Searches for “Lawrence, Frederick” and “Lawrence, Fred” on OpenSecrets.org revealed three contributions from an individual by that name employed at Boston University during the period in which President-designate Lawrence worked there (1988-2005).  I think it’s safe to say that they’re all from the guy we’re looking for, particularly since one of them specifies the donor as a “Professor of Law”.  They are:

• $250 on 7/27/92 to Bill Clinton (D)
• $2,000 on 9/20/00 to DNC Services Corp (D)
• $500 on 10/27/04 to DNC Services Corp (D)

It looks like Lawrence isn’t a major political donor, but he’s batting 1.000 for Team Blue so far.  It’s hard to read anything into his current six year period of inactivity; not only has he done that before, but I can think of plenty of reasons why the head of a law school in Washington, D.C. might want to remain publicly neutral on questions of politics.

I have to admit that I find it comforting to know that Lawrence’s sympathies appear to lean Democratic.  It supports my hope that he’ll pursue strong progressive policies for the University, and it could signify that the run of Democratic luminaries that Brandeis has brought to speak while I’ve been here (Bill Clinton, Carl Levin, Howard Dean etc.) will continue with institutional support.

At the same time, as you may have guessed from the snarky cross-out in the previous graf, I’m still wary about decisions that are handed down to us from the Board of Trustees, especially when they have such a strong impact on the future of our community. Yes, I know, the selection process included ‘student input’ – a survey, an online forum, a town hall or two – but none of these constitute serious democratic involvement of the community. I’m not interested in beating dead horses, but the near-total lack of substantive power that students exercise within Brandeis administration is a cause for continuing concern.

This is why I believe we should start off on the good foot with President Lawrence (Freddy Law!) and have a serious town hall meeting early next semester, before his term begins. A small part of it – a very small part – should be allotted for him to introduce himself, to explain why he can best lead Brandeis and how he intends to do it. But the larger part, I hope, can be devoted to expression of student and staff concerns, issues, and desires for the future of our community. What I think would be especially great would be a presentation of a plan for accountability, for making sure that student concerns and demands are substantively addressed, and that individual administrators will find it in their best interests to act on student concerns.

What do people think?

As many news sources spread word of his death and memorialize him, two things seem to jump out: the first, his KKK involvement, which is what pushed him to get involved in politics in the first place, and the second, his ability to stay true to his state (West Virginia) and reflect the views of his consitutents.

As for the first, he became involved with the Ku Klux Klan when he was in his twenties, at which point their regional leaders encouraged him to run for the House. He stayed involved with the Klan for a short time, and then cut his ties. When asked later about his involvement, he said that it was “a sad mistake,” and his track record of voting for civil rights bills plus his vote for Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor convinced people that he had left his white supremacist roots behind, though to imagine someone in the Senate nowadays having that kind of background is very surprising. Is his past forgivable under the circumstances?

From “Robert Byrd’s Baffling Career: From Segregationist to Senate Sage” by Walter Shapiro

In his 2005 autobiography, Byrd referred to his two years as a Kleagle in the West Virginia Klan during World War II when he wrote, “It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one’s life, career, and reputation.” But two years after Byrd left the KKK to work in a war-time Baltimore shipyard, he wrote to Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo (one of the most virulent racists in the Senate) declaring, “Rather I should die a thousand times . . . than to see this beloved land of ours degraded by race mongrels.”

Two decades later, Byrd delivered a 14-hour address as the final gasp of the Southern Senate filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But in addition to resorting to time-eating historical gambits like reading aloud the entire text of the Magna Carta, Byrd turned to the Bible to justify segregation. Dismissing the call of Jesus to love one’s neighbor, Byrd thundered, “But the scriptural admonition does not say that we may not choose our neighbor . . . It does not admonish that we shall not build a wall betwixt us and our neighbor.”

As to the second point, throughout his time in Congress he fought in the interests of coal miners and the companies that ran the mines, got the money to build major highways and other pieces of infrastructure to support WV’s economy, and all in all, seems to have stayed focused on his state rather than getting sidetracked by national or personal interests.

As Patricia Murphy writes in “Sen. Robert Byrd, Longest-Serving Member of Congress, Is Dead at 92,”

The Almanac of American Politics once wrote that Byrd came “closer to the kind of senator the Founding Fathers had in mind than any other.”

Lastly, a major achievement I read about in the above article, when he first entered the House he had neither a college nor a law degree. However, after taking night classes for 10 years at American University, he earned a law degree, presented to him by President Kennedy. And in 1994, Marshall University, located in West Virginia, awarded him an honorary college degree, when he was 77 years old. So, he truly was the quintessential “self-made man” which Americans are always calling for.

What do you think, will you remember Byrd fondly?

But I’d be doing Daniel (and the Brandeis student body) a disservice to attribute his victory simply to his personality.  I’d also be wrong, particularly in light of how commanding his vote total was.  I’ve never seen anything like the most recent Union election; getting over 50% turnout for the presidential race was far more than I ever thought would be possible, and it speaks to the strength of all four candidates that they were able to motivate so many students to support them.  Daniel’s total, however, was particularly impressive.  Jason Gray and Andy Hogan each won with around 600 votes, but Daniel was able to get over 900.  That has to be some kind of Union record, and you don’t get that kind of campus-wide respect simply because people think you’re nice.

You get it because you took on the most difficult and important job in the Union, the position of Treasurer, and you successfully managed the finances for the entire campus.  You get it because you helped to start Live Campus 2009, a nationwide series of concerts with the proceeds going to eliminating poverty.  You get it because you somehow managed to find the time to serve as a Roosevelt Fellow as well, going through a difficult application process to serve as a peer academic adviser.  Daniel has proven himself a leader in many different areas of the campus community, and his stunning electoral victory is a testament to his diverse, impressive resume.

While I voted and worked for Sahar Massachi in the election, I always had a strong respect for Daniel, and I look forward to working with him to accomplish our shared goals for the campus.  The student body provided him with a strong mandate to work for his agenda, and I’m sure he’s eager to jump into action.  Congratulations again to Daniel on his swearing in, and good luck on guiding the Union to a successful year.

When I took a look at the elections results from the past week, I was struck by some of the write-ins.  Students, Brandeis professors, religious figures and totalitarian dictators were tabulated along with the declared candidates for each race. I am the first to admit that some of the ballots cast are amusing; the idea that Hitler, Big Bird, and former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka all tied for Associate Justice of the Student Judiciary shows a certain degree of creativity on the part of three individual voters. However, not all of the votes were as innocent or childish. In the same race, while Judah Marans was elected to another term on the University Judiciary, three voters wrote in “Not Judah A. Marans,” “Not Judah ever,” and “Too Much Judah,” respectively.

In addition to the fact that this sort of joke would be hurtful to anyone, this brings about questions of purpose and overall value to the campus’ political dialogue: why take the time to come up with a write-in which you might find funny? First, voter turnout is incredibly low.  With the exception of the Senator for the Class of 2013 election, which yielded a 47.8 percent turnout of freshmen, all of the elections from the most recent cycle ranked in between 21 and 34 percent. This means that roughly one fourth of the students eligible to vote in each election care enough to log onto the union website and take three minutes out of their day.

Because of this, and because the official voting data is not widely released, the portion of the student body who takes the time to notice the outrageous write-ins is even smaller.  Combined with the fact that all votes are anonymous, it seems pointless to make a joke which very few people will read, find amusing, and credit you with a good joke. If nothing else, why not abstain in any election where there is no standout candidate or candidates?  In some cases, the Abstain category can win an election over an unopposed candidate. This makes an actual statement about disapproval of the Brandeis candidates and the overall electoral process without the sarcasm of a fake write-in.

The fee certainly shows a concern for consequences; in fact its purpose is to remedy the negative environmental consequences of our life at Brandeis. Student housing is responsible for a significant amount of carbon emissions, and failure to implement this fee shows a lack of care for those consequences, and places the entire burden of offsetting them and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 (a goal the University has pledged to meet) on the University. It would be irresponsible to ourselves and to our planet not to contribute towards this effort.

The second component of responsibility is accountability, and the fee certainly meets that requirement. The Brandeis Sustainability Board, which would be created by the fund, is a completely separate institution from Students for Environmental Action. In fact, I personally suggested to the creators of the amendment that they include a representative from SEA on the Board, and was told they were not doing it for this very reason. The student component of the Board will consist of the SU Treasurer, the Chair of the Social Justice Committee, and then 2 independently elected student representatives. The election of these two representatives by the entire student body means that they are held accountable to the student body, a fact which distinguishes them from every student run club on campus. On top of that, the fee will also have external accountability: it includes members of the Brandeis faculty and staff, who have the benefit of years of experience and a different viewpoint, as well as independence from the student body, all of which will ensure that the funds are used in a responsible manner.

While the article fails to prove any sort of irresponsibility on the part of the Sustainability Fee, it does show a great deal of journalistic irresponsibility on the part of both Schneider and The Hoot’s editors. Schneider shows a lack of social responsibility to his readers in his failure to check the facts. A brief list of the facts that Schneider got wrong, and that anyone reading either the publicly available documents or the writings in support of the fee on SEA’s website, facebook group, or in response to The Justice’s editorial last week could see are blatantly untrue:

1) The fund supports the club, Students for Environmental Action. This is false, SEA can’t touch the money, does not have a representative on the board, the board is accountable to the entire student body, anyone can submit a project, and it is specifically designed to accomplish projects that SEA is unable to handle.

2) The fee came about as a result of SEA losing the vote to be secured. A simple phone call or email to any member of SEA would reveal that the club has been working on this amendment, meeting with senators and administrators, and drafting documents since the beginning of the Fall semester. This statement approaches libel.

3) That the fee is a circumvention of F-Board funding. “Student activities” are limited to just that – student activities. While the sustainability fund would fund student proposed projects, many of these projects would be infrastructure changes which do not constitute “student activities,” such as electric vehicles for facilities workers, drought resistant landscaping, or LED lampposts. Others could potentially include changes to class curriculum, such as green chemistry programs in labs.

Schneider makes other arguments which are also very flawed, although they do not necessarily fall under the category of factually incorrect. He claims that other options for funding exist, and gives the example of solar panels. While in this instance the market worked in favor of the environmentally sustainable option, economics 101 teaches us that there are plenty of externalities which the market fails to correct. There isn’t a company for each of the proposed projects mentioned above that would enable us to implement them without increasing costs, and we have a responsibility to offset our carbon footprint. Second, he claims that every club would choose to fund themselves in this manner. First, this would require each of the clubs to put forth the enormous effort that SEA has put into the Sustainability Fee all year, which few would be willing to do. Second, it would require them to gain support of the Senate and 2/3 of the campus, which very few proposals would be able to do. Third, there are numerous factors which distinguish this fee from funding that goes towards clubs such as the nature of the projects, the existence at other universities, and the involvement of faculty, all of which is discussed extensively above.

Although it pains me to think of the damage caused by Schneider alone, the majority of the fault lies with the Hoot’s editors. Clearly a conscious decision was made not to fact check, which is irresponsible on the part of the organization and represents a failure of journalistic integrity. This article is an embarrassment to the organization which chose to publish it without a simple phone call, or if they were unwilling to do that, any examination of the documents that are publicly available. And the real tragedy is that the article was published just days before the vote, without the opportunity for a printed response. This shows a true “lack of care for consequences.” Undoubtedly, this article will sway the decision of numerous voters before Monday, and my response, if ever published, won’t be able to be read until next Friday, days after the vote is complete. If the vote fails this Monday, the Hoot bears a portion of the responsibility for the harm they have caused to our environment, and the damage they have done to the reputation of our University. That, and not the fee, is the true irresponsibility.

Dear candidates,
The full results are attached to this e-mail.
The winners are:

President: Daniel Acheampong
Vice President: Shirel Guez
Treasurer: Akash Vadalia
Secretary: Herbie Rosen
UCC: unfilled
Board of Trustees: Supreetha Gubbala
Alumni Association: Savannah Pearlman
F-Board: Sidak Pannu, Jessica Preis, Makensley Lordeus, and ONE EMPTY
Racial Minority F-Board Member: Empty

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

The constitution specifies that if abstain wins an election, the spot remains vacant until the next election. The empty spots will be filled at the next election (round 2) next Thursday. If anyone is interested in these positions, sign up outside of the union office, starting tomorrow, and make sure to attend the mandatory meeting Sunday, at nine pm.

Thank You,
Diana Aronin
Not the secretary, anymore. Who else is excited about this?

Update: Just to clarify, the interjection at the end is Diana’s own words, not mine. I think she’s a perfectly fine Union secretary.

However, I’ve known that I’m supporting Sahar Massachi for the position since the very beginning of the election.  The reason why is simple: Sahar is one of the most transformative people I’ve ever had the privilege to know.  It’s the same reason why I’ve written for him for three years on Innermost Parts, the same reason why I’ve worked with him on a number of successful campus projects, and the same reason why he’s been one of my best friends since I entered Brandeis University.  Time and time again, I’ve seen how Sahar can create positive change for the good of the campus community through his tireless work ethic and strong leadership.  He’s thoroughly changed the way I think about college activism, and I know he can change the way we think of the Student Union.

Sahar’s extensive resume tells a story of a student active in all walks of campus life, and his accomplishments are very impressive.  However, what’s even more impressive to me is that without him, no project he’s ever worked on could have even gotten off the ground.  He doesn’t just fill established roles effectively, he fights with everything he’s got to create new roles for improving student life.  When nobody was talking about the MSA lounge vandalization, Sahar did something about it.  When students felt powerless in the face of massive budget cuts, Sahar organized a unified and effective student response.  Without Sahar, Brandeis as a whole would be a little different and a little worse off, and I’d be hard pressed to name anyone else I could honestly say that about.

Regardless of who wins today’s election, two things are certain.  First, the Student Union will have a qualified leader set to take the reigns.  Second, Sahar will be working to improve student life and the activist cause at Brandeis.  It’s part of who he is, and win or lose, he’ll still be doing what he thinks is right.  But we have a chance to put our most powerful position in the hands of a transformative leader, and I firmly believe that we should take this rare opportunity.  That is why I’m asking you to join me in voting for Sahar Massachi for President of the Student Union.

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself lately, ever since Sahar first announced a run for President.  I remember when I first met Sahar on that fateful day in Upper Usdan when a mutual friend introduced us over lunch. My first impression of him was that he was idealistic; as soon as I sat down, he started talking about the activist blog Innermost Parts, which he co-created his freshman year. As is his wont, Sahar discussed his ideas about encouraging social justice, connecting and empowering students, and bridging the gap between the student body and the administration. He believed in students’ rights to an accessible student government, and even more importantly, their ability to bring about this change.
Although I was not immediately wrapped up in Sahar’s activist messages and feared that he overestimated students’ yearning to get involved, I was impressed by Sahar’s dedication and ability to inspire. His self-confident ranting and even his radical ideas convinced me to sign up to write for Innermost Parts, and my fate was sealed. I would soon become an activist, drawn in by the belief in my ability to change the world, or at least Brandeis. Sure, Sahar is the only candidate who approached me for support on his campaign, but in this aspect he succeeds as well. Sahar makes an effort to reach out to, make connections with, motivate, and help anyone who needs it. He doesn’t want to force his convictions on people, but believes that everyone is as interested in making a change as he is, so looks to lend a helping hand whenever possible.

Besides his charisma and charm, he cares, which is the most important quality in a president. He has dreams, but he also takes action. He’s not simply the idealist I first saw in him–that is just one aspect of his character, one he balances with his need to take action and make something of his life. He has tangible, solid ideas. Sahar wants to simplify the student government to make it more accessible, giving students more power by allowing them to vote on where leftover money goes at the end of the school year, writing a blog of his schedule so that people can see what he is doing. He has ideas and he is willing to take action to implement them. QED, I believe in Sahar. So if you do too, go ahead and vote.

I’ve made a decision this election to become informed. I want to vote for the candidate whose platform aligns with what I care about and whose vision is complementary to what I want for our university. So, I’ve read all the platforms and flyers and Facebook groups and made my decision. I’m voting for Sahar Massachi for Student Union President.

Reading through all of the other platforms, there was very little diversity–a lot of promises of greater transparency, reduction of overcrowding, increases in communication between the administration and students, and more of a focus on improving student life. Obviously these are things we all want for Brandeis, but if all the candidates promise these things, how will I choose between them? As I said before, I wanted to make my decision based on my connection to a candidates platform. Choosing between the other candidates seemed to mean choosing for the wrong reasons, and in that case I would rather just not vote at all.

Luckily, Sahar Massachi is running for President. He’s a different kind of candidate, and he has a different kind of platform. Sahar’s platform encompasses the things that all the other candidates are promising, as well as incentives that reflect a recognition of important student-run initiatives on campus. His motives are comprehensive; he’s going to pursue the goals of the Brandeis macrocosm, but he also wants to realize the vision of Brandeis imagined by all the little microcosms that make our school so diverse and exciting. He wants to bring more arts culture, improve ‘DeisBikes, empower those furthering our social justice mission, and reform Dining Services. Sahar wants to pursue the dreams the student body has for Brandeis–not only the popular ones, but the personal ones too. He’s going to effect change in an extremely positive, monumental way.

I know Sahar will be this type of president because he is already this type of person. I’ve gotten to know him both through my work on Innermost Parts and on his campaign, and overwhelmingly what I see is his passion for pursuing and realizing the goals of anyone willing to accept his help and support. To illustrate this I’m going to explain how Sahar and I met:

It was only my first week on campus, and I was feeling really lost. He introduced himself to me and handed me his business card, and when he walked away I figured we’d probably never talk again. Instead, he contacted me shortly after and started introducing me to people he knew with interests similar to mine. He made it his business to get me as involved as possible with the pieces of Brandeis that I admired and wanted to be a part of. I was just a brand-new first year and Sahar had no reason to help me, but he did anyway.

That’s the kind of president I know Sahar is going to be.

So I’m voting for Sahar and I encourage anyone to vote for him who wants to see real change at Brandeis. If you know the incredible potential that our university holds, then you need to know that he does too and that a vote for Sahar is a vote for this vision.

Why do you support Sahar? Tell us here or on facebook.