Student Leaders Severely Fumbled Handling of Tuition Issue

Student credibility on this campus was dealt a crushing blow Thursday.

But not at the hands of campus administrators.

The injury was entirely self-inflicted.

In his opening remarks to the Board of Trustees on Thursday, Student Body President Justin Young touted the importance of student input, claiming that students make up with zeal and idealism for what they lack in life experience.

An ironic statement, because I saw neither zeal nor idealism from Young or any other student leader at Thursday's meeting.

What I saw was a student body president, a Graduate and Professional Student Federation president and a set of student body president candidates going through the motions of acting like they cared about an issue they thought they were "supposed" to care about in a last-ditch attempt to boost their own reputations and look good in the papers.

And trustees and administrators saw the same thing.

Frankly, it was hard to miss.

Young and GPSF President Mikisha Brown's presentation of students' "demands" to the BOT was not only riddled with grammatical errors, it contained logical inconsistencies and omissions, which were pointed out by more than one trustee.

"I take a little issue with the fact that most of what y'all have said is that tuition is the only thing we are looking at," Trustee Paul Fulton said at one point in the meeting.

"You're either not aware of what's really going on, or it's misrepresentation."

Worse yet, the unpracticed, stream-of-consciousness, monotone manner in which the student argument was delivered more closely resembled a class presentation than a zealous, idealistic defense of students' interests.

And then there were the protesters.

If you actually can legitimately call "protesters" 30 people who show up nearly two hours into the meeting with a few mostly irrelevant signs, disrupt the discussion as they find seats and filter out one by one before any vote is even taken on tuition.

They, too, were sorely lacking in both idealism and zeal.

As far as I could tell, these students never actually protested anything during the meeting.

It's a little sad when a group of protesters don't feel compelled to sit through debate on the very proposal they are protesting.

I am left to assume that the "demonstrators" simply were protesting having to dish out more money.

Seems like a pretty unsophisticated argument for a group of people complaining about not being taken seriously.

But really.

What should I expect? They are only protesters, right?

They are there to direct attention to an issue and to make their basic stance on that issue known.

The complex arguments are meant to be made by the student leaders elected by the student body and subsequently entrusted with the responsibility of understanding the issues' intricacies and taking a firm stand on what is best for students.

At least that is how I have always understood it.

But if I'm right, students could have a lot more to be scared about than a $400 tuition hike.

It is important that next year's student leaders have the passion about their positions, the respect for the gravity of their responsibility and the solid grasp of the issues facing them that this year's leaders seem to lack.

Five of the seven student body president candidates found the time to participate in Thursday's protest.

But two didn't bother to stay for the vote, and not a single one felt it was important to attend any part of the meeting other than the segment dealing with tuition -- a point that Chancellor James Moeser took note of and made reference to when he was trying to explain why students might not have such a solid understanding of the tuition issue.

Hard to find a response to that one.

The students at Thursday's meeting asked to be taken seriously even though they themselves failed to take their responsibilities or convictions seriously at all.

It's little wonder the students' request not to pass a $400 tuition increase that would go into effect next year was not honored.

In fact, it's little wonder that trustees responded to Young and Brown's presentation by telling the duo to do their homework and refusing to offer a second to Young's motion that the BOT incorporate students' demands into the tuition principles it adopted.

The one point that Young successfully conveyed Thursday was that he felt the student voice has been ignored during the tuition debate.

But as Trustees David Pardue and Richard Stevens both pointed out, students have been given several opportunities to make their stance on tuition known and have been unsuccessful in convincing administrators that they have a salient argument for why tuition should not increase.

The problem isn't that the student voice has not been heard.

The problem is that the student voice has been incredibly unconvincing.

DTH Editor Katie Hunter can be reached at krhunter@email.unc.edu.