The student union when it started here was just a truly student union.
A group of students got together and said, hey, how about we try this,
and for the longest time it ran itself.
The students made the decisions about the money. It was truly a student organization
and "student union" didn't mean a building.
It was a student union.
It was unionizing students.
Whether there was a majority of students ever involved or not I don't know,
but I do know that where the money goes
is where people are going to get interested.
Over time--
and I talk about it in the report.
I think I document it but I can't swear to it now.
But it had gone from students running it
to becoming a building.
All the money was collected by student affairs.
The administration slowly but surely
took it over completely and
one of the places that it was
shocking when I was there,
when people got it, was Friends of the College.
Friends of the College, wonderful organization, no doubt about that,
but it got a huge chunk of that money to support it,
in addition of course to tickets and things like that, but who made that decision?
Who made that decision? That was a question: Who made that decision?
So somehow it ended up that the student government got to use the building,
we had offices, the student senate could meet there,
of course student organizations could meet there and things,
but we no longer operated it.
The students no longer operated any of it,
and not only that, there were decisions being made about the money that weren't even
necessarily connected to the union itself,
to the building, to the running of the building,
to the running of the programs that were there.
Friends of the College was a perfect example.
It was the student fees. The union fees, because one of them was a student union fee,
was going to operating Friends of the College,
which no question that that--as a teenager my mom got us to many of the wonderful programs
--its value, but the question was,
who made that decision, do the students know that they are doing this?
Because many students, like me with the athletics,
they're not going to go to a ballet, they're not going to go to a symphony,
so why are they putting money in that they have no control over?
And it was that awareness, because certainly by the time I came in,
unions always being a hated thing in the South,
the student union had no connection with the word union. It was just the building.