 I'm Bob Wilhelm, the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development. With this being that the university is 150th anniversary, I'm also pleased to announce that we're going to be offering Nebraska lectures every month this year to celebrate all through the anniversary year. And many of these lectures will be focusing on both university and state history. So I hope you'll be able to make plans to come and join us a few more times for these future lectures and celebrate the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in our heritage in this great state. The Nebraska lectures are an interdisciplinary lecture series that are designed to bring together both the university community but also with the greater community in Lincoln. I'm glad to see we have many different people here today. Thank you for being with us. And to bring people together and celebrate the intellectual life of the university of Nebraska-Lincoln. And the presentations highlight our faculty's excellence in research and creative activity. This lecture series is sponsored by the UNL Research Council in cooperation with the Office of the Chancellor. Thank you, Chancellor. And also the Office of Research and Economic Development and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which is known as ALI. A special welcome I want to make to all of the, or for any ALI members that are here today. And I'd like to recognize ALI members. We're able to have a much richer and just a bigger lecture series this year in particular due to the support of Humanities Nebraska and want to thank the Executive Director, Chris Sumerick, for helping sponsor this year's lectures. Thanks, Chris. We'll also be creating podcasts to archive each of the lectures this year. And we'll be archiving them. So, archiving podcasts. It's a new thing. And so the new audiences in the future will be able to both enjoy these lectures, but also to learn more about the people, the places, and the events that have played significant roles in our state's history. So in coming months you'll hear more from us about all the details of the podcast and where you'll be able to find them. I also want to recognize the University's Research Council, which includes faculty from a broad range of disciplines at the University of Nebraska. The Council solicits nominations of faculty to present at these Nebraska lectures. And then based on their major accomplishments and also their ability, lecture's ability to explain their work. The selection of the Nebraska lecture is a recognition from the University Research Council. It's really the highest recognition that the faculty make in the Council. So I'd like to thank again the University Research Council. I want to clap for that, too. So I've got a few different operational details to cover before we get started. The lecture today is going to be Webstream Live. And so I want to welcome anyone that is here that's joining us online and through Facebook Live. And for social media users we have a hashtag for today's lecture. And it's hashtag B lecture, so Neb lecture. A few more words about the format after the lecture. We'll also have some time for a question and answer session with the audience and we'll have a moderator here with us to lead that. Following the Q&A session, and this is part of my contract coming in as the Vice Chancellor, I'm the Master of Prizes, we will be offering a prize. And that prize today will announce the winner of an N-150 book. You may have seen some of the N-150 books on your way in. You have to be here to be present to win. So look forward to the prize event at the end of the lecture and at the end of our question and answer section. And as well, once we're finished here we also will have a reception set up and so we'll be able to talk more with the speaker and maybe visit with the friends that you see here. So now let me please welcome, help me to please welcome Chancellor Ronny Green who will introduce our speaker. Well thank you very much Bob and it's great to see everyone here at the WIC Center today. And on behalf of the Alumni Association, welcome to their beautiful facility here on our campus. As Bob said, we are taking a different approach during this 150th anniversary year that we're now into this month in 2019 by having an expanded series of the Chancellor's Lectures of the Nebraska Lectures. And Chris, I again thank Humanities Nebraska and the National Endowment for the Humanities that are helping us to bring these lectures to the campus and to the greater community in this way to celebrate the year. It's a great town and gown kind of thing for us here in Lincoln and beyond throughout the state. And it is a real privilege today in the first of these to introduce our speaker to you who I think many of you in the room here on campus know very well from her history in Nebraska over a long period of time and her history on our faculty and through Ollie as you'll hear in the introduction today. Our speaker today is Charlene Barons. Dr. Barons is an emeritus professor of journalism in our College of Journalism and Mass Communications and we're very happy it says here on my script to have you back on campus but Charlene I don't think you ever really left campus from your former position. And she's going to have the opportunity to share some insights at again a timely time about our Unicam and about our single house legislature here in Nebraska as they are now underway with their work in the long session of their set of the Unicameral work. Charlene's a journalist at heart and she's passionate about sharing her knowledge of First Amendment rights and freedom of expression. She taught an honor seminar on these topics when she was on our faculty and always urged her students in a reporting and editing classes to strive for both truth and accuracy. She's an award winning educator having earned the Freedom Forum Journalism Teacher of the Year honor a UNL College Award for Distinguished Teaching. She was also named Outstanding Educator of the Year by the Association of Students of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. When Charlene joined the university faculty first in 1995 she brought 14 years of experience as editor and co-publisher of the Seward County Independent, one of Nebraska's great community newspapers here just to our west. She also pursued and earned a PhD in political science adding a new dimension to her scholarly pursuits. Charlene's interest in the political process along with her background as a journalist helped her become an expert on Nebraska's Unicameral Legislature and many of the state's political figures through that study as well. For any newcomers in the room, most of us here are familiar with the fact that we have this kind of unique one body legislature in Nebraska. The only state in the country that has a non-partisan one house legislature where the founders of that system envisioned creating a governing body that was more transparent to the public and less susceptible to the partisan politics of the era. Charlene's written two books about the Unicameral, the first entitled Power to the People, explored the role populism and progressivism played in this bold vision for our state's government. The second entitled One House offers perspective on whether the Unicameral has actually lived up to that definition as a one house non-partisan legislature. She also is author of Chuck Hagel Moving Forward, a biography of our former U.S. Senator and U.S. Secretary of Defense, who was just on campus here recently this past fall along with numerous other pieces on the political process of journalism. Charlene retired in 2014 from the university, but as I said earlier, she's remained very active on campus. In fact, has trailed me around a couple of times writing stories and is very active in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, as we mentioned earlier. It's now my honor to introduce to you our colleague Charlene Barons who will present Nebraska's Unicameral still progressive after all these years, and she tells me that's a playoff, Paul Simon. So, Charlene, welcome. Well, thank you all for coming. It's wonderful to see so many of my NL friends here and my Oli friends and some of you who fall into both of those subsets. It's just delightful that you came to hear this presentation today. I don't know if you noticed where this little announcement ended up in today's paper. It was collected with a few, with four other short items under a section called Add a Glance. It was this event, a fire and three crimes. So with any like this will not be a crime here. It might be a crying shame, but it won't be a crime, I hope. It's interesting to me too that I do know so many of you and I'm right here where I've spent a lot of time in the WIC Center and on campus because usually an expert is somebody who comes from at least 50 miles away and is a stranger, right? So I was mentioning this to my husband Danny the other day, you know, this 50 miles away thing. He said, well I could drive you out to Grand Island and back if that would help. It would take care of the 50 miles but you know it snowed so we didn't do that. At any rate, I'm happy to talk about the legislature. I'm always happy to talk about the legislature. I have been interested in this unique system we have here. Ever since I moved to Nebraska several millennia ago, I figured out I've spent about 75% of my life here in this state and I'm happy about that. I'm almost a native Nebraska and I was happy that I had an excuse to study this legislature in some depth while I was in grad school and after. I wrote two books as the chancellor said. The first one pretty theoretical though the next one not so much and you'll probably be relieved to hear that we're not going to talk deep theory here today but we will talk a little bit of theory. Here's the first thing though that I want you to know. We have not always been like this. Nebraska entered the union in 1867 with a traditional two house legislature and we didn't make this switch to one house until a vote of the people in 1934. The first session of the one house Uticameral was in 1937. It is not easy to make that kind of institutional change. Think about that. Changing the whole way your legislature is set up the way your senators are elected. That's a big deal. So why did Nebraskans do that? Well a one house nonpartisan legislature didn't just bring full blown from the soil of the dust bowl in Nebraska. But it wasn't I don't think a huge political or social crisis. There certainly weren't people marching in the streets and demanding something different and better. Instead I argue it was an outgrowth of the populist and progressive philosophies that were major influences in the state from the 1880s on into the 1930s and still are around today to an extent and in some form. So what was or is populism? Here's a little bit of theory. Very briefly populist theory asserts that an identifiable entity known as the people exists. This is different from Madison's idea of a whole bunch of individuals, you know, and will pit excuse me, interest against interest until we come to some common good from the result of that. Instead populists believe in a very unitary people. The people whose will should be carried out and the people are pretty much everybody who isn't one of the few elites. It's a very majoritarian philosophy and it's still a very popular philosophy in many ways in somewhat different form. First though I want to take a quick march and I mean that quick march through the history of some of our state beginnings and our government's beginnings. Senator Stephen A. Douglas known best for debating Lincoln in 1858 played an instrumental role in making Nebraska a state. The Transcontinental Railroad Congress had been talking about that since the early 1840's and Douglas a senator from Illinois wanted a northern route for the railroad so that it would connect to Chicago in his state. And that meant if we're going to have this railroad built that we had to organize the territory west of the Missouri as part of the United States it was all part of the Louisiana Purchase as you remember from 1803 but west of the Missouri we hadn't even organized it into territories yet much less states. So in 1847 Senator Douglas introduced a bill to establish a Nebraska territory. Now slavery had become a central issue in discussions about organizing territories and it did have an effect here too but those details are for another time. There's not enough time today. Let's just say that the Kansas-Nebraska Act finally was passed in 1854. The railroad began its construction in 1863, finished in total in 1869 when the two parts of the railroad hooked together in Utah. So Nebraska became a territory in 1854 with a population of almost 2800 people almost. By 1862 though even before the Homestead Act of that year Nebraska was producing enough ag products to more than balance the value of the goods imported. That's a pretty good economy we had going here and the population grew rapidly. By 1867 it was about 50,000. Now because we were a territory our executive and judicial officers were appointed by the president. The legislature was popularly elected. James Buchanan was the president at the time and he was known for his pro-South and pro-slavery attitudes and Nebraska's didn't like the officials that he was appointing and their discontent boosted the Republican's strength in the territory but neither party was completely dominant. I think that's important to remember. From the start neither party was way way stronger than the other. And in fact in the 1860 election almost everybody in the territory supported Lincoln no matter what party they were from. That same year though the voters defeated a proposal to form a state government. Four years later the territorial legislature asked Congress to pass legislation making statehood possible and that bill passed in Congress in April of 1864. So the next step towards statehood was for Nebraskans to convene a constitutional convention which they did. They met on July 4th and adjourned almost immediately. They made no attempt to form a constitution. We can't have a state without some kind of document to tell you what's going to happen. So we had to try again. In 1866 the Republicans in the territorial legislature pushed statehood via some unorthodox procedures like preparing a constitution and moving it through the legislature so fast that members never saw a copy. However this was approved by the voters in June of 1866, narrowly approved. Unfortunately the document didn't include very many provisions at all for a functioning government. The primary goal seemed to be to make government as cheap as possible. I'm sure that's a shock to you, right? Well regardless of all that the Congress welcomed Nebraska into the union on March 1st, 1867 as the 37th state in the union and that's the date of course March 1st that we celebrate every year on statehood day. So despite Nebraska's political struggles to even become a state, it didn't take its leaders long to figure out that the state needed to sponsor a college. Now Congress had passed the Moral Act in 1862 named after its sponsor Justin Smith Moral of Vermont and you're probably aware in general at least that this enabled a grant from the federal government to provide land and funds for a college in each state and they were known logically as land grant colleges. The purpose of the schools was to teach the principles and skills related to agriculture and mechanical arts but also to include other scientific and classical studies and a quote from the language in the bill it was to promote liberal and practical education. What we think of today as a university. So Nebraska situated its land grant college on four city blocks in Lincoln just a few blocks north of the capital that had been finished just the previous year. It was you might say a bold and audacious thing for the state to do. So with its capital building and its state college in place Nebraska continued to grow. We were 150,000 in 1870, 10 years later we were a million people. One big reason was the railroad. The Union Pacific had been given 20 sections of land for each mile of track and it sold the land at reasonable prices because you know what were they going to do with their trains if they didn't have customers. So they needed farmers, they needed communities and they encouraged a lot of people to settle along the right of way. Another big influence was the Homestead Act of 1862 that gave anybody who wanted it 160 acres if they would live on the land and farm it for five years and then it would be theirs. Now in the 1860s and 1870s at the same time that Nebraska was being settled by white folks farming was becoming mechanized and more commercial and that was both a blessing and a curse. Farmers were at the mercy of fluctuating production and an unstable ag economy and the state's heavy dependence on agriculture plus that nearly useless constitution from 1866 made it really tough for state government to function. One big problem facing farmers was the land itself. Some of the land was sub-marginal, it didn't produce enough to cover the inputs needed for farming. And except in the sandhills, people across the state tried to use the same ag practices that worked only in the eastern third. In the actual sandhills, you know what we now identify is that they could see that wasn't going to work, but most of the rest of the state tried to farm the way people had farmed in Illinois and Iowa and in the eastern third of Nebraska. The situation led to cycles of boom and bust and like just about anybody anywhere, farmers were looking for somebody to blame not themselves, not the weather, not poor farming practices. Nebraskans were looking for villains and they found them, railroads, mortgage lenders, speculators. Well it was time, people began to say, to make the state's government a little bit more effective. And in 1871 a constitutional convention convened to write documents to do exactly that. But the railroads, pretty powerful, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern by this time, didn't like the potential regulations contained in this constitution and they campaigned against it and they defeated it. By 1875 state government was near chaos. So the leaders tried again, they wrote another constitution, still included some railroad regulation but this time it passed by a 6-1 margin. And the railroads really wouldn't have had to worry because it turned out that passing legislation to regulate railroads was a lot easier than actually doing it and not much really changed. Well by the 1880s the crops were pretty good, land was available, loans were really easy to come by, anybody who pretty much wanted to get a loan to buy land The 1889 crop had been really good but prices of course hit an all time low. And the farmers thought with some justification that they were getting ripped off by bankers and grain elevators and especially those stinking railroads. Their discontent found a voice in the Farmers Alliance which started out as a citizen lobby but soon became a full-fledged political group. More than 800 people, delegates at an alliance-sponsored convention in 1890 met at Bohanins Hall in Lincoln and the state's People's Party was born. This was populism. Populism people, right? People's party, populist party. Nebraska's populism, I believe was part of a movement that originated in the 1880s and 90s. South to an extent and in the plain states, right here in the middle of the country. Farmers were struggling against drought, speculators, railroads, bank high handedness and remember this was the gilded age. There were huge, huge disparities in wealth. This was the days of the Carnegie's and the Rockefellers and the JP Morgan's. Does this sound familiar, this huge disparity in wealth thing? Let's see. But farmers, of course were far better educated and better to communicate among themselves by this time than people had been in previous decades. Excuse me. And they began to rise up against what they saw as the tyranny of the minority, those few elites who they thought had all the money, all the power, all the control. They demanded that the government get involved more and provide for the good of the people and they turned to politics as a way to get that done. They did in the late 1890s get a few people elected to the state legislature and to Congress, but it didn't last very long and it wasn't enough to make much of an impact. Nebraska's William Jennings Bryan was one of the most famous politicians to come out of the populist movement. But when he ran for president in 1896 it was as a Democrat because at that time the populist party had fused with the Democratic party. It gave them a bigger platform and a bigger voice for a while, but it was the end of the populists as a separate party. By the early 1900s though Republicans and Democrats seemed to be competing with each other to implement a lot of the populist's goals that government should represent the people. Both parties began to see a need for government regulation of industry and business in the interest of common folks and progressivism picked up where populism left off. They still believed in a will of the people, but they added some specifics that government should specifically work to improve the lot of the people, should be open to scrutiny by the people, experts at expertise should be put to work to that end, and importantly parties and party bosses should just take a back seat to the experts and to the people. And it seemed to have an effect. Between 1901 and 1919 Nebraska's past 10 constitutional amendments influenced by this progressive spirit. The initiative and referendum in 1912, we were one of the first states in the nation to do that. Women's suffrage in 1918, two years before the 19th amendment was ratified and became federal law. We also adopted regulations on railroads and public utilities. We established a direct primary system and we passed some labor legislation work rules, wage and hour rules, that kind of thing, and nonpartisan elections for the judiciary. George Norris was a long time representative and then senator from Nebraska and he was for sure a progressive and he had been agitating for a one house nonpartisan legislature since the early 1920s. He wrote a long opinion piece in 1923 for the New York Times and I mean long. It was like almost an entire big page in a broad sheet newspaper. In that piece he denounced party politics and praised nonpartisanship. He said it would be a lot easier for the people to be the government in that case. It would make the legislature transparent, easy for people to follow and to get involved and that he said was the ultimate goal in a democracy. But it wasn't until 1934, 10 years later, that things really got rolling. In February that year Norris and other Nebraskans met in Lincoln and kicked off the initiative petition drive made possible by that 1912 amendment to place the constitutional amendment on the ballot that fall. It would make the legislature a one house nonpartisan body and they promoted that on the basis of populism and progressivism. By the way, one of Norris' loyal co-conspirators and in fact really his right hand person in this campaign was John Sunning who was chair of the UNL or the NU political science department at the time and very involved right after Norris just as close as you could get. Well here are some of the main points of their argument. They said one house will be more open and straightforward and easier to follow. You couldn't have one house passing the buck to the other which happens in two house legislatures. You wouldn't have any more bills reconciled in conference committee where one house passes a bill that's just a little different from the other so a few people from each house get together in a conference committee, work out the details and then put forth their solution to this with no more amendment, no more discussion, take it or leave it. So Norris thought that the conference committees were probably the worst thing about a two house legislature. These folks also said that if you made the legislature smaller it would be easier to follow and a lot more accessible to the common person. The 1932 Nebraska legislature had consisted of 100 people in the house and 33 in the senate. The amendment proposal set the total number between 30 and 50. It's a lot smaller. They also said that parties just get in the way of government by the people. They give too much power to the few who are the party bosses and besides Norris said straight out the business of the state is in no sense partisan. That's a quote. Now this nonpartisan thing was the point on which he got some argument even from his fellow supporters of the amendment because they were afraid it was too radical. That people would look at that and go I don't know I can't vote for that. And it is true that nonpartisanship did get a lot of criticism. And some of it pretty thoughtful. Some noisy critics said that if you took away the party structure special interests would have a heyday and that would be even worse. You could make that argument. But Norris was not going to give in. He insisted nonpartisanship had to be part of the deal because parties got in the way he said of government by the people. So Norris and Sending and the others said that one house would be more responsive and responsible, more efficient, more business like that meant hiring some experts for staff and paying legislators more a lot more than they had been getting. And he even wrote into the amendment this total dollar figure of $37,500 to be divided by however many legislators we ended up with between 30 and 50. That proved to be a consequential decision to put that into the amendment. They also said that this new body would be more streamlined, able to move quickly to meet the needs of the people. And they said that lobbyists would have to do their work out in public and in the open where people could watch what was going on. They called this proposed institution the model legislature and they campaigned for it mightily. George Norris, who was 73 at the time, very young, right, my Ollie friends? Yes. So that he nearly wore out his car driving back and forth across the state. A lot of critics attacked the plan and the critics included almost all the newspapers in the state. And it looked as if this thing was just not going to make it. But when Election Day came, the amendment was approved by almost 60% of the voters. Now two other amendments on the ballot also passed. One repealed prohibition and the other one legalized perimutual betting. And rumor had it that supporters of the other two measures urged people to just vote yes on everything and that the unicameral was swept along with the betting and the gambling and the drinking. But the unicameral passed with the largest margin of approval. Excuse me. Well, Nebraskans had made history. This was probably the most radical innovation in the history of American government. George Norris gets a lot of credit for this because Nebraskans admired and trusted him and when he said this was a good idea they were inclined to agree. One more thing the idea was probably also appealing because it would be cheaper this new legislature. Remember this was the middle of the Great Depression and any way to save money probably looked pretty good. But I reject the idea that that was the primary or only reason that people voted in favor. That idea has kind of been surfacing lately that well it's cheaper that's why we passed it. No, I don't think so. I mean Norris had been promoting this for more than ten years right in lots of ways and he never mentioned the cheaper part of it until they actually put the amendment on the ballot and by that time our economic circumstances in the nation had changed and it seemed like an obvious thing to say in the middle of the depression. Nebraskans also might have been influenced by the New Deal philosophies of innovation that were sweeping the nation in the early 30s as people looked for a way out of the mess of the depression. Well at any rate the 1935 the last bicameral was charged, legislature was charged with deciding how many members exactly the new camera, the unicameral would have and redistricting the state accordingly. They drew map after map and remember this was no computers this was by hand. They figured different ways of dividing the state and what they were looking for was a good balance between urban and rural representation and they finally decided that 43 was the best way to do that at the time in 1937 and those 43 senators met as a nonpartisan one house legislature for the first time in 1937. They set the rules for the legislature as every legislature does set its own rules but this group when they started writing rules they were as determined as Norris who wasn't, remember he was in Washington he wasn't part of this group but they were just as determined as he had been that this body was going to be open and accountable. So Nebraska was on its way to showing the rest of the nation what a progressive legislature looked like but has it lived up to that? Is it still progressive after all these years? Well let's look at the couple of criteria to answer those questions. First of all they said that the new unicameral would be more open to inspection by and input from the people largely because of its simple structure and small size. Nothing in that structure or size has changed dramatically. In the 60s we added a few more senators we're up to 49 but that's not a huge change. We still have no conference committees. We have no other house to blame things on. All the lawmaking is done in one room and senators themselves and any observer can sit there and watch the whole thing happen. Sessions on the floor and in committee are open to the public. So yes our legislature is still pretty open and transparent and one of the things that they wrote into the rules that very first session was that every bill would get a public hearing advertised in advance. That's still part of the rules in the legislature. Every single bill gets a public hearing. Anybody can go and testify. So a senator doesn't have to be part of the majority party to get a bill in front of colleagues in the public and no committee chair can just disappear something that he or she doesn't want to deal with. Every bill will be considered and people will come and testify for and against it. And also because the size is still small someone who really wants to get involved with legislation can contact all 49 senators in person. I mean it's not impossible. I mean it looks like it might be because you're all busy. But us retired people we could do that anyway. And we're still nonpartisan which keeps the senators more responsive to the people. I have heard this from senators. I've heard it from other observers. Now some critics have said that party labels on the ballot would make it easier for voters to make their choice. You know if there were an R or a D behind these names which there isn't for the legislature. Then if you didn't know something much about this person you could at least kind of guess which direction he or she would lean on every issue or most issues. So maybe there's a place for that. But almost nobody thinks that having party discipline and structure in the body itself would be an improvement except the states Republican and Democratic parties of course who would love it. Now some people say the unicameral might be nonpartisan in name but come on we know we know the senators all vote along party lines. But the senators themselves vehemently disagree. Think about it this way every senator except the one registered independent is registered Republican or Democrat. And so you will see people fall out along general philosophical lines which you might expect right but that doesn't mean that the party is telling them how to vote. There are no party leaders in the unicameral. There is no party hierarchy. There is no party discipline as such. I think though that lately citizens and the media have been paying a lot more attention to how to what party affiliation the various senators have. And I think the term limits have something to do with that and we'll talk a little more about term limits at the end. So voting coalitions in the unicameral are by definition not partisan not organized by party apparatus and party discipline unlike every other legislative body in the country. Our unicameral does not meet on the first day or two of the session to elect a speaker of the majority of whip minority leader or other party based leadership positions. Senators do not thus take marching orders from the party. A story in the Daily Beast which is an online publication focused on politics a couple years ago described the structure of the unicameral as making weird alliances and inter-party strategizing the norm not the exception and the story portrayed that as a very good thing. Political scientist quoted in this story said that the structure fosters a culture of people voting their conscience rather than by politics and that was also portrayed as a good thing. So coalitions sometimes form on the basis of a rural urban split, business not so pro-business division geographic division or just a division of interests and ideologies but those coalitions shift from one bill to the next and that means almost inevitably there's going to be some log rolling and vote trading going on. You know I really need your vote on this and if you can vote with me Mike then on the next bill that you really care about I'll support you but that's a lot different than a vote that's a decision that's instigated by the party leadership. These votes are solicited by the sponsor the bill's sponsor and the core group supporting it not by the party. This means that senators are all relatively equal nobody has a whole lot more power than anybody else by virtue of party position or seniority which also doesn't officially count. You can't serve on a committee in the unicameral for two three years and assume you're going to move up and become the chair. Seniority does not officially count. One position that has gotten stronger over the years though is that of speaker. In the early sessions the speaker had almost no power at all he and there's always been a he was just the figurehead. Nobody else had much power either the committee chairs a little bit but not much they were deliberately trying to keep everybody on an equal footing which is commendable in theory but it really makes it hard to get things done. If you've ever been part of a group that formed around a cause or a goal or a need to be met you know how you all sat around and looked at each other until finally somebody said okay I'll take the lead oh good now we're going to make progress right you have to have some of that leadership. As the legislative workload got heavier over the years the unicameral began to strengthen the position of speaker and they kind of were dragged into it kicking and fighting I mean this was against the innate feeling of equality that the body instills in its members. So now the speaker can set the agenda and can designate some super priority bills and if you've been following this in the paper recently you saw the stories about the arguments over many hours of debate should be allowed before we move on to the next bill. The speaker can decide that sort of thing but the speaker still can't say we'll debate this for four hours and then we'll vote he can say we'll debate this for four hours and then we'll move to the next topic there's a big difference there. Well the committee chairs and the executive board are the other positions of power in the legislature but they're not very powerful either a little bit more than they used to be but not much. So as a result of this formal leveling process the body has to rely on other ways to find leadership and one of the most valued is knowledge about an issue. When I surveyed the senators in 2001 for the first edition of One House they said that the most knowledgeable senators not the most senior or the most ideologically pure become the body's leaders and I heard that again when I talked to senators for the second edition of the book a few years later. Well quite a few years later that really echoes the populist and progressive philosophy that underpins this institution. Noras and the others wanted independent members weak leadership and rules that gave everybody plenty of voice. They wanted knowledge and expertise to supplant party loyalty and I would say to a great extent those goals have been met and continue to stay enforced today. So let's look real briefly at a few other goals. One reason that the Unicameral has been able to keep its members on pretty equal footing is that it has embraced that progressive idea that experts and specialists can help the government work better for the people. This was something Noras really pushed and the addition of staff at all levels has helped to make that possible. There are aids for individual senators and for committees and there's a legislative research office, a fiscal office, an audit office and a bill drafter. On the criterion of good pay though the legislature is still way behind. Both pay for staff and pay for senators themselves and I think George Noras the good progressive would be disappointed. He put those dollars into the amendment thinking that would guarantee a decent salary not thinking about how hard it is to change the constitution every time you want to give your legislators a raise. It's just tough. They haven't had an increase in pay since 1987 when we decided they could have $12,000 a year. That's way below minimum wage. Way below because this is not a part time job even though it might look like it. 60 days and 90 days? No. They're on the job almost all the time. In 2012 we tried to raise it and the amendment failed. It's really tough since it's in the constitution. My grandfather was from Falls City, Nebraska. This was years ago and I was saying we need to pay these senators more so they could do more and he said maybe if they do something we'd pay them more. Well that's one way of looking at it I suppose and it was my grandpa for sure. He would have been real comfortable with that constitution that just tried to keep government cheap. At any rate it's difficult for most people, most ordinary people to be state senators when the job is as demanding as it is and the pay is so low. One more factor to consider is the influence of lobbyists in this unique legislative structure. Lobbyists had a really bad name in the 1930's not that they've got a really good name now. Many citizens saw them as representatives of the wealthy elite sneaking around and trying to help their clients at the expense of the real people. Norah said this proposed unicameral could change that for one thing because it would be small it would be hard for lobbyists to hide and because it was nonpartisan lobbyists couldn't just go to the party leaders and persuade them to get their members in line and vote the way the lobbyists are recommended. Best of all though the new unicameral would have no conference committees where Norah said laws were made in secret which was pretty much true. In his model legislature speech he said that lobbyists had told him the easiest legislature to control was one with lots of members because in a case like that, in a big body, in a partisan body, you had to have a few leaders that were going to really have a lot of clout. So all a lobbyist needed to do was convince those few people to get their troops in line and that was all they needed. In a small body with no party leadership the lobbyists would have to convince the majority of the entire group to support their point of view. Norah's had no use for lobbyists. His friend John Senning took a slightly different point of view. Like most political scientists today, Senning recognized the valuable role that lobbyists can play. Providing information, representing the legitimate interests of ordinary people, sometimes in conflict with the legitimate interests of other ordinary people. After all, lobbying is the primary way that most people exercise their first amendment right of petition. I mean there are groups out there representing farmers, teachers, doctors, beer truck drivers. Your interests are represented by at least one group that's lobbying on your behalf, one place or another. So lobbying goes on today under more scrutiny and regulation that it did in the 1930s. I'm not sure Norah's would be happy about that, but I think he'd just have to live with it. One thing I'm sure would make him happy though. He'd be thrilled that the mandated hearing on every bill is still in place. Because if that were not required, a lobbyist could work with a committee chair and just kind of make some legislation disappear. That is not possible here where every bill has to be put out for public debate. Doesn't mean every bill is going to make it to the floor of the legislature for consideration by the whole body. But it will have a public hearing. Guaranteed. Now just a quick word about term limits and their effect on the legislature. In 2012, the University of Nebraska Press published a second edition of One House that includes a chapter on term limits effects. And the interviews that I did with current and former senators and lobbyists and the analysis of what's actually happened in the unicameral suggested that the legislature as an institution may be growing weaker. Here are a couple of factors I identified. The governor and political parties and special interest groups have begun to take advantage of the large number of inexperienced senators. Remember every two years we're electing maybe a third of the senators brand new to this small body of 49 people. The parties in the interest groups have a lot more experience. The governor has a high profile. And they can exert a lot more of their own influence on a group where nobody has been there more than eight years. Nobody. Some of them only have careers, you know, and they decide not to run again. But most of them stay the eight, but that's it. So the governor, the interest groups, the lobbyists might be able to influence policy more easily than in the past. And here's another observation about term limits. At every level of government in the US, it is hard to defeat an incumbent. It's a huge advantage, name recognition, a record, you know, having been out to breakfast with a lot of constituents. So potential candidates are likely to wait until an incumbent decides not to run again and a seat is open. Well, this two-term limit on service in the legislature means that we always know when a seat's going to be open. Again, as I said, a few people decide not to run for a second term, but most do. But then they're done. That seat will be open. And the parties and the special interests can spend time recruiting and grooming and supporting candidates who they believe will strongly advance their positions. And if those candidates win, they are likely to feel some link to the party or the interests that help them get elected. I am not implying anything corrupt here. I don't mean that. There's stronger shared interest, I think, than there used to be because everybody has, every seat comes open at least every eight years. And I think the result is a more partisan spirit in the legislature. Two years ago, you might remember when a big flock of freshmen entered the legislature, we had a real hoo-ha about electing how we're going to elect committee chairs. This has always been done on a written secret ballot. The reason being, even though that goes against this whole concept of transparency, right? But the reason being that that way nobody's going to come back at you and say, hey, you didn't vote for the right person here. He's not your party. She's not part of this group. So we had a big hoo-pla about that and also a whole couple months of wrangling over the rules, and it also influenced, I think, the party spirit or the nonpartisan spirit in the legislature. I think it feels like things have moderated a little bit again. Partly, we probably just elected a bunch of more moderate people last fall. But I also think that maybe some of those people who were so involved with that upheaval a couple years ago might have heard calls to respect the institution and the benefits of nonpartisanship and backed off a little bit. At least I hope that's the case. So to wrap up, we just got to admit that the unicameral is not perfect. Even if it has a profoundly effective structure and thoughtfully designed rules, no institution is perfect. But ours does pretty well, even after all these 80 years. And Nebraskans overwhelmingly like the way their legislature is structured and the way it functions. A poll of Nebraskans in 2015 showed that a stunning 62% approved of the legislature's work and only 26% disapproved. That's a big margin. The other 12% apparently weren't paying attention because they didn't have an opinion. Two items I sponsored on the NACIS survey, the Nebraska annual social indicators survey poll in 2017 indicated that closer to 50% may not be paying attention because they didn't have an opinion. But let's look at those who did. In response to this statement, the Nebraska legislature should return to a two-house partisan body. Only 12% of the total respondents agreed. 41% disagreed. Then there was this statement. Nebraska's legislature seems to work better than two-house legislatures in other states. Only 7% disagreed with that. And 41% said, yes, it does work better. We agree. So Nebraskans who are paying attention tend to think our model works well and shouldn't be changed. I think George Norris would be really proud of the institution he helped to create and the way it's continued to function through the decades. And I think we should be too. And thank you for listening. Good afternoon. I am Jamie Reimer. It's my pleasure to serve as the chair of the University of Nebraska Lincoln Research Council. Thank you for being here this afternoon. And thank you to our speaker for an enlightening discussion this afternoon. If you have any questions about our Unicameral or related topics, I'm sure she would be happy to entertain them now. So during the discussions in the 30s of going to the Unicameral were there discussions on how long a term would be? Was there controversy about how many years a person would serve? No, there really wasn't. At that time, terms were two years only. And the legislature met only every other year. That was true under the bicameral up to that point and it was true under the new Unicameral up to the 60s when they changed the terms to four years and decided they better meet every year because the pace of change had increased and they needed to stay up with things. So it really wasn't part of the discussion at the time. Thank you very much for that. I wondered if any other states have had movements trying to follow our model to create a one house legislature? Yeah, they have actually and I've got that here someplace. Sorry, I should just find it, shouldn't I? It was either 12 or 15 states during the 20s and early 30s that in some way raised the question of a Unicameral. Sometimes it was the governor who mentioned it in a speech. This is something we should consider. Or a bill was introduced but it didn't get very far. Or there was just a group of citizens who brought the idea forward but again it didn't go anywhere. Now South Dakota tried just a couple years ago to go to a one house legislature, not nonpartisan but one house and it failed. So I think it's interesting that George Norris did not recommend that the US Congress should be converted to one house. He thought that the national legislature represented many different interests. This is not a populist idea. I mean because populism would say hey the whole nation's got one unitary interest, right? He jumped off the populist bandwagon at that point and didn't think that the Congress should switch. Other states, I don't know why other states don't. I mean think about the states which are lower population than we are and yet have two houses which cause all the problems that Norris was trying to get away from and I don't know that there's a big advantage to that. The one thing that somebody did mention to me once that I thought was surely worth considering is he said you know the trouble with one house is that if I go to my senator and I don't get any satisfaction from her, I don't have anywhere else to go. If there were two houses I could go to my representative in the other house. Well, yeah you could but we don't. Thanks so much Charlene. As we're looking back on the first 150 years of being a university this was really insightful I think I'd like you to look forward now maybe to our next 150. What challenges to the unicameral or changes in the unicameral do you predict may happen over the coming decades? Wow. I don't know how it's going to turn out but I think the struggle to maintain that nonpartisan spirit, the nonpartisan commitment is going to be tested over and over for the reasons I said term limits being right there at the top of the list and also communication, I'm sorry communication being so instant now and I don't see that I don't see that anybody in our legislature is using Twitter the way some politicians in this country are but it's possible you know and it's easy to go from moderate to extreme really fast in that case. I do think though as I said I've comforted by what I see as a kind of a return to a loyalty to the nonpartisan to the institution and I have to say Senator Laura Ebke who was we were in grad school together we disagree on pretty much 90% of policy issues but man I admire her for her commitment to the institution of the unicameral. She was a real institutionalist. She respected the nonpartisanship, she respected the rules, the openness and it's not that nobody else does but she just stands out in my mind as somebody who really was willing to lay it on the line and unfortunately she didn't get reelected but I think there's hope more of that in the legislature again as we kind of rebound from some of the major tests and threats. Charlene I'm curious about you talked about the original 1937 unicameral having 43 senators I think you said and at one point that changed to 49 that we currently have today. I think it was just one change it wasn't a multiple. So do you see any challenges for the unicameral you mentioned rural urban and there's a lot of conversation about that currently at a national level as well. How did they come about the 43 to 49 what made that change at that time and do you foresee any possibilities in that regard? Yeah in the 60s was when all that happened when we went to meeting every year to the four year terms and so forth there was a real the population had grown enough I believe that people were saw the need to respond more quickly and we also reapportioned and as you might remember all of you I'm sure you do in some way or another that it was not mandatory that state legislatures had to be apportioned according to population in the 30s when we became a unicameral but we did we they apportioned those districts as you know as close as they could to equal population and keeping the urban rural balance in the 60s a couple of really high profile Supreme Court cases Baker v Carr and a few others made it mandatory that you will apportion according to population you have no choice the only body exempt from that is the United States Senate and that's a historical thing so we have to stay with that kind of apportionment now in Nebraska that means of course that senators with equal numbers or almost equal numbers of constituents have different geographical areas to which they are responsible and that can be a problem and it could be that if we expanded the legislature added just added some more people 10 more maybe we could reduce some of that burden on the rural legislators who have a hard time getting from one into their district to the other but that would take a constitutional amendment and a few years ago somebody did propose that I can't think who it was but it didn't go anywhere so thank you that was a fascinating lecture I have a question if you could build more the context the historical context when this debate was happening with George Norris was there an extensive debate within the university was there wider participation or was it just a few individuals and a second part of that will be do you think that the unique comrade in this unique way of governing has really provided a broader support for the university over time as far as I know from the research that I did the university didn't have a position on this I don't think they would have dared to legally but certainly politically but John Sinning was right there right next to Norris through the whole thing and he was very involved in the drawing of the districts when they reapportioned for the one house and so forth and I'm sure there were other individuals too who took part in that movement but I don't have any details I'm sorry and now I can't remember the other part of your question that's an interesting idea is this better for the university than a two house body wow I don't know I don't think it's hurt us I mean I think that and maybe this is true in land grant schools all over but the people of Nebraska really think this is their university my gosh it's mine and my kid better go there if he wants to right it's my legislature and I know who my senator is and I can go there and I think maybe the two things have complimented each other in that people are more involved more aware of what's going on that's probably a benefit sometimes and maybe not other times certainly the goal that the legislature would be more efficient and able to move more quickly should benefit the university I think but I haven't studied it to know to be able to give you any data that would indicate whether it has or not so sorry throughout the entire lecture there's been a lot of discussion on paper the idea of the unicameral being nonpartisan and without influence of any one political party obviously that is never entirely true in practice you mentioned one senator in particular that had a particular allegiance to the institution of the unicameral and its ideal form I was wondering if you could maybe provide some more insight through your meetings with state legislatures and what you've been able to observe over the past couple of years and to kind of the degree to which partisanship is still an issue how much state parties are actually able to influence individual senators and kind of to what degree that is actually prevalent regardless of what the ideal form of the unicameral should actually be as I said I think term limits have made a big difference in that regard you know you're gonna even if it's just senator in the back of your head you're gonna dance with the person who brought you right and if you got lots and lots of help being elected from a political party I don't mean they paid you off I don't mean that because I don't think that's happening but you certainly would be inclined to listen and the reason you're recruited in the first place is because the party saw you as somebody whose views aligned with theirs this is true in both parties I'm not you know there's no villain and hero here so yeah I think that that really probably more than anything else the term limits have had a made that made a leap in that threat to non partisanship we've had some governors who are outstandingly effective politicians and they again because you've got inexperienced senators or at least that makes it more obvious the governor has been able to do his best to influence the legislature we've interestingly you know that when they passed a couple of very controversial bills the governor vetoed the legislature turned around and overrode the veto in several instances so they're not just lying down and playing dead by any means but then you have a you know we had the referendum then on the death penalty and that's another whole story next question here okay thank you I wanted to know what do you think of the Ernie Chambers and the role he's had in the unicameral shaping the institution that's interesting I think Senator Chambers is an institutionalist I mean I really do I think he really values the institution of the legislature really respects it he is famous for knowing the rules better than anybody else and using them to his advantage I think he's a voice that needs to be heard absolutely needs to be heard can he frustrate the process yes he sure can we'd all probably just assume that he'd stop doing that but he represents people whose voice needs to be there and so he does that in the way that seems to him most effective it's been interesting that he chose that path you know to be on his own an outlier not to work within the system so much but I think he probably would stand up here and defend this one-house non-partisan thing as much as I do Charlene a few years ago there was on the ballot was the option of increasing the number of terms to three as well I think it was the same year to raise the annual salary of senators and both were voted down pretty strongly how do you square that up in terms of Nebraska's kind of populist bent yeah we people have said that it was you're talking about the term limits increasing the number of terms to three and increasing the salary and maybe putting those both on the ballot at the same time was not such a good idea strategically it might have been better to go with one or the other and then you know come back later how does that square with populism I don't think it does I mean I think the term limits are not a populist notion well maybe they are I mean because populists think that the legislature is the pass through for me right we I us the people should be able to make our will known through the legislature and they just listen to what we say and then they do it because we are a unitary people and hardly anybody is that pure a populist but that idea can really influence the way people look at their legislature and legislators I think the money is just a crying shame it's just I don't know I think people you know if they do something maybe we'd pay them more I don't think they're aware of how much work is involved in being a legislator and I don't think they've taken that step of thinking about okay well I don't like it that the elites are in the legislature well who else can afford to I mean the people that are there are not all big wealthy folks by any means which you've got to have an independent source of income or you can't do this and even the people with I mean they're making a sacrifice to do this so and they're getting paid hardly anything so you gotta think maybe they have a sense of public service why else would you do it and even if you disagree with them even if you don't like their their philosophies and their policies why else would they do this unless they thought that they have an idea that somebody should consider for the sake of the people and the state were there any other questions this afternoon last one include on your list of heroes of the unicam Senator John Norton was the chair of the rules committee and I think he was a hero he you know the big thing was this required hearing on every bill that they put into the rules that's a huge that just is not the case in so many states so that was a big thing and Norton really they were trying when they wrote those first rules to make everybody equal you know they really wanted weak leadership they wanted everybody to have a chance to talk to represent this body of the people looking over their shoulders and he did an excellent job in the legislature of making that happen and of course as I said some of it we've had to back away from because of changing times and even at the time they started out with a committee of the whole every bill was brought to the committee of the whole where the presiding officer steps down you know they all just talk about it they don't take any action they reconvene as the legislature and they make a decision or they talk about SMAR and then they make a decision well they thought they were going to be out of here in no time this is going to be so much more efficient they were here until the end of June and people were getting these were farmers a lot of them you know they couldn't get home plant their crops this was not going to work so they had to you know almost immediately start pulling back from that a little bit but Norton really knew how to make the system work to the goals that the people behind the amendment had in mind so I'd say he's a hero I think John Sending's a hero too because he was very involved with kind of helping them shepherd things along through those first through that first session so go UNL right so thank you so much this is really fun Please join me in thanking Sharolina for a wonderful enlightening presentation or a unique camera and as a token to our lecturers we have a framed print of the Nebraska lecture for you Sharline so as a token of our appreciation for something to remember this about I enjoyed that. Another round of applause for Sharline