Tuition Increase Controversy
Angelo Anthony Caravano and Steven Wilson Quick
Tony Caravano recalls continued controversies involving tuition increases during his tenure as student body president, and his efforts to keep tuition affordable for NC State students.
Interview on 2011-11-04 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Caravano: I mean we used the stories from Amanda-basically just to take a step back.
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Quick: Personal Stories was the name of the book.
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Quick: The Personal Stories Project.
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Caravano: Personal Stories Project, yeah. So the tuition increases, you know there's an interesting role as a student body president.
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You understand, or you come to understand,
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the innards of this place, the guts of how it operates and works,
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so I understood the need for additional revenue coming into the campus,
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but at the time in North Carolina the middle class was just being squeezed
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the students that had need, they were going to be covered, right? So like I was receiving financial aid, I was probably going to receive enough money to make this work.
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Students whose parents could afford to just write the check at the beginning of the semester, they were going to be fine as well.
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heir parents were going to help them afford it.
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It was the students who were working to pay and the students' parents who were working to pay to get them there, that's who we were really worried about,
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so that was the source of the opposition
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Some of the trustees had a hard time with the increases because they understood that.
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We made that really palpable for them by bringing real people and real faces in front of them
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with the book that Amanda prepared and also just by bringing real people to those meetings.
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So I think it was different. We didn't do the protests that some of our predecessors had done and the rallies,
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those things hadn't yielded different results,
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so we brought them to actual meetings to talk to the people who were going to make the decisions.
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I didn't vote the same as the other trustees on those votes, I'm pretty sure,
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but at least we had voiced our opposition in a way that I thought was articulate
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and in a way that also gave us a lot of credibility for other issues
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that came down the road later and then for years to come.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.