SEYMOUR LACHMAN, Director
Hugh L. Carey Center for Government Reform
Carey Center WEB SITE
Office: Campus Hall, 3rd floor
Campus 718-420-4131
Home 718-232-5470
Cell 917-968-6534
E-mail seymour.lachman@wagner.edu

     In 1996, Seymour Lachman left his job as dean for the City University of New York to run for the New York State Senate in a special election. Previously, he had taught the theory of government at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College.
     When Lachman left the Senate after 9 years, he wrote "Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse," published in September 2006 by the New Press.
     He came to Wagner College in 2006 at the invitation of President Richard Guarasci to create a center for the study and advancement of government reform initiatives.
     Read more about Carey Center programs and publications on its WEB SITE.
     Senator Lachman is currently working on a book about Governor Carey and the New York City bailout, "Hugh Carey and the New York Fiscal Crisis: How America’s Empire State Avoided Bankruptcy," to be published in 2010 by the State University of New York Press.

PROFILE from Wagner Magazine, Fall 2007:

    Nearly a dozen years ago, City University of New York Dean SEYMOUR P. LACHMAN left the ivory tower to join the rough-and-tumble world of New York state politics.
    Today, former New York state Senator Seymour P. Lachman is a distinguished professor of government and politics at Wagner College and founding director of the college’s new Hugh L. Carey Center for Government Reform.
    The tale of how he got from there to here is, in part, the subject of Lachman’s most recent book, "Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American State-house," published last September by the New Press.
    Lachman’s nine-year career in the New York State Legislature began in January 1996, when state Senator Martin Solomon called it quits after 17 years to accept an appointment as a civil court judge. Democratic party politicos quickly drafted Lachman as Solomon’s successor, paving the way for his vic-tory in a special election—the 62-year-old’s first-ever venture into electoral politics.
    The City University dean was not, however, an utter stranger to Gotham politics.
    “I had taught the theory of government for a number of years at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College,” Lachman says. “I was also the youngest president of the old New York City Board of Education, when it had much more power, and there was a lot of politics in that.
    “The political world was not new to me. I just didn’t realize how it operated from the inside.”
    Lachman quickly discovered that, to understand how the New York state capital actually functioned, he need grasp but one fact: Everything in Albany depends on the say-so of the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the Assembly speaker—hence, the title for Lachman’s book, "Three Men in a Room."
    His book outlines many damning ills of Albany politics:

• Legislative committees functioned in name only. Only if a house leader okayed a bill did it stand a chance of being enacted into law.
• House leaders gave hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money each year to loyal legislators for distribution to local governments and nonprofit groups. The purpose: to secure the legislators’ re-election.
• House leaders jimmied the legislative redistricting process to create safe seats for their supporters—and unwinnable seats for those deemed “troublemakers.”

    “As I look back,” Lachman says, “my years in the New York State Legislature were very disturbing, especially after I got to know how the place takes care of its own and blindsides the voters.”
    Yet these experiences, far from turning him away from government and politics, have driven him to become even more engaged. From his new platform of action at Wagner College, he’s launching a reform project on a grand scale.
    “I’ve concluded that only top-to-bottom reform can bring a semblance of democratic rule to Albany,” says Lachman.
    He’s not just talking about specific remedies, like campaign finance reform and term limits, as political Band Aids for the Empire State’s body politic. To truly fix all that ails New York’s undemocratic form of government, Lachman writes, nothing short of “radical surgery, a constitutional convention” would do the job.
    “I believe that a constitutional convention, which would throw open the entire system of governance to reexamination, is the most important place to begin,” Lachman writes.