Star Scene

By Tarek Tutunji

The American University of Beirut, AUB, elections just ended with what looks to be a resounding victory for 14th of March, and a good turnout for the independents.

But enough about the formalities. During the preceding days, students have been getting phone-calls from random strangers who are not me! Creepy, I know but wait it gets better. Turns out the parties have lists of AUB students and they somehow obtained their home phone numbers and called them up.

My friend Paul, for example, got a call from one of the parties; his obvious Christian name apparently made him a great candidate to call up. An attractive female voice asked him endearingly: “We are representatives of party (name of party removed) and we would like to invite you to vote for our candidates on your year in exchange for some (name of the job removed) satisfactory jobs”.

Ok, so maybe I added a little something to that conversation but you get the basic gist. Hundreds of phone calls have been made in the days preceding the elections and not all of them were friendly. Some candidates received threats to withdraw or else. Others were offered enticements and even some parents were contacted to sway their kids.

The world of student elections is a dark and sometimes dangerous one. For some reason, the political parties of Lebanon think that by winning a majority of seats in a student representative body, which has the powers of a lame monkey in a jello pond, can claim that they are the true representatives of Lebanon’s ridiculously spoiled rich youth.

To this end, they employ extreme means and spend close to $20,000 on student elections to get the chance to make a headline in a newspaper and destroy any vestige of legitimacy that the student representative bodies have.

If student elections are ever to become about student demands, the university administration needs to find a way to enforce rules that force candidates to run based on platforms, help students hold their representatives accountable, and to limit funding to all candidates. The lead taken by University of Saint Joseph this year is an impressive reform and though it may not be the exact formula to follow, it is a good sign to see that university administrations have realized that some reform is needed.

Till that happens, the independents will have to scrape by with their poorly funded largely disproportionate struggle and the student representative councils will remain an illusion used by universities for meeting accreditation standards.

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