Grad students lead campus activism

MANCHESTER, N.H. — With less than eight hours before polls opened in New Hampshire, Shlomi Sher GS and a dozen Princeton students volunteering for retired Gen. Wesley Clark gathered in the living room of the house where they were spending the night.

They huddled around as Sher announced the game plan for Election Day: Wake up at 4:30 a.m., head to Clark's Portsmouth headquarters by five, work until polls closed that evening.

"I know it's the last day, but we'll push ourselves up on caffeine," he said.

Sher, a 24-year-old psychologygraduate student and founder of Princeton Students for Clark, led more than 20 students to New Hampshire over intersession.

Sher coordinated the trip, spending several hours a day recruiting students and arranging housing and transportation in the weeks before the Jan. 27 primary.

Sher's efforts were rewarded as Clark had the largest contingent of Princeton volunteers of any of the Democratic contenders.

Sher said his activism is not typical among graduate students, whom he found to be more liberal but less likely to volunteer than undergraduates. Some do participate in campaign groups on campus, but only a handful of the nearly 50 students who volunteered in New Hampshire before the primary were grads.

While undergraduates tend to devote considerable time to one or more extracurricular activities, graduate student life is structured almost exclusively around meeting the rigorous academic demands.

Like many of his peers, Students for Dean co-director Juan Melli-Huber GS has found himself much busier with schoolwork now than when he was an undergraduate. Studying for his doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering, Melli-Huber hesitated to get involved in other commitments while at Princeton.

"But when this came around," he said, "I felt like I really had to do something."

Frustrated by the Bush administration and inspired by the former governor's message, he decided in August to found Princeton Students for Dean — only to discover that Joaquin Tamayo GS had signed up on the campaign website a day earlier.

The two became co-directors of the group, arranging monthly "Meetups," coordinating letter-writing campaigns and running a website.

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Asked how much time he devoted to the group, Melli-Huber laughed. "Oh, too much."

He spent up to 15 hours a week on campaign-related activities while preparing for his general examination in January, which graduate students are required to pass in order to become Ph.D. candidates.

Sher agreed that fitting political activism in with doctoral work was a "small challenge," but said the cause was well worth it.

For him, the drive to elect Clark started last June when his brother Itai, a graduate student at Northwestern, called to say he had just seen the next president of the United States on TV.

At Itai's urging, Sher watched an interview with Clark on "Meet the Press" – which was "like an epiphany," he said.

Sher had been "obsessed" with defeating Bush ever since the 2000 election and especially since the beginning of the war in Iraq. A strong believer that Democrats must nominate a strategic candidate if they hope to win, Sher said, "It was clear immediately that there's no better strategy for beating Bush than nominating a charismatic four-star general from the South."

Sher founded Students for Clark at Princeton, while his brother started a chapter at Northwestern and his sister-in-law began one at Harvard.

Over winter break, the trio spent a few days volunteering in Portsmouth, N.H., where they attended a house party with the general on New Year's Eve.

When Clark learned Itai was an economics graduate student, he asked him how to get jobs back to the American people.

But when he found out Sher and his sister-in-law were studying psychology, the general became excited. He led them through a discussion about topics including the mind-body problem, free will and determinism, quantum mechanics, Hume, Plato, Chomsky and EEG studies of the brain.

In the middle of the conversation, when someone tried to pull him away to make a toast, the general said, "I don't want do it right now; I'm busy talking about electroencephalography."

The 15-minute exchange left the three students astonished and exhilarated. "Nothing could have more strongly reaffirmed our impressions of this person we were working to elect," Sher said.

"We could have this extremely knowledgeable president who cares about and values ideas and is capable of thinking about problems in very sophisticated ways," he added. "Compare that to what we have now."

Inspired by the experience, the three students redoubled their efforts to spread the word about the candidate at their respective universities. For Sher, his enthusiasm for Clark has grown to the point where it has nearly become his identity.

"I'm known around here as the guy who, when he meets you, tells you about Wes Clark," Sher said, chuckling. "So the graduate students in the Grad College are pretty knowledgeable about Clark."