Senior Cierra Hinton remembers when she attended N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University’s Homecoming football game during the fall of her senior year of high school.
She can’t remember the team that the Aggies played, or even if they won, but she can remember the feeling on the university’s Greensboro campus.
“It was a real family atmosphere,” Hinton said. “It was a great feeling of people coming home, a very exciting feeling for a student. That feeling made me want to go to A&T.”
Now Hinton, president of the Carolina Union Activities Board, says she hopes to bring some of that feeling to UNC through a proposed fee that would raise money directly for the group’s annual Homecoming concert.
And although the amount of the fee hasn’t been determined, the proposal — and the bubbling student discontent that arose when indie-rock group the New Pornographers headlined this year’s show — underlines common misconceptions about the organization of the University’s Homecoming week.
This year’s UNC Homecoming concert was contracted at $40,000. The unofficial ticket total for the Oct. 29 show was 703, the Carolina Union Box Office reported.
Last year’s Passion Pit show, which cost CUAB $99,000, sold nearly 4,500 tickets.
“It’s really hard to bring in an artist that everybody is going to like,” Hinton said.
CUAB receives a third of the student activity fee, which forms the core of its annual operating budget.