MIT Senior Will Advocate Student Representation

While his classmates spend their time crunching probability equations, MIT senior Erik Snowberg is playing with some odds of his own.

With one more semester left to finish at MIT, he's decided to run for Cambridge City Council.

"The whole point of this campaign is to get students to vote," Snowberg said. "Basically I have ten volunteers here, and we're going to go door to door."

Snowberg said he is running for the council to give a voice to his peers in a city made up of one-quarter students.

"I basically started out at the beginning of last year trying to get students to vote," he said. "Myself and another student did some research and found out that the only way to get students to vote was to give them something to vote for."

At that time, Snowberg said that he had no intention of running for the spot himself. But when no one stepped forward, Snowberg decided to give it a try.

Still, City Councillor Sheila T. Russell said that though students have run in the past, they do not have the same impact on the campaign as do incumbents or other more politically active candidates.

"This has happened before. One student ran for mayor many years ago," she said. "He got maybe three hundred votes."

Russell said that though students may have good intentions, they do not have the breadth of knowledge about Cambridge issues that other citizens might.

"[Cantabrigians] are familiar with the issues and the environment. I don't think that someone who is living in Cambridge temporarily should try to make a huge impact on the city," Russell said.

"I wonder why he's doing it," she added.

But Snowberg said he thinks that knowledge of traditional Cambridge issues is not necessarily important for election, though he said that he is familiar with matters such as rent control.

"You don't need to know those things to be on the council," Snowberg said.

Snowberg said his campaign will focus on keeping the MBTA open later, improving bike safety, and increasing communication between residents and students.

Even with his own agenda, some councillors said they doubt Snowberg's campaign will transform city government.

"He would probably bring up different issues [than what we deal with now]," Russell said. "But he would not have a huge impact."

Other councillors said the city's voting history works against Snowberg.

Students have never been voters in Cambridge, they said, even when other students have run, because they are not interested in improving a town they will live in only for a few years.

"Not a lot of students will go out and vote for the municipal elections," said city councillor Michael Sullivan. "For the 2000 presidential election, though, we'll likely have a very high turnout."

But Snowberg has a different vision of how the election will transpire. He said he expects to follow in the footsteps of other candidates who were initially unknown.

"If you look at for instance other third party candidacies, like Jesse Ventura or Ross Perot, the people that came out for that were new voters," Snowberg said.

Snowberg said that he has not decided whether or not he will pursue a lifelong career in politics.

He said it was unlikely that he would want to remain on the council as a student representative for many years, and that if elected, he hopes that another student would take over when he decides to leave the council.

"I imagine myself in two years perhaps choosing to run [for reelection]. But I don't think I want to represent students when I'm 27 years old. I wouldn't do a good job," Snowberg said. "My interests then may be different from students."

Although students are the focus of Snowberg's campaign, the candidate said he hopes to get support from other parts of the community as well.

"I would say that I have been working with various progressive community organizations," he said. "I'm hoping to [campaign] in other areas that are traditionally disenfranchised."

Whatever the outcome, Snowberg is glad that his opinions about issues will be heard and hopes that the voters will give them consideration.

"I'm in this because I believe in democracy," Snowberg said. "I think its not working right and I want to change that."