When the decision about Student Stores was announced last week — after 100 years of operation, Barnes & Noble College Booksellers would privatize the store — people across campus and Chapel Hill were quick to react. Some praised the decision, while others lamented. Activists rallied as employees adjusted their plans. Administrators negotiated details; social media users opined within minutes of the news breaking.
And, in a sense, our board joins in many of these sentiments — these reactions. But in another way, we find our opinions to be a little more convoluted, and our reaction more difficult to pin down.
Mostly, we wish we weren’t simply reactors — that our involvement wasn’t limited to a simple response. For an institution with as rich a history as UNC Student Stores, these kinds of decisions carry weight on the community. And when both jobs and millions in scholarship money hang in the balance, we thoroughly understand that no decision can be simple. It’s possible that, given access to the information that the committee had, we would have made a decision to privatize too. But we won’t know; we weren’t there.
We weren’t able to be there when the companies presented, when the committee questioned them, or when they deliberated. And when the public does not receive access to the information that the decision-makers analyze, then we can’t engage thoughtfully with the reasoning throughout the process.
In the case of Student Stores, the student body holds multiple relationships with the stores: business stakeholder, scholarship beneficiary, customer group, and employee group all in one. And with that level of community investment — in the inputs and the outputs — comes a responsibility of transparency to the affected community.
We understand that the bidding process necessitates a level of discretion, but we believe that it certainly would have been possible to provide the community with more information and more agency in this process.
This leads to our last concern: community business. At the heart of this issue, we do not stand flatly against privatization, nor are we opposed to new ideas of efficiency. We are, though, opposed to any reckless pursuit of these in the abstract —the distant shareholder, the far-away beneficiary — as opposed to concrete local gains. At the end of the day, what we want to see is these efficient, community-run businesses thrive on campus as their hard-earned profits remain here, rooted in our community.
And without empowering the community voice, we worry that these priorities can fall by the wayside. We sincerely hope that the loss of The Daily Grind on campus is not evidence of this.
