mmU v W--- oww-- Leaders from page I ts. Often times it doesn't seem that you're listening a whole lot." That was a year and a half ago. When Talmers recalls the incident now, she still shakes her head. What was the Regents' reaction to her speech? "Nothing. They just sat there. I meanj that was the whole point of my! statement: 'We say all these things and you just sit there.' " Talmers was vice president of thej LSA Student Government back then. She stayed for another year fighting the same battles as president before retiring to return to the life of a normal student, replacing meetings with ad- ministrators with midterms and trips to the movies. After almost three years in student government-of pressing to get studen- ts onto administration committees, of! pushing mostly apathetic students to take an interest in their own univer- sity-she is battle-weary and more than a little disillusioned. "I'm very cynical about the ad- ministration," she said earlier this week.-"And I'm very upset about the way they deal with students because I don't think they're very straight with us." Dealing with the "average student" wasn't a whole lot easier for Talmers. "Students are so concerned about what they're going to be doing (after graduation) that they're afraid to make moves unless they feel it's really, really important, that it's really going to make a direct impact on their lives.! And it takes a great deal of work to motivate people like that," she said. "I was really frustrated with what you had to do to motivate students, the ways you had to pressure them to get them to do anything." In many ways, Talmers is typical of the men and women who throw them- selves into student government, who put in 40 or 50-hour work weeks, who practically live in the tiny offices in the Michigan Union. After a couple or more years of struggling to hang on to a slight foothold in University decision- making-and often of watching their grades and social likfe crumble while doing it-many student leaders say they're not quite sure what they ac- complished. Being the leader of student gover- nment has its perqs-perqs which are often responsible for drawing students into student government in the first place. They get their name in the paper, their- professors notice them in class, they regularly get to chat with the ad- ministrators who decide the future of the University, and they get offices and sometimes even a secretary. It's oc- casionally glamourous. It looks great on a resume. And they can make the connections that later can get them into a good law school or even into politics. Leaders from the past few years have a good placement'record. Some are in law schools at Duke. Harvard, or Yale. One is a congressional aide, and one just finished managing a state senate cam- paign in Massachusetts (although an unsuccessful one). But despite the benefits, the job can also become tremendously frustrating for those who actually want to get something done. In trying to earn students a voice in the University decisions that shape their educations, student government officers say they run up against the resistance of ad- ministrators and faculty members on one front and against the apathy of fellow students on the other. .. ... ....... ........................ ... ...... ................ .. .. . . . .. ... .. .......................... ................................. .. . ......................... .......... .......................... ..... ...... . . . . ...... .. Marc Breakstone: Fighting the administration, 1980 Progress is slow. On some key issues, like getting students a seat on certain administration committees, it may take the work of five or six government administrators before there are any tangible results. That means a large number of students can enter student government as freshmen or sophomores, put in two or three years work at winning that seat and graduate before ever seeing the first student ap- pointed. "At a university it takes a long time to get something done," said Matthew Neumeier, who worked closely with student government here two years ago. "Like this Alumni Center they built-it took them 15 years to decide to get around to doing it and completing it, which is about typical University pace. And of course the student wants to do it today. He doesn't want to wait 15 years down the road." Often frustrating to student represen- tatives is the reluctance of ad- ministrators to offer a genuine role for students in important campus decision- making. Although student leaders almost always have access to top ad- former MSA President Eric Arnson. "But I think the other part of the question is were they receptive to change? Probably not very much. And the reason is these administrators have been around and they've seen five, six, or ten years of student governments come and go."j Neumeir, who is now at Harvard Law School, agrees : "For one thing, ad- ministrators are career people. They can outlast you. All they have to do is wait four years and you're gone. For some of the changes that we advocated, they knew that if they could keep us on the side long enough, they wouldn't have to worry about things." And that turnover of students is one of the biggest handicaps to student leaders who want to influence Univer- sity policy. "It takes almost your whole first semester to get a feel for it all," said LSA senior Mark Waters, who served one year on LSA Student Government before deciding not to seek reelection. "So after your first term you see you don't have any power, so you figure 'Why come back the second term?''' i the hedging of fellow representatives,, they are sometimes tempted to pull out their hair over the casual apathy of many students at large. "I remember spending several nights sitting up putting together posters (to organize students) and running around to get them run off," said Lindsay, who is now in graduate school at Yale University in Connecticut. "I remem- ber getting up every morning at seven o'clock to poster the campus and then going to the meeting the night it was supposed to be held and having four people show up - the same four people who would show up at every meeting." For anyone who has reason to doubt it, student indifference to their school governments is documented in the miserable turnouts at campus elections every year. About 10 percent of the students at the University will vote in a typical, larger election, like those of MSA or LSA Student Government. And that's a big turnout. The smaller school governments are the ones with the real problems. In the University's graduate school, for example, only about 1 percent of the Rackham student body actually votes in Rackham Student Government elec- tions. And because there are usually not enough candidates running to fill all the open seats, RSG members commonly are elected with only one write-in vote. In 1979, Emma Goldman, the long-dead American anarchist, was elected with four write-in votes, which is a virtual mandate in RSG politics. In the larger campus governments, low student interest presents very real problems. Said Waters of LSA Student Gover- nment: "I think it tended to handicap us somewhat because we would go in there (to talk to administrators) and we would know that only about 10 percent, if that, of the students voted in our last election. So what do we do? Do we go in and say we want this or that and say we speak for all the students when we know we don't really speak for them? That makes it kind of tough." Others, however, aren't so sure it makes that much difference. "Even if you have student support, I'm not sure that's really effective," said Dick Braz- ee, a president of LSA Student Gover- nment in the late 1970s. "In general, administrators aren't particularly swayed by that. After the '60s, most of them became experts at handling Coded- for jazz Ronald Shannon Jackson University Club 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Saturday, January 22 By Jerry Brabenec ALONG WITH such groups as the Air Trio and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society performs at the leading edge of today's innovative jazz, while hearkening back and incor- porating the rich diversity of jazz history. Nobody else, however, has succeeded in bringing modern jazz to dancing, celebrating life the way Jackson has. Describing this music is difficult. As Jackson observes, "I guess it would be easier to map out what styles are not present in what we do - you'll hear everything from Hungarian and classical (Eastern and Wester ) and polkas to rhythm & blues, jazz, rock, funk, and hillbilly. At the bottom of it all is a strong beat." Jackson's background uniquely suits him for this dynamic melding of in- fluences. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas, birthplace of '50s saxophonist King Curtis and jazz innovator Ornette Coleman. Jackson's father maintained and stocked the area's jukeboxes for a living, and his mother was a church pianist. Later, in college at Lincoln Univer- sity in Missouri, he played in the school band with trumpeter Lester Bowie (of the Art Ensemble of Chicago), Julius Hemphill (of the World Saxophone Quartet), and roomed with John Hicks (most recently pianist with Betty Car- ter). Jackson apprenticed in the late '60s with Stanley Turrentine, Joe Hender- son, and Charles Mingus, among many others. After an interval that we might interpret as going for the money, playing bar mitzvahs, weddings, and burlesques, Jackson became a Bud- dhist and enlisted with Ornette Coleman's harmolodic Funksters. Coleman deserves a paragraph in almost anybody's biography, as the ar- chetype of the iconoclastic, intellectual, confrontational jazz outlaw, scorned by many musicians and mocked by publicity that would reach near unanimity in singing his praises 10 years later. Coleman's main tenet is harmonic and rhythmic freedom; he saw the complex harmonic structures developed by Charlie Parker, and later by John Coltrane, as the starting point for a polymorphous, freely improvised music that would incorporate these concepts but not be limited by them. Ornette won his initial victories over the narrow minded through his quartet with Don Cherry and Charlie Haden; branched out into Third World folk music (as well as orchestral music) in the '60s; and by 1974 decided it was time to make with the happy feet. Jackson was the driving force behind these ner- vous sounding, hyperkinetic ensem- bles, which spawned a whole school of harmolodic funksters, including bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and electric guitarist James Blood Ulmer. Jackson's approach to this style tends to stay closer to a traditional funk base than Ornette's, although things can get pretty bewildering at times. Electric guitar and dual electric basses dart in and out of the riffing framework of a tune, tossing in improvised comments that often merge into a dense mass of omnidirectional funking. The trumpet and sax blow fanfares, big band shout choruses, and marches over the top of everything, and the overall effect is rather like standing in the middle of a seven-ring musical circus. Jackson has apparently kept together the same unit that played Ann Arbor last spring. This would be Melvin Gibbs and Reverend Bruce Johnson on bass, Vernon Reid on guitar, Zane Massey on sax, Henry Scott on trumpet, and Jackson on percussion. The style of the band gives everybody a lot of room to shine, and they do, but I would have to single out Scott's trumpet from their previous performance. Scott has all the imagination of Miles or Lester Bowie, and the kind of chops one would associate with the lead trumpet in a 20-piece big band: this guy really blows. An interesting sidelight on the Decoding Society's appearance in Ann Arbor is that the whole thing is being made possible by a on the part of the N for the Arts, the Wi ter House, the Mi Eclipse. Jackson's current business teeth at shows back in the lz former coordinator been instrumental i New Dreams to toi example of a pr enrichment that wa founding of Eclil organization devote of jazz and the deve people in the relate production and pron It just shows tha comes back to you; a lot of good Saturd down to see the Dec( There will alsc tur/demonstration non-performers alik at the Trotter House ill 'There's a point when you say 'Why is this worth it? I'm just ruining my life. I don't have a job and I'm not doing anything that begins to resemble academic excellence.' And you start to wonder why.' -Amy Moore MSA President ministrators, students say they still feel they often go unheard. "I gained a much better understan- ding of how concentrated and cen- tralized decision-making is at the University," said Marc Breakstone, who was president of the Michigan Student Assembly two years ago, "and of how the University gives the feeling of participation to students without the reality of participating in decisions. The fact is that decisions are made by a select few, and students are given some input, but they have no decision-making power. That's the key distinction."' "You can have access to ad- ministrators and you can discuss things. And I think for the most part they are receptive to comment," said Those who do decide to come back the second term are often the ones who work their way into leadership positions. And, once they do, they sometimes become exasperated with other student representatives whose commitment is less. "I learned very quickly that things never get done and that people are apt to say they'd love to help you, that they're interested in reforming the tenure process or whatever," recalled Jim Lindsay, a former vice president of LSA Student Government. "But when push comes to shove they all dump you and say 'I have a paper due and I can't' or 'I'm going home this weekend.' " If student government leaders sometimes throw up their hands over Decoding Society: Jazzed up 10 Weietni'tii'' 2," t$93/..... .......$,.... v..... . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . .. _ _ , 3i WeekenjV . _. 4 . Rim