By Butch Oxendine, editor in chief

Some third-world dictators serve as “president for life.” But what about student body presidents? At Washington State University, Steve Wymer served up an unprecedented three consecutive terms (1998 to 2001) as Associated Students president—maybe the longest tenure of any student body president in American history.  This veteran leader’s three terms in office have been described as WSU’s most successful in its 110-year history.

After serving as a senator as a freshman, Wymer won the office of vice president during his sophomore year. Halfway through the year, his running mate was forced to resign and Wymer was sworn in as president for the remainder of the term. Wymer won re-election in a landside as a junior, then came back for a third, and hotly contested, campaign as a senior.

“We’ve only had two other presidents in the history of the school who got re-elected,” Wymer says. “I got started so young. Most people get in as a senior.”

Wymer says his lengthy tenure allowed him to get more done because he was more knowledgeable, experienced, and personally knew all of the key players among administrators and at the state capitol in Olympia.

“There are some administrators who loved me, but there were some who were so glad to see me go,” Wymer says. He says some administrators purposely postpone making important decisions, hoping the campus leaders will be out of office before anything can be decided. “They say ‘That’s a good idea, but let’s talk.’ If I hadn’t come back, I wouldn’t have been able to hold them accountable. Some administrators were used to being able to listen to students, then say, ‘Go plan the dance party and leave me alone.’

Wymer says he focused on building facilities and restoring Student Goverment’s credibility. “Part of the reason AS hadn’t been powerful and influential is because they didn’t have time to finish what they were working on,” he says.

“At most meetings, I was the only student there,” he says. “I got there early and went around the table and lowered the chairs at the table and raised mine up. I didn’t want them to think I was a joke. If they’re going to be wearing a suit, I’m not going to show up with a hat on backwards. I wore a suit every day. Student leaders need to be professional in appearance and in everything about them. I feel like the paycheck I got, and a generous one [editor’s note: the ASWSU president receives a $17,642 annual salary—see the SG Salary Survey at www.studentleaer.com], held me accountable to be a professional and quality representative of the students.”

Wymer says ASWSU elections are hotly contested and most positions are coveted. “People spend thousands of dollars,” Wymer says. “There’s a perception that you write your own ticket if you’re student body president. I don’t know if there’s a SG in the nation that’s empowered to affect the daily lives of students like we are. As president, you’re chair of a multi-million dollar corporation. It’s a full-time job, 40 hours a week.”

“If anyone is too blame for his lengthy term, I’m partly to blame,” says Edward Prince, Wymer’s predecessor from May ‘98 to February ‘99. “I found this young, fired-up guy who would be a good vice president. Part of the reason I ran with him, even though he was a sophomore, was the amount of passion he had. I never thought I would have to step down. He wouldn’t have been president the first year had I stayed in office.”

While Prince says Wymer did a spectacular job as president, he actually advised his protégé against running for a third term. “The job is so demanding, I wanted him to experience other parts of college. You can get into a ‘bunker mentality’ as president,” Prince says. “You focus on issues you’re dealing with, but you need to have other experiences. But when he said ‘I’m going to run again,’ I said ‘Go ahead.’ The students have a choice. They can decide to not reelect you. Someone else can always step up to the plate and challenge you.

“A lot of administrators know that student are only going to be there for a year, so they stall and stall and shuffle their feet, then the student graduates,” Prince says. “Then the new person doesn’t want to do the same thing or go in the same direction. That was a real plus—he got a chance to see a lot of things through.”

“What helped him be the most successful student body president in history is that he had the time to build relationships,” says Jesse Keene, ASWSU president after Wymer. “I’m barely getting to the point of making relationships within the university to get things accomplished and get answers. Steve could call up the vice president or president and go play golf with them. I’m just getting to where I have the social and business relationships with them. I almost find it preferable to serve multiple terms. I’m not ready to leave yet. I would like to see more things through.”

Wymer counts the construction of a new student recreation center at the top of his list of accomplishments. “I sat on the developmental committee, then put it to student vote as a referendum,” he says. “I got to work on that project all the way until the day I left. As a freshman, I sat on a committee that came up with the idea, then as a senior spoke at the grand opening and cut the ribbon.”

As Keene says, “it was critical and vitally important for Steve to have the institutional memory on the rec. center. Steve knew every intricate detail. He brought credibility to the project, he helped us open the center because of that.”

Because of his tenure’s length, Wymer could afford a more in-depth analysis and become a strong advocate for specific projects, says Kathleen Hatch, director of university recreation. “There’s so much on the plate of student leaders, it’s hard for them to champion anything,” she says. “The student rec center became a real carrot and a real desire of his to have the students’ voice in the decision-making. He participated in all types of decisions. To this day, he could tell you about the sub-surfaces in the floor. He wanted it done right, and sometimes you only get one chance to have a $40 million project that would forever change the landscape of recreational activities. We’re seeing 85 percent of our student body participating.

“There would have been less of a student voice if there had been others in office,” Hatch says. “Otherwise, we may have had individual student body president who didn’t understand the impact of decisions. I’m not sure that they would have been made as well or as informed. To have time, in terms of a capital project, Steve had an immense amount of impact and really championed students’ voice. It’s really his legacy.

“Having that sustained voice while engaged in a huge student project is really such an asset,” Hatch says. “You don’t have to spend half the time providing an understanding and history with a new leader. Not only do they understand the history, they participated in it. Students have tremendous responsibility but not always the history to guide them. He took it very seriously.

“Given our moment of time relative to this project, it was more ideal to have someone who had the history,” Hatch says. “It’s not the ideal every year and every place. I’m an advocate of student growth and leadership, you have to remember that Steve graduated with a whole different set of skills and knowledge than someone who gets a one-year experience. The outcome was that much richer and developed, even though it was directed at one student. It can be life-changing. For our history here, it was very useful and timely.”

On another important student issue, Wymer says that the personal relationships and friendships, sometimes social ones, he built with the state’s Board of Regents helped soften the blow of a planned tuition increase. “The president said we’re going to get a five percent increase, so I went into the Regents and proposed a 3½ percent tuition increase instead of maxing out at five percent,” Wymer says. “We wouldn’t have won unless we had created those personal relationships. They could see that we understand the big picture and have been around.”

To ASWSU’s advisor, “There are pros and cons” to executives serving past a single term. “We do look at ASWSU as a laboratory for learning and a leadership opportunity,” says Virginia Thomas, director of campus involvement and ASWSU advisor. “It’s a dynamic organization, and there’s a lot of new energy and ideas. There can be some chaos within that as a result. How do you maintain some continuity? Do you have a good transition process? Is the organization developing leadership throughout the organizations? The ‘pro’ has to do with continuity. I’ve never worked where there are such high expectations of the president participating in the governing process. They supervise a staff, they have lobbying responsibilities, they’re expected to write reports, and there’s a great demand on them. It really is in essence a job. There’s something to be said about continuity. There are so many SG presidents who say if ‘I only had another year.’ They wish they had some luxury of learning those nuances of the system. The desirability of having a multiple-term president is the continuity of learning who the players and policies are, then being able to take it to the next step.

“The drawback is having someone who isn’t effective because it’s a high-demand job,” Thomas says. “Could Steve manage it? Would he be able to continue the energy level, at some cost to him personally? What are we doing for our students in developing them as the whole package? What’s the personal cost? Steve is such a passionate person and believed so strongly in SG, but I don’t think he had as much as a personal life as he should've. That was a choice he made. We as an institution helped him make that choice by the demands we make of SG. He'd respond to every e-mail. He really put an awful lot of his energy. Often times, SG attracts students who’re committed to improving campus and making a difference. It’s pretty attractive to sit in on a meeting and create a program rather than sitting down to write your political-science paper. It’s an incredible learning opportunity.

“If we’re recycling our leaders, if we don’t have a good method for bringing our emerging leaders along, then that’s an issue,” Thomas says. “That’s another cost—when people perceive it’s your time to leave. There’s a perceived ladder to approach the presidency. You get involved as a senator, in an increased leadership role in senate, go for executive position, then you run for president as an exec. If someone bottle-necks it up top, then you have a series of possibly very qualified folks with some commitment to continuity and differences in approach and personality. And they don’t have anywhere to go.

“Now we don’t think it’s a good idea to have a U.S. president for four terms like Franklin D. Roosevelt, but at the time it worked,” Thomas says. “For us, it was comforting to have Steve. For this time and place, what he offered made a significant impact in some real ways.”

Not surprisingly, some disagreed with Wymer’s decision to run for a third term. In fact, he says, “That was the campaign platform of my opposition: That I'd been too involved. I figured if students wanted more, they’d vote for me and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t.” Wymer’s opponents served in key roles in his previous administrations, which tried their friendships. But he says campaigning was straightforward: their successes were also his, and his failures where theirs as well.

The former editor of The Daily Evergreen, WSU’s campus paper, acknowledges that Wymer’s tenure concluded with a satchel full of considerable accomplishments. “But when you have the same person in office that long, I’d like to see a different perspective in there,” says Chris Chancellor. “He did do a good job. He was highly involved in the community, probably more so than any student body president.

“I think term limits should be considered, as I believe in giving as many people the opportunity as possible,” Chancellor says. “If I were to run our paper for two or three years, I’d be learning and gaining experience, but it would have the same personality. It’s good to have a new perspective. The connections he had made with administration and with politicians in general were positive for the student body, but I think he benefited more from the experience.”

Wymer acknowledges the pros and cons of his lengthy tenure, but speaks with pride of his administration’s accomplishments and with no regrets. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d run for all three terms,” Wymer says.

Contact Wymer at swymerwsu@yahoo.com, Chancellor at cchancellor@wsu.edu, Hatch at hatchk@wsu.edu, Prince at potus9@msn.com, Jaeger at cjaeger@wsu.edu, Thomas at thomasv@wsu.edu, Keene at jskeene@wsu.edu, or visit www.wsu.edu.

An Administrator's View “Steve Wymer certainly left his mark on WSU,” says Charleen K. Jaeger, WSU’s vice president for student affairs. “As a three-term president, Steve had the unique experience to be an instrumental person in the campus plan to build a new Student Recreation Center. Steve was directly involved from concept to pre-design, and finally to see the construction and grand opening of a world-class facility. “In addition, three years in office allowed him to learn his way through the administrative system at the university,” Jaeger says. “Steve was able to be informed on a broad array of issues and to address them from a student’s perspective. Continuity on longer-term projects was possible from year to year because Steve had developed strong working relationships with administrators and faculty. “On the downside, while the experience was a real personal growth opportunity for Steve, two other students missed the unique opportunity to be ASWSU president,” she says. “Having one leader may limit the opportunity for new voices to come to the table with new ideas, energy, and connections to broader representatives of the student body. New leadership may enrich and broaden the developmental learning and advising opportunities from year to year to keep Student Government organizations vital and dynamic.”