Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager recalls his tumultuous time at Boston University
Jeff Weaver, the Vermont senator's longtime confidant, met Sanders only after he was "thrown out" of BU.
The 2016 Democratic presidential primaries were hardly the first time Jeff Weaver, the campaign manger for Bernie Sanders, found himself at odds with institutional forces.
In an Off Message podcast interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, the Vermont senator’s closest aide recalled his activist days as a student at Boston University, which eventually led to him getting “thrown out” of the school.
Weaver said he got involved in the anti-apartheid movement as a BU student in the 1980s, protesting the university’s stock holdings in companies that did business with then-segregated South Africa.
John Silber—BU’s polarizing 25-year president, known for, among other things, his heavy-handed approach to protests— was also at the school at the time. Needless to say, Weaver was not a fan.
“He was sort of a notorious right-wing Democrat,” he said of Silber in the interview released Monday. “I guess he’s a Democrat. You know, BU had a lot of controversy under his rule.”
https://soundcloud.com/off-message/160731-weaver-mixdown#t=8:03
Weaver, a St. Albans, Vermont native, was one of 11 students arrested on disorderly conduct charges in April 1986.
Known as the “BU Eleven,” they had attempted to put up a shantytown—a form of divestment protest also reportedly seen at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brandeis—on the lawn in front of the BU student union building.
According to a Harvard Crimson report at the time, three students were arrested for trying to stop BU employees from taking down the symbolic plywood structures, and then Weaver and seven others were arrested for trying to prevent the arresting police officers from driving away.
But Weaver says Boston police didn’t take the situation too seriously.
“Some people were arrested,” he said on the podcast, “and some of us who blocked police cars were also arrested and taken off to the Boston police station, where they really didn’t want much to do with us because they didn’t really look at it as all that serious.”
Weaver said that the charges were eventually dismissed, but according to the Crimson, he and the seven others who blocked police were suspended by BU until January 1987.
“I got thrown out of school,” Weaver recalled. He later added: “At BU there was a lot of sort of suppressed activism.”
Weaver was also one of four students who sued the school the following September, after BU threatened to evict them after they hung political signs in their dorm windows.
The school argued the banners, which read “Divest,” referring to BU’s reported $22.3 million investment in companies doing business in South Africa, destroyed the “[aesthetic] integrity” of the campus, according to The New York Times. The Times also noted that Silber was a “staunch opponent of divestment.”
In December 1986, a Massachusetts Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Weaver and his three classmates, finding that the school selectively enforced their ban on signs.
“Clearly what was going on at BU was wrong, and I sort of felt compelled to become involved,” Weaver said.
He ended up finishing his degree at the University of Vermont.
It was while Weaver was suspended from BU, after he moved back home, that he got a job as the campaign manager for a certain “Socialist gubernatorial candidate in Vermont,” as the Crimson reported at the time.
“I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next, and Bernie, at that time, was mayor of Burlington and running for governor as a third-party candidate,” Weaver told Thrush. “…I met him at this parade and we sort of hit it off, actually, and he called me a day or two later and said, ‘Do you want to come down and work in Burlington?'”
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