► entertainment
► events
► issues
► music
► art
hilltopics
daily kansan
wednesday ◄
9,30.98 ◄
eight.a ◄
Past presidents differ on job's merits
then ...
Yearbook pictures from past presidents' glory days.
Schnake: 1979 president, practices law in Wichita
Dennis Highberger, 1984 KU student body president, sits on the front porch of his Lawrence home. He works as an attorney for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment in Topeka. Photo by Matt Daugherty/KANSAN
Adkins:1982 president, state legislator
Ashner:1983 president, ex-director of YouthFriends
Easley: 1985 president, works in Johnson County
White;1989 president, acting in Beverly Hills
Continued from page 1A
Political training ground
Of the 26 student body presidents who have served with Ambler, only five have been female.
Petra "Tedde" Tasheff was president in 1977, the year Ambler was hired at the University. Since leaving KU for law school, Tasheff has worked her way into the New York City legal department of one of the nation's biggest financial corporations.
Many of the presidents on Ambler's list are lawyers, and a handful plan on a legal career. Almost all the former presidents work in the legal, corporate or business worlds, and it's a safe bet that all but one or two wear dry clean-only clothes to work every day.
B. Jake White is one of the few who does n't. Until recently, he was waiting tables in Los Angeles while he worked and waited for a break in the movie business.
And not all of the lawyers are commuting from the suburbs to glass buildings in new minivans or sport-utility vehicles. Dennis "Boog" Highberger lives in Lawrence in an old white house that looks like it's rented to a group of college kids. He commutes to Topeka, where he works as an attorney for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
Highberger, who shared the presidency with Carla Vogel in 1984, says he and Ambler were never close, probably because Highberger and Vogel ran on one of the few anti-establishment tickets to win an election during Ambler's tenure. Highberger remembers walking into Ambler's office for the first time.
"He had pictures of David and Lisa on his desk," Highberger says, a wry smile barely parting his salt-and-pepper beard.
barely parting his salt and pepper beard. He knew he didn't have much in common with David and Lisa, which meant he probably wouldn't have much in common with David Ambler.
Ambler has lost touch with Boog and Carla Vogel. David and Lisa, on the other hand, have stayed in touch.
In 1979, his freshman year at KU, Adkins was elected class president. In the spring, he won a Nunemaker seat in Student Senate. As a sophomore, he served as chairman of the Student Executive Committee and was named a Truman Scholar. At the end of that year, he was elected student body president.
His political career stopped so he could finish college, get a law degree and, before being elected to the Legislature for the first time in 1982, take a job in Kansas City with a law firm co-founded by former Kansas Governor Robert Bennett.
That firm merged this year with a larger Kansas City firm, and Adkins now serves as special counsel for the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation.
But the governorship seems to hold a special allure for David Adkins, even if his aspirations have cooled a little since his days as student body president.
"When I was student body president, I planned on being governor," he says. "But as a legislator, I've realized that you only have a limited time to accomplish the things you want to accomplish, and there's a certain freedom that comes with that realization.
"I'll be just fine if I'm never the governor of Kansas."
Don't think he's given up on politics. He still revels in the stories about college elections and the chaos of a campaign's final days.
He calls being student body president at the University the best training program for running for the Legislature, and he cites all kinds of ways the office helped prepare him for politics in the real world.
"Politics is one of those self-revealing enterprises," he says. "You're out there with your name on the ballot, and you've put all your time and energy into it, and you think it's the most important thing in the world. How you deal with winning or losing in that situation is going to tell you a lot about who you are."
Adkins has all the qualities Ambler talks about when he tries to sum up his presidents: devotion to community, intelligence and wit, maturity, the politician's ego. Put that together and you've got the consummate politician and the prototype student body president.
"He said, "This is the last time you'll get a free meal on David Adkins," Amber says, grinning broadly. "From now on, it'll all be $100-a-plate dinners."
Outside the system
It is clear that David Adkins will not leave the political arena any time soon. And he is clearly one of Ambler's favorite presidents. The administrator has stories about Adkins' courtship of Lisa Ashner and about Adkins' toast at their wedding.
Boog Highberger was never upset about seeing David and Lisa's photos in Ambler's office that day. He and Carla weren't expecting to get cozy with any administrators, anyway.
No wonder his picture was on Ambler's desk.
"I'd say student government was the best idea an administrator ever had because it gives students the illusion of
"I'd say student government was the best idea an administrator ever had because it gives students the illusion of power without giving them any actual power."
Dennis Highberger 1984 student body president
power without giving them any actual power," he says, leaning his thin. T-shirt clad torso over his wiry legs to obscure the hole just above the knee in his jeans. "I wouldn't argue that it was very useful for any of the students in the long term."
Highberger's experience in student government did not leave him disillusioned with politics — he never cared much for the system. That's why he and his running mate, Carla Vogel, called their coalition the Costume Party, and it's why they ran as a team and shared the president's office and salary even though she was the one elected president.
Actually, Highberger was the original presidential candidate. The Costume Party formed in Fall 1983 and, with Highberger at the top of the ticket, lost the election that November to greek candidates. In January 1984, however, the election was invalidated because of grossly mismanaged voting procedures.
The administration set a new election for March. Boog and Carla switched positions, and he ran for vice president to show that they considered themselves equals and that they would run student government as partners.
The Costume Party's anarchist partnership was swept into office in an election where only 10 percent of students bothered to vote. That's less than the paltry 15 percent who turn out for most senate elections, which may explain why the Costume Party stands out on the list of student presidents like hippies at a country-club cocktail party.
Highberger admits that he and Vogel didn't succeed in changing the system much. To his mind, their greatest contribution may have been the injection of humor into the system from the top down.
Highberger once went to a finance committee meeting dressed as Jesus Christ—and managed to get everything he asked. He instituted a tradition by which senators who wanted to speak during policy discussions raised their hand and gave the thumbs up or thumbs down sign to indicate whether they would speak for or against legislation on the floor.
"It's hard to construct anything lasting in student government because it changes every year and because you only have power within the parameters set by administration," he says. "That's why students don't care. People pay attention to important things that happen in their life, and students realize that Student Senate isn't going to do anything that really affects them, so they ignore it."
Highberger says he is no longer an anarchist, although he still believes in devolving power from the government to the individual. He has stayed away from politics because he doesn't think the changes he'd like to see can be made within the system.
He isn't the only former student body president who has kept out of politics — in fact, the presidents from the last 20 years are more likely to be in the private world from day to day, occasionally dabbling in public service.
After leaving the University, she went to law school at Northwestern and then to work at a big Kansas City firm, Morrison & Hecker. In 1993, she left took a job in New York City with the Federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Now she's trying cases for Citibank, which recently became one of the world's biggest financial corporations.
As a trial lawyer, Tasheff knows it is her job to place all professional courtesies and procedural niceties aside, walk into a courtroom and stick it to her adversary — something she had a little practice with as president.
Putting experience to work
You might say that Tedde Tashef began her climb up the corporate legal ladder at the University of Kansas, where in 1976-77 she was the first woman student body president since 1946, when the men came back from the war.
Tasheff says she didn't face any difficulties particular to her sex as a candidate or as student body president. She speaks of
"I do think you've got to choose your battles, and that's a concept I associate with my experience in student government," she says. "If it looks like you're always in battle mode, you're easily dismissed because the people you're trying to influence just see you as the person who will argue about everything."
battles and victories on behalf of the student body and of the idyllic world of student politics — free from corruption and constant campaigning. But she does not feel that her gender was much of a factor, even if she was the first woman president in 30 years.
"I remember the first Kansan article after it took office," she says. "It was about the flowers on my desk, trying to emphasize the novelty of having a woman in there. So there were some perception issues, but, in terms of getting things done, it wasn't a factor."
She has not had a job in politics since she was student body president, but it's mostly because she's been too busy practicing law to worry about running for office.
While Tedde Tasheff is focused on litigation and climbing the corporate ladder in New York, B. Jake White is 3,000 miles away, waiting for a rocket ride to fame.
After graduating from the University, Jake White accepted a job with the "Sharper Image" catalog in California. The job wasn't what he expected, and just to keep from getting bored he began taking acting classes at night.
Then, in a Sausalito restaurant in 1994, White met movie star Matt Dillon. They struck up a conversation that ended with Dillon giving White the names of casting contacts for the film "Golden Gate," which Dillon was filming in the area. After two days of incessant phone work, White landed a part as an extra. Once on the set, he worked his way up to a speaking part in the movie.
"And I thought, 'this is the way I want to spend my working days,'" he says from his home in Beverly Hills. "You're creating, and they're paying you to do it."
That small part got White a trip to the Sundance Film Festival and a membership in the Screen Actors Guild. It wasn't easy from there. He spent several years waiting tables, which almost caused him to blow town. But he stayed, and now he's started his own business, a marketing consulting gig that helps pay the bills and gives him the freedom to chase his big-screen dreams.
Running after that fast-moving Hollywood train seems like a long way away from running up the hill from the Sigma Chi house to a tiny office in the Kansas Union.
But just because B. Jake White isn't running for office and dreaming of being governor doesn't mean he's not using his experience as student body president.
Once he understood, White explains, the student body president's job was to take that understanding to administrators, the Board of Regents and the Legislature. He had to convince them that he knew the student body and that he understood what the students needed and why. And that, White said, is almost exactly what an actor does.
As student body president, White spent plenty of time listening to students from backgrounds that were nothing like what he'd seen in the frat house or growing up in western Nebraska. He had to learn to listen and to understand and to try to imagine what it was like for foreign students and minority students and non-traditional students at a big state university.
"An actor's job is to make a person real, and to do that you have to understand that character's life," he says. "You have to know their background and what concerns them in the present and what they want in life — all the things that motivate a character to do what he's doing. If you can do that, the audience will identify with the character, and that's when you've succeeded as an actor."
A group of individuals
A group of individuals David Ambler hears from Jake White
PRESIDENTS IN THE AMBLER ERA
The following students served as president while David Ambler, vice chancellor for student affairs, has been in office.
Year President Occupation
1976-77 Petra "Tedde" Tasheff Lawyer, Citibank Corp., New York City
1977-78 Steve Leben District Judge, Johnson County
1978-79 Michael Harper Private business, Wichita
1979-80 J. Gregory Schnake Lawyer, Wichita Fall 1980 Margaret Berlin Publishing firm, Johnson County
1981 R. Burt Coleman Resides in Wichita
1982 David Adkins Special Council of Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, Republican state legislator
1983 Lisa Ashner Adkins Former director of YouthFriends, Kansas City Mental health worker, Minneapolis
1984 Carla Vagel Lawyer, Kansas Dept. of Health & Environment Dennis "Boog" Highberger *
1985 William Easley Financial services, Johnson County
1986 David Epstein Lawyer, Kansas City Real estate broker, Kansas City Spring 1987 Brady Stanton
1987-88 Jason Krakow Sports promotions, Kansas City
1988-89 Brook Menees Financial services, Johnson County
1989-90 B. Jake White Actor, consultant, Beverly Hills
1990-91 Mike Schreiner Lives in Canada Fall 1991 Darren Fulcher ** Lawyer, judicial clerk, Missouri
Spring 1992 Alan Lowden Business consulting, Kansas City
1992-93 Brad Garlinghouse Internet services, San Francisco
1993-94 John Shoemaker Assistant to Sen. Dick Bond, Topeka
1994-95 Sherman Reeves Medical student, Johns Hopkins University
1995-96 Kim Cocks Law student, KU
1996-97 Grey Montgomery Working for a newspaper in Oregon
1997-98 Scott Sullivan Attending law school at the University of Indiana
1998-1999 Kevin Yoder KU undergraduate and student body president
- Vogel was elected president, but she and Highberger shared the office
** Fulcher resigned as president; Lowden, the vice president, took over
"At the University of Kansas, we have a lot better student government than our students deserve."
David Ambler Vice chancellor for student affairs
occasionally, and Tedde Tasheff and David Adkins. He doesn't hear much from Boog Highberger, and he isn't even sure where Carla Vogel is these days, but it's not because he doesn't care. He says he's loved all these folks, and he should know: He's worked with each one every day for a year.
He knows that hardly any students vote in the elections, and it burns him because it's an insult to his kids.
"At the University of Kansas, we have a lot better student government than our students deserve," he says, with a hint of defiance.
He has a hard time generalizing about the group. To Ambler, his kids are all individuals. It doesn't surprise David Ambler that most of the student body presidents are successful and prominent today. And he's proud of it. After all, they are his kids.
... and now
Updated versions,
images from the post-80s
era
Adkins: Married 1983 president Lisa Ashner
Ashner Adkins:
Married 1982
president, David
Adkins
4
4
1