Cooper gives cause for optimism

Between the beach-going and ensuing aloe vera baths of a Florida summer, I found myself comfortably numb to the comings and goings of North Carolina’s past few months.

At first, there was no reason for concern. The Tar Heels returned to the College World Series. Incoming freshmen — not “first years” in this column — made their annual pilgrimage to CTOPS. From my garage apartment in St. Petersburg, Fla., all seemed quiet in Chapel Hill, my northern front.

Of course, deep budget cuts were brewing, but we’d prepared for the worst. Or so I thought.

But one afternoon, as I retreated indoors to escape the heat, I opened my computer to discover something more glaring than the afternoon sun. It was the news — and it wasn’t pretty.

Headlines spoke of steep cuts, ones deeper than what were projected all along. I was shocked to see that the state’s flagship university, my university, would bear the brunt of them to the tune of 18 percent.

Again, I escaped, this time to my email. And as I did, I felt a warmness tingling up from the keyboard through my arms. No, it wasn’t the perpetual sunburn this redhead could never seem to kick. It was the email urging me, a Pennsylvanian, to contact my legislator to stand up for UNC-Chapel Hill.

This wasn’t a gaffe. I had willfully enrolled in the listserv the recently anointed student body president, Mary Cooper, devised to deploy students on a lobbying mission. I’d anticipated these emails, but it never occurred to me how good they would feel.

As it turned out, this summer was no time for students, or their student body representative, to rest. And though Chapel Hill will still absorb the deepest cut of the UNC system and of the past few years, it’s comforting to know that students were at least empowered to do everything they could.

Before Cooper, each student body president approached their largely arbitrary office in a different way. For you seniors who cared to pay attention freshman year, there was J.J. Raynor, a student body president who knew how to meet the Board of Trustees halfway. She made rational arguments and understood that it was easier to stomach change that was phased — rather than rushed — into place.

At least for now, Cooper appears poised to make the most out of her symbolic seat at the table. She oversaw a good faith attempt at mobilizing students and she nudged her way into a budget deal that, for all its faults, spared students from another unforeseen tuition supplement.

For that, the student body has her and some savvy administrators to thank.

But there’s always the next year to be worried about and, as her predecessors have shown, a lot of learning to be done and progress to be made — or not.