Student Power

Eric Moore describes the influence of student groups, including the African American Coordinating Committee.

Interview on 2017-05-17 00:00:00 -0400

Transcript

00:00:00.000 I mean there was a concern on a lot of our part that students were not being-and, yeah, we would call it power back then
00:00:11.331 but I would say more student influence, because there would be decisions made that didn't necessarily seem to be in the best interest of the students
00:00:21.756 Student African American Coordinating Committee, decided we're having a black person in the homecoming parade,
00:00:27.861 and so one of our colleagues had a convertible, Mustang convertible, so it's now just a matter of strategically planning how you were going to break the parade line to get her in.
00:00:40.372 There were some clandestine meetings discussing how they were going to do it and I was getting concerned that again, knowing where we were, there might be a reaction that wasn't going to necessarily be favorable
00:00:52.489 to them trying to break into the parade and somebody feeling like, ah, we got to show you your place.
00:00:57.080 So I spilled the beans, quietly, to some administrators that this was being planned.
00:01:02.525 Well fortunately they responded with, okay; then we'll just put her in the parade. It wasn't an exclusionary thing but it was almost a case of, you know, we never really thought about this,
00:01:15.360 and I tended to find once I got inside that a lot of the decisions that were being made did not necessarily include student input
00:01:26.532 so what they decided didn't necessarily sit well with the students.
00:01:30.874 So I would like to think that the whole push in terms of student power was designed to listen to us,
00:01:37.395 we might have something that we could contribute to the situation, and I think that began to happen because
00:01:45.100 with Cathy [Sterling] and many that followed us as the "revolutionaries" there was still a constant push to listen to the students.
00:01:54.688 So all of those kind of came as part of the push for: Listen to us,
00:02:03.429 because we think we have something to contribute and we would prefer that you at least take our input and then if you make the decision, fine,
00:02:11.902 as opposed to making a decision without even checking with those that are going to be affected.