A politician's plans to discuss young people's apathy for voting at the Eagleton Institute of Politics on the Douglass campus last night was greeted by a University professor's challenge that the youth is shouldering the blame for the apathy of a whole culture.
New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner arrived last night armed with the results of the New Millennium Project - a study which asked why there has been a decline in voting by America's youth.
The study was prompted by the fear that the 1996 presidential election would have had the lowest voter turnout of the century, Gardner said. As a result, the National Association of Secretaries of State decided to focus on why the youth in particular was not voting, he said.
According to the study, Gardner said today's youth had an enormous distrust and cynicism of politicians.
The next obstacle, Gardner said, was "how to eliminate this cynicism and distrust."
Gerald Pomper, the Board of Governor's professor of political science, said there is nothing new about the findings of this extensive $100,000 project.
"Distrust of authority in youth is somewhat healthy," Pomper said.
Additionally, Pomper said the premise of the study is faulty.
"It's not just the youth, but everybody," he said. "The problem isn't the young people's attitude, but the institutions of the nation."
Pomper said the government does not make it easy enough to vote.
Along with the two men's comments, Douglass College junior Jessica Roberts, Montclair High School senior Lara Green-Spector and Omar Cruzwere, a graduate of Berkeley College in West Paterson, were selected to speak on behalf of today's youth at the event.
Roberts said it is unfair to compare the apathy of today's youth to "our parents' generation."
"The issues back then (in the sixties) were clear cut. It's hard to get 16-year-olds galvanized about health care," Roberts said.
"To be honest, politics is something kids yawn at," she said, "We need to show them why they should care, and use that as a hook to get them into politics."
Gardner said the New Millennium Project - along with a recent study by Northwestern University's School of Journalism in Illinois which corroborated the findings - found that young people would be more involved in politics if politicians talked more about issues that related to them.
Pomper said it is untrue that politicians do not talk about issues that relate to kids. He that one of the most important issues - education - is directly related to students. "They're the clients of it," he said.
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