WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.574 Caravano: I mean we used the stories from Amanda-basically just to take a step back. 2 00:00:04.574 --> 00:00:08.061 Quick: Personal Stories was the name of the book. 3 00:00:08.061 --> 00:00:10.774 Quick: The Personal Stories Project. 4 00:00:10.774 --> 00:00:16.770 Caravano: Personal Stories Project, yeah. So the tuition increases, you know there's an interesting role as a student body president. 5 00:00:16.770 --> 00:00:19.946 You understand, or you come to understand, 6 00:00:19.946 --> 00:00:25.015 the innards of this place, the guts of how it operates and works, 7 00:00:25.015 --> 00:00:29.475 so I understood the need for additional revenue coming into the campus, 8 00:00:29.475 --> 00:00:35.151 but at the time in North Carolina the middle class was just being squeezed 9 00:00:35.151 --> 00:00:44.293 the students that had need, they were going to be covered, right? So like I was receiving financial aid, I was probably going to receive enough money to make this work. 10 00:00:44.293 --> 00:00:50.574 Students whose parents could afford to just write the check at the beginning of the semester, they were going to be fine as well. 11 00:00:50.574 --> 00:00:53.340 heir parents were going to help them afford it. 12 00:00:53.340 --> 00:01:00.215 It was the students who were working to pay and the students' parents who were working to pay to get them there, that's who we were really worried about, 13 00:01:00.215 --> 00:01:03.319 so that was the source of the opposition 14 00:01:03.319 --> 00:01:07.686 Some of the trustees had a hard time with the increases because they understood that. 15 00:01:07.686 --> 00:01:12.177 We made that really palpable for them by bringing real people and real faces in front of them 16 00:01:12.177 --> 00:01:16.371 with the book that Amanda prepared and also just by bringing real people to those meetings. 17 00:01:16.371 --> 00:01:22.966 So I think it was different. We didn't do the protests that some of our predecessors had done and the rallies, 18 00:01:22.966 --> 00:01:25.644 those things hadn't yielded different results, 19 00:01:25.644 --> 00:01:29.543 so we brought them to actual meetings to talk to the people who were going to make the decisions. 20 00:01:29.543 --> 00:01:35.280 I didn't vote the same as the other trustees on those votes, I'm pretty sure, 21 00:01:35.280 --> 00:01:40.188 but at least we had voiced our opposition in a way that I thought was articulate 22 00:01:40.188 --> 00:01:43.424 and in a way that also gave us a lot of credibility for other issues 23 00:01:43.424 --> 00:01:45.994 that came down the road later and then for years to come.