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There's some times now, particularly with the elections that are going on and the ads that are being run and there's just times when I

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look at how people become elected officials

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and how things happen at a state level and a national level that I'm sometimes sitting there going,

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this is so oddly familiar.

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Maybe the language is a little upgraded but this is like the same battles that happened back at State over student government.

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Don't we ever evolve? [Laughs]

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and there were of course a group of people that were really hostile to me for the athletics.

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I was really naive about hostility.

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I was raised in a religion that was very gentle and very loving and very positive

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so it was like a bath in cold water to look at somebody and go but you don't like me just because of the opinion I hold?

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I mean you really, really don't like me? [Laughs] You're really angry at me?

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And I remember after I was elected Chancellor Caldwell had a dinner at his house for just the start of the year

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and he put me at a table with a bunch of student athletes.

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And they were very well behaved, but I remember going in going, I'm being fed to the lions. [Laughs]

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But they weren't--. I don't know whether--. Casey was the athletic director then

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and he was such a gentleman.

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Any hostility that came towards me never came because he told anybody to be,

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or encouraged it or supported it, and I was always very clear about that.

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He was an amazing man, and he got what I said. He got it.

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He didn't necessarily agree but he got it, he understood it.

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But that level of hostility was really shocking,

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and then there were other people that were just, this is State. Girls don't become student body president.

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And there were people who outside of the university,

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in fact there may be some letters in those letters I gave you.

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I got a lot of nasty letters from out in the state.

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Yeah, and just like, what? [Laughs]  Whoa.

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And then when I was elected that happened too,

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but because being student body president could be seen as building that resume to go on to leadership within the state,

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and you know, for me, I mean women weren't going anywhere, right? I was going to get married, make babies, and stay at home.

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Why would I do such a--? It was perceived as a taking away of something that by right belonged to some guy.

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ut not me, not me. This was State. Maybe UNC,

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nd if you go back in that time and look at the issues with UNC,

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I remember Jesse Helms could say it in a way that I could never be able to say it: liberal. [Sounds like "libral"]

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It's "libral". There were all these battles going on at UNC about free speech and things like that that just didn't touch State,

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not until we got liberal arts, and that was, I think,

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the big wakeup call for State in terms of joining that larger community of universities.

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By making this choice they were going to experience the same things at the same time, but they did it at a time that was just at the beginning of this incredible time

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in universities and student activists

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on campus, so it's not like they even got ten years of quiet time-- [Laughs]

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--so they could kind of get used to girls being here, or women being here.

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But it was just like boom, boom, boom. [All at once.] All at once.

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So they went through quite a process, a baptismal. [Laughs]