The Transformation of the Student Union
Cathy Sterling reflects on what she saw as the shift of the student union from being a group of students run and supported by themselves to being a building on campus supported by student fees collected by Student Affairs.
Interview on 2010-10-21 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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The student union when it started here was just a truly student union.
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A group of students got together and said, hey, how about we try this,
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and for the longest time it ran itself.
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The students made the decisions about the money. It was truly a student organization
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and "student union" didn't mean a building.
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It was a student union.
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It was unionizing students.
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Whether there was a majority of students ever involved or not I don't know,
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but I do know that where the money goes
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is where people are going to get interested.
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Over time--
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and I talk about it in the report.
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I think I document it but I can't swear to it now.
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But it had gone from students running it
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to becoming a building.
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All the money was collected by student affairs.
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The administration slowly but surely
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took it over completely and
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one of the places that it was
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shocking when I was there,
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when people got it, was Friends of the College.
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Friends of the College, wonderful organization, no doubt about that,
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but it got a huge chunk of that money to support it,
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in addition of course to tickets and things like that, but who made that decision?
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Who made that decision? That was a question: Who made that decision?
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So somehow it ended up that the student government got to use the building,
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we had offices, the student senate could meet there,
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of course student organizations could meet there and things,
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but we no longer operated it.
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The students no longer operated any of it,
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and not only that, there were decisions being made about the money that weren't even
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necessarily connected to the union itself,
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to the building, to the running of the building,
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to the running of the programs that were there.
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Friends of the College was a perfect example.
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It was the student fees. The union fees, because one of them was a student union fee,
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was going to operating Friends of the College,
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which no question that that--as a teenager my mom got us to many of the wonderful programs
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--its value, but the question was,
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who made that decision, do the students know that they are doing this?
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Because many students, like me with the athletics,
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they're not going to go to a ballet, they're not going to go to a symphony,
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so why are they putting money in that they have no control over?
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And it was that awareness, because certainly by the time I came in,
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unions always being a hated thing in the South,
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the student union had no connection with the word union. It was just the building.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
