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The student union when it started here was just a truly student union.

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A group of students got together and said, hey, how about we try this,

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and for the longest time it ran itself.

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The students made the decisions about the money. It was truly a student organization

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and "student union" didn't mean a building.

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It was a student union.

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It was unionizing students.

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Whether there was a majority of students ever involved or not I don't know,

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but I do know that where the money goes

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is where people are going to get interested.

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Over time--

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and I talk about it in the report.

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I think I document it but I can't swear to it now.

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But it had gone from students running it

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to becoming a building.

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All the money was collected by student affairs.

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The administration slowly but surely

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took it over completely and

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one of the places that it was

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shocking when I was there,

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when people got it, was Friends of the College.

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Friends of the College, wonderful organization, no doubt about that,

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but it got a huge chunk of that money to support it,

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in addition of course to tickets and things like that, but who made that decision?

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Who made that decision? That was a question: Who made that decision?

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So somehow it ended up that the student government got to use the building,

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we had offices, the student senate could meet there,

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of course student organizations could meet there and things,

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but we no longer operated it.

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The students no longer operated any of it,

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and not only that, there were decisions being made about the money that weren't even

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necessarily connected to the union itself,

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to the building, to the running of the building,

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to the running of the programs that were there.

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Friends of the College was a perfect example.

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It was the student fees. The union fees, because one of them was a student union fee,

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was going to operating Friends of the College,

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which no question that that--as a teenager my mom got us to many of the wonderful programs

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--its value, but the question was,

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who made that decision, do the students know that they are doing this?

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Because many students, like me with the athletics,

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they're not going to go to a ballet, they're not going to go to a symphony,

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so why are they putting money in that they have no control over?

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And it was that awareness, because certainly by the time I came in,

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unions always being a hated thing in the South,

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the student union had no connection with the word union. It was just the building.