"
Running a snake for dorm council was just one of
several election-related pranks. In a later election,
Stallman and his dorm mates nominated the house
master's son. "His platform was mandatory retirement at
age seven," Stallman recalls. Such pranks paled in
comparison to the fake-candidate pranks on the MIT
campus, however. One of the most successful
fake-candidate pranks was a cat named Woodstock, which
actually managed to outdraw most of the human
candidates in a campus-wide election. "They never
announced how many votes Woodstock got, and they
treated those votes as spoiled ballots," Stallman
recalls. "But the large number of spoiled ballots in
that election suggested that Woodstock had actually
won. A couple of years later, Woodstock was
suspiciously run over by a car. Nobody knows if the
driver was working for the MIT administration."
Stallman says he had nothing to do with Woodstock's
candidacy, "but I admired it."In an email shortly after this book went into its
final
edit cycle, Stallman says he drew political inspiration
from the Harvard campus as well.
Pages:
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119