Student Up for City Council

Knocking on registered Cambridge voters’ doors while dressed neatly in a gray button-down shirt and black slacks, 31-year-old Leland Cheung looks every bit the earnest young politician.

But the Cambridge City Council aspirant is also a graduate student dual-enrolled at the Harvard Kennedy School and the MIT Sloan School of Management. And aside from the daily tasks of running his campaign—flyering, fundraising, and canvassing—he also has to attend classes.

On this particular day, he has squeezed an afternoon lecture at HKS in between meeting with his staff and calling potential donors. He began going door-to-door in the late afternoon and has now been at it for more than two hours.

A few blocks away from the MIT campus, Cheung rings the doorbell of local mother and Harvard lab technician Sara Amaral. As Amaral’s young son darts between her legs, she explains her biggest concern about local governance: the lack of decent parks and other resources for children. Cheung listens intently and occasionally adds thoughts of his own.

When their conversation ends, Amaral says she is impressed by Cheung’s attitude.

“If you’re doing it for the kids, you’ll get my vote,” she says.

And if Cheung does secure enough votes in November, he will be the youngest member of the Council, the first Asian-American elected, and the only student within the body in recent years.

He says his student identity is what motivates him to run, and he intends to mobilize student support to aid him on what may well be an uphill battle for a seat.

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

The child of immigrants, Cheung spent much of his childhood moving from state to state, never staying in any one place long enough to develop roots.

He says he initially hoped to leave his mark through scientific innovation, earning a B.S. in physics and a masters in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Stanford in 2000 and 2001, respectively. He was one of the first employees of Space Adventures, a Virginia-based firm that is the world’s only space tourism company to have actually sent private citizens into space.

But during this time, he met a woman in his community whose grandson had recently been killed by a driver speeding through a red light—and beyond her loss, she was despairing of the fact that the local legislature had voted down a proposal to install red-light cameras.

“That made me realize that who you elect on a local level really matters,” Cheung says.

In 2005, Cheung moved to Cambridge to work for a venture capital firm and became involved with a number of local philanthropic organizations, immersing himself in Cambridge life.

This summer, Cheung decided to run for City Council after reading about the incumbents and deciding that the students of Cambridge—who comprise one fourth of the total population—did not have a voice in local government.

“Individually, [the incumbents] are nice, intelligent people trying to do good, but they don’t represent you or me,” Cheung said. “They’re all over forty. None of them really relate to what students are going through.”

One of Cheung’s primary campaign issues is highlighting how all Cantabrigians could benefit from a liaison between the universities and the local residents—a role that Cheung says he is uniquely suited to fill.

He often cites a recent study, published on news Web site the Daily Beast, which ranked MIT and Harvard the fifth and 20th worst schools in the country, respectively, in terms of crime against students—a statistic that Cheung calls “shameful.”

“The mindset of the city toward the students shouldn’t be ‘They’re only here for four years,’ but rather ‘We only have four years to convince them to stay,’” he said.

CHEUNG’s CHALLENGES

Cheung says he is well aware that he is facing an uphill battle in his campaign. All nine incumbents and twelve outside challengers are running for a seat.

Cambridge uses a complex ranking system in its City Council election in which voters can list multiple preferences, and relative candidate rankings are taken into account in determining the nine members of the body.

“You only get one vote in a Cambridge election, and it needs to be the number one vote. That’s very hard to get,” says Glenn S. Koocher ’71, a 12-year veteran of the Cambridge School Committee.

Based on past voter turnout, Cheung estimates that he will need to receive about 1,500 first-place votes to claim a seat—amounting to only about 5 percent of the 30,000 combined MIT and Harvard students.

Cheung says he knows that the student vote can be notoriously difficult to mobilize, especially when most students would have to re-register as Cambridge voters.

“Issues like the public school system or Section 8 housing or community policing are very hot topics in the City Council race but don’t have that much relevance to the typical 19-year-old who is living in Adams and has a different set of interests,” says Matt S. DeBergalis, a 2000 MIT graduate who narrowly lost a Council seat in 2003.

In addition, Cheung says many city natives are loyal to the sitting Councilors.

But Koocher said these factors did not necessarily preclude the possibility of election.

“Anyone connected with the Universities’ student population, who ran a skillful campaign using the technological tools that we have now, could mobilize enough people to generate a sufficient turnout to get elected,” he says.

The campaign has been challenging on a personal level as well, Cheung says. He proposed to Yin Zhou, his girlfriend of three years, in August, but he will be busy with campaigning for much of the first three months of their engagement.

Zhou acknowledges the difficulty but says Cheung would “never be happy only doing one job.”

“He always wants to look outward to see how he can help other people,” she says.

A HAVEN FOR STUDENT REPRESENTATIVES

A number of Harvard undergraduates have begun encouraging fellow students to re-register as Cambridge voters by the October 14 deadline.

But Matthew Young ’12 says he has been disappointed so far by the response from the Harvard community.

“Harvard students don’t really seem to care about sending one of their own to Cambridge City Council,” says Young, who said he finds students to be very interested in direct public service—like volunteerism and philanthropy—but less inclined to engage in local politics.

Unlike Cambridge, which elects representatives to its nine City Council seats by citywide vote, New Haven votes for its thirty aldermen by district. As a result, Yale, which occupies a large portion of the city’s first ward, has historically been successful in putting an Eli on the board.

Two former Yale students who served as New Haven aldermen have donated to the Cheung campaign. One of them, Ben Healy, said that he was excited by Cheung’s campaign because he had seen firsthand the importance of bringing a student voice into city politics.

“If university students care about questions of public safety, if they care about development around the campus, if they care about the schools around them, having someone who could speak for that and who is accessible to a student population is just very powerful,” Healy says. “The best of the Yale aldermen have learned how to push the city and the university at the same time...I think that’s what Leland represents. That’s what his campaign is trying to emphasize.”

—Staff writer Evan T.R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.