Here is a political conundrum to ponder on a holiday:
When school starts tomorrow, what if the new principal of Lin Howe School gave all students an urgent, almost mandatory invitation to report to campus the following night to hear two Obama campaign workers ask them to “volunteer” for an accelerated voter registration campaign?
What if the new principal of La Ballona School did the same thing tomorrow morning?
And let’s say a directive from Supt. Dave LaRose went out today to all schools, firmly urging them to emulate Lin Howe and La Ballona.
Does that bother you? It should.
The story that follows is from The Chronicle of Higher Education:
By Peter Wood
As faculty members at Ohio State two weeks ago double-checked their syllabi, glanced at their rosters, and ran through the usual routines for the start of fall courses, some of them found a surprise in their e-mail in boxes. A senior English professor invited his colleagues to open their classrooms in the weeks ahead to organizers in the Obama campaign. They would first encourage students to register to vote and then, if the instructors were willing, encourage students to volunteer for the Obama campaign.
But don’t take my word for it. Here is the memo, from Brian McHale, with the subject line “How to Turn Students into Voters”:
Colleagues,
I’ve been in touch with a couple of campus organizers for the Obama campaign, who have asked me to pass along to all of you a request for access to your classes in the next few weeks. If you were willing, they would send along a volunteer to make a pitch to your students about registering to vote. This would involve five minutes or less of class time, at the beginning or end of class (whichever you preferred), and the volunteer could make him/herself available after the end of class to sign up students who wanted to register on the spot.
If you were willing, the volunteers could also take a couple of extra minutes to see whether they could interest any of your students in volunteering for the Obama campaign themselves. If you weren’t comfortable with this, however, you’d only need to say so, and the volunteer would limit his/her presentation to voter registration, and leave the recruitment pitch out; it would be your call.
I don’t need to tell you that voter registration is absolutely the key to this election, not least of all in the state of Ohio. (I don’t need to tell you this because it has been made so manifestly plain by those who have been doing their best in several states, including ours, to limit access to the polls in various ways.) I hope you can see your way to helping bump up the voter registration and turnout among this key constituency—our students.
The easiest way to arrange for volunteers to visit your classrooms is to contact Natalie Raps or Matt Caffrey directly: [address removed] and [address removed]. Alternatively, you could contact me, and I’ll put you in touch with them. Either way, please do it!
Democracy: love it or lose it.
Note that those two campaign workers, Natalie Raps and Matt Caffrey, are representatives of the official Obama campaign in Ohio. Their e-mail addresses (deleted here) are for Organizing for America, Ohio Headquarters. Caffrey, according to a pro-Obama Web site, quit his job in March to become a paid “campaign field organizer” for Obama in Columbus.
Raps and Caffrey, in other words, aren’t just some student enthusiasts who happened to find a kindred soul in Professor McHale. They are bona fide representatives of the Obama campaign. Most states discourage faculty members at public institutions from using their classrooms for partisan political purposes, and I doubt Ohio is an exception. College courses at public universities generally should not be used to troll for votes or campaign volunteers. In any case, Ohio State has its own particular rules (see here) that encourage faculty members to “differentiate carefully between official activities as teachers and personal activities as citizens, and to act accordingly.”
But never mind the rules. The whole idea of professors’ subjecting their students to this sort of cajolery has the fragrance of abuse.
