How students can take over City Hall

by Michael Crowley

In the 1968 cult classic film Wild in the Streets, a free-loving, drug-addled teenage rock star named Max Frost leads America's kids in a flower-power revolution that lowers the voting age to 14 and installs him as president of the United States.

Swinging with a freaked-out gang of chicks, acid-heads, and cats like his guitarist Abraham "the Hook" Saltine (plus a cast that includes Shelley Winters, Hal Holbrook, and Richard Pryor), Frost soars up the charts and in the polls, taking power after an unwittingly dosed Congress amends the Constitution to his followers' will.

The result is the grooviest administration in US history: the military, the FBI, and the CIA are disbanded, the hungry are fed, and the entire over-35 population is shipped off to "rehabilitation camps" to have their minds blown with LSD.

Wild indeed. But imagine something like that happening here in Boston, where a mayoral election will be held in November.

Imagine the city's 85,000 college and graduate students rallying around a charismatic leader -- a rock hero, perhaps -- with a social conscience and a knack for tapping student frustrations on such basic quality-of-life issues as housing.

Imagine a mayor who, having slept past noon, stumbles to his own inauguration an hour late and with a wicked hangover, his life as front man in a popular ska band clearly taking its toll.

Mounting the stage outside City Hall as Groovasaurus belts out fat riffs, Hizzoner -- a scraggly-haired 21-year-old Boston College junior -- sketches out a policy agenda that includes scaled-back enforcement of marijuana laws, later hours for bars and the T, and a new City Hall agency to oversee student housing. A beer-drinking crowd of thousands, dotted with baseball caps and hair scrunchies, cheers in approval before grabbing their books and hopping on the train: time for class.

It could happen.

Students could take over Boston. In a city where nobody cares and nobody votes anymore, Tom Menino was elected mayor in 1993 with just 74,448 votes -- or about 16 percent of the city's voting-age population. The number of students living here, according to the city's most recent estimate: 84,831. And that's not counting Boston's tens of thousands of twentysomething postgrads, who share common interests with the campus crowd. This group holds the power to radically alter the character of the city, from its nightlife to pivotal long-term projects like waterfront development and the coming face-lift at City Hall Plaza.

The mechanisms are in place: the vast majority of students are eligible to vote here (although several thousand foreign students, needless to say, are not). And the age minimum for the mayor's job is . . . 18!

Over the past several years voter turnout has spiraled downward, and the city's government is now controlled by a small and influential minority based mostly in a few politically wired neighborhoods. As a result, the nonparticipants -- not just students, mind you, but most of the city's young professionals and minority voters -- reap what they sow: from parking laws to economic development, they are largely ignored by city government.

"It's certainly tragic in the sense that students are living here, there are decisions being made that affect their basic quality of life, and they're not involved," says City Councilor Tom Keane, who represents student-filled areas like the Fenway and parts of Back Bay.

"I've learned just how much, as a politician, you need to pay attention to the people who vote," Keane says. "And if people don't vote, then the reality is that politicians don't pay attention to them."

Still, it wouldn't take a wild, hemp-fueled insurrection to shake up city government. Just a few thousand more votes from students, from young postgrads, from minorities, could seriously shake up an entrenched city leadership driven by patronage, rivalries, and nepotism.

Not that the notion of a City Hall where the stationery is paisley-patterned and the mayor's office is cluttered with lava lamps, Bosstones posters, and kicked kegs isn't a little intriguing, or -- depending on whom you ask -- terrifying.

"It's not a good thing" that students don't vote, says Suffolk criminal-courts clerk John Nucci, a former Boston city councilor. "But on the other hand, think what could happen if Steven Tyler got elected mayor."

On to part 2

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.