Letter: ​What kind of Carolina do we want to have?

TO THE EDITOR:

As an alumnus, I expected my main duty to be deleting emails from various arms of the UNC bureaucracy asking for money. 

On certain occasions, sure, I’d have to stumble around Franklin Street, sling my arm around a stranger and whisper my graduation year (“16”) without context. 

They’d walk away, with a story, and I’d lay marooned in front of the Ackland Art Gallery shop imaging TOPO’s balcony as the side of a ship and myself a jetsam from it.

That’s why they send you a sailor’s hat when there is a building named after you.

But, I cannot simply lie in reverie with one of the people for whom a building is named, our conjoining crapulence (it means vomit, so now who is gross­, me or your imagination?) a personal swimming pool while we abjure responsibility.

So, let it be printed in bold font, on the front page of the newspaper, alone: CHASE RICE WAS ACTUALLY THE JUBILEE PERFORMER LAST YEAR.http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2016/02/opinion-chase-rice-is-a-god-awful-choice-for-spring-jubilee

Did they actually do it?

Well, in any case, know it was not an illusion, a sick joke, a prank gone wrong where your friend gets mad and leaves the sleepover or even a part of someone’s initiation into Gimghoul: Chase Rice was paid $77,000 to play Jubilee in a legitimate manner.http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2016/02/cuab-announces-chase-rice-as-jubilee-performer

Only about 61 percent of the tickets sold. On top of this, CUAB canceled Homecoming to create a Frankenstein concert with ample amounts funding to get a supposedly big name.http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2016/04/rice-returns-for-jubilant-performance

That’s a 100 percent reduction in Homecoming concerts from last year.

Collective campus memory can sometimes be complex with the boiling over, up and out of a fresh batch of young “global leaders” every year (there are tons of phrases like this in alumni emails too). 

There are traditions, but much of both the good and bad just gets flushed. After four years, it’s pretty much a totally new school being defined by its students.

The question for each round of students comes with moments like these. 

Will you make the same mistake twice? 

Or will you stand against the long shadowed imperium that is CUAB (just go with it) and demand a better concert?

What kind of UNC will you create?

Jacob Rosenberg

Class of ‘16