has no choice but to perceive it as a force to be reckoned with. UA member Dan Debicella agrees. "Student government is only good to the extent that it rallies students around issues they care about," he said. "If student government can't get the student body behind it, it's useless." Some feel this is how the University has evolved. "The recent history of UA has been marked by marking flimsy paper resolutions that do not reflect any kind of serious thought on important matters," Pitt said. "And when you consider that voter turnout is less than 25 percent, you see that they don't even have the support of the public. It's not surprising that the administration does not respect them." Vice Provost for University Life Kim Morrisson said the administration "respects the idea of student government as the voice of the student body." "Whether or not they act on it is a different matter," she added. But abolishing student government doesn't seem to be an option to anyone except for the man who originally proposed it – Horner himself. He said University administrators are so caught up in a politically correct and wasteful mode of thinking that they lose sight of how best to allocate resources. "You can be sure the administration doesn't take student government seriously – they're too busy conducting affairs in secret, obfuscating finances?," he said. "Take the money wasted on student government and give it to poor kids, so more people have a chance to even get to college." Debicella dismisses Horner's idea as "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." "That would be an overreaction to a problem that exists," he said. "We do a lot of good unnoticed things, although we do have some major problems." Although a harsh critic of student government, Pitt agrees with Debicella. "I will grant you that the system of elected student government is not effective, but having a system in place which at least in theory should protect the rights of undergraduates is really important," he said. Constan, too, defended student government, if only as a way of providing students to practice government. "The chance to act in student government is as justifiable as any other extracurricular activity," he said. If it didn't exist, he said, students would simply invent it. The consensus seems to be that, despite its shortcomings, at the very least student government remains a viable way of gauging the student body's opinion, if only for lack of alternatives. "Who would [the administration] listen to if not some sort of student government?" Morrisson asked. "Society is predicated upon those who vote having the clearest and loudest voice."
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