Opposition to Student Fees
Evelyn Reiman discusses how her proposals for fee increases, which she believed necessary to support staffing, buildings, and infrastructure, led to intense relationships with student leaders because of general student opposition.
Interview on 2012-04-26 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I think it came about
00:00:04.259
really in the last third of my career,
00:00:08.255
and that was when campus became much more-
00:00:16.510
well when students became much more
00:00:19.919
hostile toward student fee increases.
00:00:24.683
That's an area where I can get in my head why there's so much opposition to that,
00:00:32.393
and where it made it difficult for me
00:00:36.823
in my role with Talley Student Center
00:00:39.233
is that that one fee was supporting four buildings,
00:00:43.397
including utilities, not just staff and programs but utilities.
00:00:48.379
So we had four buildings, one fee; the oldest building was eighty years old.
00:00:53.802
The department of insurance had threatened to close it down
00:00:58.280
because of the fire hazards of it.
00:01:01.933
So going to bat for student fee increases,
00:01:08.668
I felt that there were times where
00:01:14.317
I had to move pretty delicately because the student leaders I was working with,
00:01:19.083
I mean those were students who were going to be voting on the student fee increase that I had proposed,
00:01:24.790
and so there was this understandable hostility to any kind of increase,
00:01:29.954
and at the same time knowing that-.
00:01:34.045
There was a year where one utility bill went up two hundred and twenty-two percent,
00:01:39.716
right, so you really got to the point where you were talking about is there a program
00:01:44.442
or a whole department we're going to eliminate,
00:01:46.712
or do we cut the lights at a certain time,
00:01:51.010
because we didn't get any state monies, or very few state monies to support those facilities.
00:01:57.098
So in terms of student leaders
00:02:00.100
I don't feel like there were any partings with student leaders,
00:02:06.084
I mean there were no irreconcilable differences,
00:02:09.387
but it did sometimes put us in this kind of awkward position
00:02:13.105
because I knew that they had to take a public position
00:02:17.248
not only in terms of what they said but in terms of how they cast their votes
00:02:21.106
and that it was often on something I felt really strongly
00:02:25.496
we needed to fund or finance
00:02:28.165
because I felt like the need was significant
00:02:31.949
and that the consequences of no fee increase were really
00:02:36.241
to the negative for the student body at whole.
00:02:39.403
So I would say as student fees and tuition continued to go up
00:02:45.375
and there became much more of a kind of backlash and adversarial reaction to those increases,
00:02:51.437
and then I characterize it as the political reality
00:02:56.818
that the student leaders seemed resigned
00:03:00.768
that there was no way they were going to be able to impact tuition increases
00:03:04.722
and so the sense that I had that they would then take all of their focus on student fees,
00:03:10.008
and there are a lot of student fees
00:03:12.902
and I'm focused now on the ones that I was championing.
00:03:16.511
So tuition, they would just kind of be resigned, like, well, it's going to go up no matter what we do,
00:03:22.323
for the most part, and then over here the fees were-.
00:03:25.727
You might be in the senate hearings again until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning
00:03:30.899
where they were grilling you over seventy-five cents.
00:03:33.767
So that got to be kind of intense. [Laughs]
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.