Opinion: Allowing a student vote would be a good start

H ere at UNC, the decision by the Board of Governors to cap the amount of money that could be used from student tuition toward need-based aid provoked hours of debate, careful consideration and close attention from this paper. But at yesterday’s BOG meeting, the issue was given mere minutes of tossed-off attention.

There is a disconnect between the issues that matter to students and those that consume the attention of the members of the Board of Governors.

BOG members, while well-meaning, are too far removed from student voices to make fully informed decisions. There is a vital need for greater student representation in their ranks.

To ameliorate this problem, the student representative of the Association of Student Governments should be promoted from an ex-officio member to full membership, and the board should consider giving ex-officio spaces to representatives of each school in the UNC system. Barring this, the BOG should actively solicit a wide array of student voices when making decisions so crucial to the quality of their education. The variety of interests represented among the state’s campuses cannot be sufficiently represented by one non-voting member.

The board’s members have ties to the Chapel Hill campus in overwhelming numbers. And with the state’s historically black institutions in particular in danger of cuts, it seems unfair that not one voting member of the Board attended a historically black school, in or out of North Carolina.

The BOG’s decisions on need-based aid did not mark the first time they have fenced decisions in with little regard for student voices.

Infamously, in August 2013, the BOG unanimously voted to ban gender-neutral housing despite overwhelming support for its creation by student groups and countless hours of work and advocacy from passionate, driven students.

Similarly, the BOG instituted a policy that drastically cut the drop-add period for students from eight weeks to ten days without consideration of different needs for different campuses and without the input of UNC administrators and students with strong reservations about the change.

These decisions are emblematic of an unacceptable disregard for student engagement.

The student absence from the voting body of the Board of Governors can largely be explained by the necessity that voting members be able to take the long view. Students, who are usually in and out of the University within four years, might not have the perspective or institutional know-how to effectively act in the system’s best interests.

But this fact has been used against students to pigeonhole their demands with the hope that those movements will die down once the group spearheading them graduates. At any rate, the risks detailed above are not sufficient to deny students at least one voting representative whose vote, alongside the 32 non-student votes, would not compromise the board’s ability to govern.

The speak-out organized by the N.C. Student Power Union tomorrow for 8 a.m. at the Spangler Building will be an excellent opportunity for students to display their dissatisfaction with the status quo.