As Mary Cooper and her supporters cheered in jubilation after her resounding victory in the student body president runoff election Friday night, Hogan Medlin watched quietly in the corner.
It was in that room in Carroll Hall that Medlin, the current student body president, emerged victorious by a nearly identical margin one year ago.
In the weeks following his election, Medlin set to work on a strategy for limiting tuition increases looming on the horizon.
But after months of planning and proposals, he cast the lone dissenting vote against a measure to raise tuition by 6.5 percent, the maximum permissible percentage, in a meeting of the Board of Trustees.
It was a glaring instance of a student body president who was unable to deliver what students wanted most on the issue they cared the most about.
This, along with an election cycle that seemed at many points petty and bizarre, challenges the position’s perceived influence and suggests that the role of the student body president in the tuition process is — like Medlin’s vote — merely symbolic.
Medlin, former student body presidents and administrators alike said the top student leader does levy influence through persuasion, but that their power is easily trumped by larger forces.
“The student body president has no power,” said Bob Winston, chairman of the Board of Trustees. “It has the power of persuasion — the power of the ability to speak to the board at length and to be involved in the process of setting tuition.”
Power through persuasion