Activist Party Polarizes Columbia Student Voters

A newly formed undergraduate political party at Columbia advocating radical changes in the student government there created a surge in voter turnout for the college's early April elections and has provoked campuswide controversy.

In a campaign marked by accusations of unfair political tactics and even manipulation of the campus newspaper, the newly-founded Students for a Democratic Campus (SDC) fielded 10 candidates and won five of 11 contested seats in the 15-member Columbia Student Council.

The SDC candidates ran on a fixed party platform that backed issues such as organizing student workers, involving the student body in faculty tenure decisions, and pressuring Columbia to divest from corporations doing business with South Africa.

But SDC's desire to promote activism through the student government has divided the Columbia student body, a former representative to the council said yesterday.

"By being political they are going to alienate a lot of people they seek to represent." Othan Prounis, outgoing chairman of the Student Council, said yesterday. He added that he thought "a lot of issues [the SDC] ran on were very naive."

The group attacked the old student government for failing to take any action beyond at locating funds.

"We stressed that student government and the university are not accountable to students." Todd Bressi, SDC founder and the former managing editor of the campus paper the Columbia Daily Spectator, said yesterday Bressi added he hoped to use the experience he gained on the Spectator to form a group that would know how to affect University decisions.

But Bressi's newspaper connection drew attacks from James D. Weinstein, the undergraduate representative to the powerful University Senate, a consultive body of students, faculty, and administrators. In an editorial Weinstein accused Bressi of being a martinet who was trying to control the Student Council with the facit assistance of the Spectator.

Bressi, whose term at the college daily ended in February, refuted Weinstein's charge and said yesterday that the "Spectator was afraid of that link with me and bent over backwards" to ensure that coverage was unbiased Bressi added that he thought they bent too far."

Steven Waldman, editor in chief of the Spectator said yesterday that the issue had been blown out of proportion. He added that while the Spectator had run an editorial that "came just short of endorsing the SDC" the Spectator's campaign coverage had neither helped not hurt anyone.

The SDC also found itself under attack during the election for the scale of its organization which included telephone banks and continual leafletting, Bressi said.

"We were attacked for our tactics," he said, adding that the SDC had had an advantage over individual candidates because it had chartered itself as an official student organization and therefore enjoyed certain campus mailing privileges.

Interest in the SDC has spread to Barnard College, where the organization last week fielded a candidate for Barnard representative to the Columbia University Senate. Although the candidate lost, observers said that the SDC had raised voter turnout.

At least "one hundred more people voted because of them," Mary Bergan, vice president of Barnard's student government, said yesterday. Bergan said 657 of the 2500 students at the college voted in the election.