'Bad Guy' Sometimes Does Good

When a local television station broadcast a segment about last week's debate on whether to eliminate the late-night, on-campus shuttle service SAFE Escort, the coverage was obviously one-sided and supportive of a few students' fight to maintain funding for the service.

Those few students put up a decent fight the past few weeks, even suckering students entering the Undergraduate Library into signing a petition stating that they believe the golf carts should continue shuttling students around.

But it's easy to rally around certain causes -- who would say they're opposed to the environment, animal rights or safety issues?

It's much harder to be the bad guy who decides that programs aimed at helping these causes are not always wholly beneficial and sometimes should be eliminated.

Luckily, some members of student government were willing to be the bad guys. Instead of just seeing SAFE Escort as a service that promotes safety, the Safety and Security Committee saw the program for what it is -- poorly managed and a redundancy in services.

The committee unanimously made the decision last week to cut the $32,000 that had funded SAFE Escort after considering its past inefficiencies, including the discovery that former leaders had used the funds to fill their own gas tanks. They also considered the core problem of SAFE Escort filling a need that is already being met by the Point-2-Point shuttle service.

It makes sense to shut down the service when taking these factors into account, but it's hard to be the guy who makes a decision that others might view as being against safety.

But maybe we need more bad guys, more people willing to take the unpopular, realistic stance.

Some of the best and most essential decisions made on campus recently have been unpopular but have created the best results.

Take, for example, the Carolina Athletic Association, a group mired in the past few years by rumors of corruption and unfair ticket distribution practices. The group has worked in the past two administrations to tweak its systems to increase fairness -- but not always with popular results.

One of their most significant moves came in October 2001 when CAA's then-President Reid Chaney worked to eliminate the practice of students getting multiple bracelets and then cutting off the excess ones when the lottery number was announced.

Chaney changed the system so that students had to swipe their UNC ONE Cards when getting a bracelet, therefore ensuring that students could only get one bracelet each.

Many students grumbled and moaned in response, upset at the longer lines and upset that they could no longer better their chances of getting decent basketball seats. In the end, however, Chaney created a fairer system that puts honest students on equal footing with those who previously cheated.

Then there are Student Congress's stingy practices last year that left many student groups bemoaning the meager amount of student fees that were allocated. Student groups were turned away with little or no funds to run their organizations -- a very unpopular move indeed.

But it was a necessary move for Student Congress to get its budget on track. It had been saddled with previous Congress' deficit spending of student activity fees, leaving the body in a financial hole so deep that the light of day was hard to see.

Because of its frugal, yet unpopular, ways, Student Congress was able to eliminate all student government debt by last February and pass a budget that allotted $28,000 per semester to hand out to student groups, ensuring that no group with a legitimate request would leave without at least some funds.

More people need to realize that in the end, the unpopular guy can be your best friend.

Karey Wutkowski can be reached at karey@email.unc.edu.