My role tonight was to help with the leadership development stuff on the agenda, something I was trained in during the years I was a college dropout. Even though I’ve noticed almost no one knows that. So y’all are among the first to know. Just because I love all of you
Everything seemed to turn out well, so I’m happy. And even if it didn’t, it’s a volunteer gig so I’ll gladly issue refunds if people are dissatisfied
I’m off to grab my Grey Goose-laced Diet Mountain Dew and hit the pool for a bit. I’ll try to cobble an entry together tomorrow, but if I don’t get the chance I hope all of you have an amazing weekend!!
Earlier today the North Carolina General Assembly gave preliminary approval to the state budget for the 2010-11 fiscal year — and included among the provisions is a repeal of the 8% student tax that I’ve mentionedin severalentrieshere at law:/dev/null.
With the repeal soon to be final (a 2nd vote happens tomorrow), I wrote up a Facebook note with a chart in it. If you’re on Facebook, feel free to check out the original entry here. You should be able to access it even if we’re not Facebook friends… and if in the process you get the sudden urge to become an FB friend, you’re more than welcome to do so
The note appears below in its entirety:
[Note: by default I'm tagging the ASG President and senior leadership, the NCSU SBOs, and a few extra people on the side. If you don't want to be tagged in future editions of T Greg's Tomes, just shoot me a Facebook message -TGD]
====================
Past Editions of T Greg’s Tomes:
T Greg’s Tomes: UNCASG saves students $8.6M+ (a 4,019% return on investment!)
Folks who regularly read T Greg’s Tomes know I don’t exactly get along with student media, particularly the perpetual (and perpetually sophomoric) foolishness-disguised-as-punditry that emanates from the conservative-leaning Editorial Board at the UNCCH Daily Tar Heel (see Exhibit A and Exhibit B and Exhibit C and Exhibit D and Exhibit E and Exhibit F and Exhibit G).
I’m eagerly awaiting whatever backwards spin will get applied to this story now that UNCASG has saved students millions of dollars for the 2nd year in a row…
Earlier today the NC General Assembly gave preliminary approval to the 2010-11 state budget, which includes a repeal of the 8% student tax that was adopted in August 2009 (see line 32 on page 47 of the budget bill) — a repeal the delegates and officers of UNCASG spent most of our last session successfully getting enacted through in-person lobbying, phone calls, emails, and a Tuition Petition signed by over 22,000+ students.
Now even if we just count in-state undergraduates (since anything more complex wouldn’t fit into the graphic below), our work saved University students over $8,642,722.64. Compared to the $1/student fee that funds UNCASG’s budget, that’s a 4,019% return on students’ investment — meaning UNCASG could do absolutely nothing at all for the next 40 years, and students would still be better off financially than they would have been without the group’s work.
Or, put another way, the $1 fee could have been implemented on the very day UNCASG was created on September 22, 1972 and students would still be saving money.
I took the liberty of putting together the table below for everyone’s information and usage, compiling the tuition increase rates from the General Assembly, the Board of Governors alternative rates, and the FTE UG resident enrollment at each institution.
UNCASG wins $8.6M+ in savings
And remember the savings are actually more than this, because 100% of the tuition being paid will now go back to the universities where it belongs instead of going to the state’s General Fund.
For folks who question why I’ve dedicated the past 4 years to UNCASG and the NCSU Student Senate, this is why: in just the past 2 years alone — last year we helped repeal a similar student tax slated for 2009-10 — Student Government leaders have saved UNC system students over $25,730,590.64.
Overall, not a bad deal for the $2 apiece we each paid in. Remember that next time someone complains about your student leaders — and seriously think about becoming one of those leaders yourself
And since I’m a big fan of data and tables, I also made another table showing those added-up savings over the past 2 years as a result of UNCASG’s work. Here are the results:
Savings over 2 years: $25.7M+
Now this isn’t a total victory of course. The authorization for an additional $750/student tuition increase I mentioned to y’all was included in the final budget bill, and odds are roughly 100% that every University in the system will jump on the chance to hike tuition under that authorization. So I don’t expect any UNCCH students, for example, to be grateful for paying $950 instead of $990.
But there are precious few total victories in life, and if that $40 (or $259.60 @ ECU) enables someone to stay in school who otherwise might have to drop out, I’ll consider it a success.
Especially when a budget of $215K saved students over $25.7M
The psychological trauma of losing a fifth of your classmates is still sinking in for a lot of us, so tonight’s entry is going to focus on the state budget for North Carolina since I can write about it from memory with minimal effort
Unfortunately the trauma with the budget is a bit more serious…
The catch? The Senate also authorized the University system to unilaterally approve additional tuition increases of $750-per-student to offset budget cuts
Unlike the student tax, the universities would keep the money raised from the tuition increases instead of it going to the state’s General Fund. But with no cap at all and no approval required by a campus’s Board of Trustees or the system’s Board of Governors, it essentially guaranteed tuition rates would go up nearly $1K apiece at many campuses… a ~25% increase in a single year for UNC Chapel Hill, which is already the most-expensive University in the UNC system (the % is even higher for other universities, including my alma mater).
Needless to say that’s a huge amount for a tuition increase in a single year. Those kind of jumps force students to drop out of school.
Well the House of Representatives had their turn last week, and the Representatives seemed to be perfectly fine with that
Historically the House has been unkind to the University, using draconian budget cuts to the university system as a bargaining chip with the Senate when the budget goes to a joint House-Senate conference committee for its final edition. But even knowing that as the backdrop, I was still totally floored at how aggressively the politicians pillage the people’s universities.
You can see the House version beginning on Page 25 of the House budget report on S897. The first entry alone blows my mind: ~$150,000,000 in permanent budget reductions starting this year, on top of the ~$100,000,000 in permanent reductions that began last year. That means the Legislature is chopping a quarter of a billion dollars (with a B) in less than 2 years’ time.
Representatives apparently weren’t content there, so they decided to follow up by providing only a fraction of the system’s request for need-based financial aid — the $$ universities will have to use to help kids avoid dropping out when the Legislature’s budget cuts inevitably lead to substantial tuition increases. Then the House decided to go a step further and cap enrollment growth to 1% a year, which will exclude thousands of academically qualified North Carolina students from the very universities their parents’ taxes are financing
I’ve seen the same House-Senate budget dance play out for 11 years now, but this really has to be the single most outrageous proposal I’ve seen. It will utterly decimate each of our universities for years to come.
So back on Monday I woke up, checked my email, checked Facebook, read the news… and decided I was sufficiently pissed off that I needed to vent publicly. I prefer doing work behind the scenes when it comes to politics and lobbying, but my blood was sufficiently heated that I fired off a letter to the Raleigh News & Observer. They were kind enough to post it on their Education blog, which got spread around via email among some chambers of the Legislature.
Here’s their entry:
A student voice on UNC budget cuts Submitted by eferreri on 06/07/2010 – 10:45
Tags: Campus Notes | Erskine Bowles | Greg Doucette | N.C. Central University | N.C. State University | T. Greg Doucette | UNC system
Greg Doucette knows better than most just how tough it can be to pay your way through college.
Doucette, an N.C. State grad and current N.C. Central University law student, recently stepped down as the president of the Association of Student Governments, the group of student leaders from across the UNC system.
In that role, Doucette served on the UNC system’s Board of Governors, where he routinely put a face to the budget-cut issue by telling his own story about struggling with tuition payments while at NCSU. He dropped out for a while, putting his college career on hold for several years.
Now, he writes of budget cuts to the UNC system proposed by both the state House and Senate. The Senate spending plan, while generally easier on the university system, still proposes a $50 million cut and would increase tuition $750.
And the House budget calls for a far larger cut. UNC President Erskine Bowles says it would result in the elimination of 1,700 jobs across the public university system.
In a letter submitted to the News & Observer, Doucette lays out his concerns.
Here it is:
It was during North Carolina’s previous recession, roughly a decade ago, when the General Assembly last considered such deep cuts to our state’s public universities comparable to those now proposed by the House. Unsurprisingly, those cuts led to dramatic increases in tuition rates (similar to the $750+ per student increase now proposed by the Senate) to make up for the losses in revenue.
Also unsurprisingly, those huge spikes in cost forced students like me to drop out of college entirely. It took me 5 years working low-wage jobs in the “real world” until I saved enough to return to NC State, where I graduated with my degree in Computer Science last year — and where resident undergraduate tuition had surged 120% from the year I started until the year I came back.
How much more tax revenue would I have contributed to the state treasury had I graduated in 2004 instead of 2009? How much more tax revenue would the many students in my situation have contributed over that same time span?
I understand legislators’ impulse to protect K-12 education and the other areas spared by their current budget proposals; this is an election year, after all. But legislators should understand the cuts they’ve proposed to the University of North Carolina will condemn many students to years of reduced earnings (especially those who live outside of the Triangle or Triad), mortgaging North Carolina’s future economic health for the sake of re-election.
Students and their parents deserve better.
With warm regards,
T. Greg Doucette
The writer is a student at the N.C. Central University School of Law, and President Emeritus of the UNC Association of Student Governments.
God bless them for using my old profile photo from when I was President of the NCSU Student Senate — and still had hair
In all seriousness, I can’t be the first person to point out the effects of these types of cuts and their attendant tuition increases. I spent 5 years working as a college dropout earning a salary of someone with a mere high school diploma, when I could have already wrapped up my J.D. and been earning a lawyer’s salary; or, in the alternative, skipped getting the law degree and been working as a computer scientist.
Either way, I would have paid far more in taxes to the state in just 1-2 years than I paid over those 5. And I know of at least a dozen students who dropped out of NCSU the same semester (indeed the same week) that I did, and there were undoubtedly dozens upon dozens upon dozens more — sufficient numbers that we undoubtedly would have covered the state’s marginal cost increase for teaching us.
We’re in a recession; I realize and accept that. Budget cuts needs to be made, which I realize and accept too.
But the University system already took a disproportionate share of the budget cuts last year, and the decisions at this point are going to reduce the long-term economic health of the state — and crush the dreams of hundreds of University students who, like me years ago, will find themselves forced to interrupt their college education and search for a low-paying job just to make ends meet.
Here’s the list of legislators who are on the House-Senate conference committee. If you happen to be a North Carolina student, or you’re a taxpayer who realizes this short-term budget cure is going to cause far more long-term budget harm, please get in touch with these conferees and tell them: students and their parents deserve better.
Your support is greatly appreciated
That’s it from me y’all. Have a great night!
Essentially each campus’s tuition would go up by 8%, capped at $200… but the money would go to the state’s General Fund instead of the campus where the tuition money was paid :crack: [↩]
First, a quick explanation for the sudden spamming of your Google Reader and other RSS clients yesterday. I usually prep an entry daily but don’t actually post it until I’ve had a chance to go through and tweak it — make sure all the spelling is correct, all the links go to the right places, the paragraphs aren’t too long, etc etc etc. It’s a tedious process, and one I’ve occasionally forgotten about or put on the backburner while handling other priorities.
That happened most of last week, hence why you got a blizzard of 5 days of updates all at once Shouldn’t happen again any time soon (hopefully) since class tends to keep my mind focused on routine. Please accept my apologies
Now to the day’s events: the North Carolina Senate unveiled their version of the state’s budget.
The potential bad news? Buried in the text of the budget bill is language authorizing the University President — in the name of offsetting budget cuts made by the Legislature — to unilaterally approve extra tuition increases of up to $750/student!
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, for the 2010-2011 fiscal year only, the constituent institutions may, with the approval of the President of The University of North Carolina, increase tuition by up to seven hundred fifty dollars ($750.00) per academic year. This increase shall be in addition to other increases authorized for the fiscal year. These funds shall be used only to offset the institutions’ management flexibility reductions.
My gut instinct tells me this was a concession to folks from the Boards of Trustees at UNC Chapel Hill and UNC School of the Arts, who have both been particularly vocal critics of the UNC Board of Governors‘s policy of capping combined tuition/fee increases at 6.5% per year. This tuition predictability policy has worked wonders for containing the rising cost of education in North Carolina, enabling students and their families to plan ahead for their college degree and — more importantly IMO — ensuring financial aid availability can keep up with the rising cost of attendance.
But some of our more-elite institutions have argued the policy is eroding their ability to stay competitive with peer institutions in other states, and they want to raise tuition substantially higher.
They’d get their wish with this particular provision of the budget, which would basically nuke everything the BOG’s 6.5% plan put into place. Take UNCCH as an example: tuition for in-state undergraduates for 2009-10 was $3,865.00. Add in the $200 increase the campus requested (which would take effect instead of the 8% student tax). Then this $750 goes on top of it. Tuition for 2010-11 would now be $4,815.00 — essentially a 25% increase in a single year
The language also practically guarantees that the increases will go into effect. By incorporating the “[n]otwithstanding any other provision of law” verbiage, it essentially circumvents all of the checks and balances built into the UNC system in approving the increase. A campus’s Board of Trustees doesn’t have to request the increase; the statewide Board of Governors doesn’t have to approve it. Based on this current language, the only person that matters in determining whether the extra increases happens or not is UNC President Erskine Bowles… who already announced back in February that he’s retiring at the end of this year.
It basically enables legislators to avoid hostile parents in an election year by saying the UNC system ultimately made the decision on whether or not to increase tuition. It enables the UNC system to also avoid those same hostile parents by saying it was the Legislature that cut university funding that led to the tuition increases.
I’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for Erskine Bowles and what he has accomplished during his tenure as President of the UNC system, and I take him at his word when he says he’s “a ‘low tuition’ guy.” But I’d still prefer seeing this particular language stripped out of the budget when the House adopts their version, or at the very least have it watered down in the joint House-Senate conference committee so that a campus’s Board of Trustees has to request the increase and both the UNC President and Board of Governors have to approve it before it goes into effect.
At the very least hopefully then everyone will have time to realize how profoundly damaging a ~$950 permanent tuition increase — a 25% boost even at the most expensive public university in the state — will be to the accessibility and affordability of a quality college education in North Carolina.
My fingers are crossed on behalf of the 215,000+ students in the University that their legislators are listening…
…or, perhaps, divine intervention. That was the theme of my first speech to the UNC Board of Governors, after taking my oath of office as the Board’s student member.
With my term as UNCASG President ending in the middle of final exams, I never really paused to realize how accurate a characterization that is of my life — and particularly my involvement in Student Government.
It’s a point that got reiterated a couple times over the past few days.
Comments from one of the forefathers of ASG
Earlier today I was getting ready to drive down to Fayetteville State University to run a parliamentary procedure workshop for their Student Government Association, when I logged into Facebook and saw this comment from a past President of UNCASG. This guy is one of maybe 2-3 people who were pivotal in making the organization into what it is today, so I consider it high praise
It’s praise I never could have gotten had I not been elected President. And that election was the end result of meeting the Pickle Princess three years ago this past Sunday. I was attending a reception for legislators hosted by the University system, my first event as Student Senate President at NC State. Even though I had been working for a lobbying firm for months I still felt profoundly out of place. So rather than continue trying (poorly) to blend in and mingle, I sat down at a table next to her and introduced myself. We ended up becoming friends, then competitors, then colleagues. Most of what I did in the Association when I was Senate President was to impress her, and she returned the favor by getting us elected a year later when folks loved her but loathed me.
And that UNCASG election itself never would have happened had I not first been elected Student Senate President, a freak election that hinged on my opponent’s taste for apparel touting our university’s athletic arch-rivals. This was after I served the preceding year as a Student Senator, appointed to a vacancy after first losing a 4-person Student Senate election to 3 seats… coming in 4th, to at least 1 guy who didn’t even campaign
That appointment was actually my 3rd separate stint in the Senate. I was a Student Senator my freshman year, decided to run for Student Senate President that Spring (as a freshman), and — predictably — got totally obliterated. Yet the guy who beat me “agreed” to appoint me to a Senate vacancy, scheduled my appointment for confirmation, even had me show up to the Senate meeting where I’d be approved. Then, as I was walking to the front of the chamber… he withdrew my nomination, prompted by a pre-planned objection made by the Student Body Treasurer at the time.
The Treasurer happened to be… the same guy who wrote those remarks on Facebook I mentioned at the start of this post
To this day that experience easily ranks among the most embarrassing moments of my life, but it taught me some valuable lessons. Most importantly: it motivated me to work harder to excel at what I did so I wouldn’t go through a similar experience again. That motivation led to my return to the Student Senate the next year (albeit briefly), kept me focused on returning to school after finances forced me to drop out, and reminded me to seek perfection in everything I do since.
Anyhow, I’d go on with more examples but this particular post is already pretty long. Was it all a chance coincidence of coincidences? Divine intervention? A bit of both? Not sure, but I know it’s been an eventful journey… with an even longer road ahead
I’m still feeling a bit under the weather, so rather than get a fresh entry y’all are instead getting a copy/paste of a SG-related note I published on Facebook earlier today.
If you’re on Facebook, feel free to check out the original entry here. You should be able to access it even if we’re not Facebook friends… and if in the process you want to friend me, you’re more than welcome to do so
The note appears below in its entirety:
[Note: by default I'm tagging all of my ASG Vice Presidents, committee chairmen and senior leadership, the NCSU SBOs, and a few extra people on the side. If you don't want to be tagged in future editions of T Greg's Tomes, just shoot me a Facebook message -TGD]
==================== Past Editions of T Greg’s Tomes:
T Greg’s Tomes: DTH Edit Board explains anti-ASG bias, endorses SBP candidate 10 months early
The UNCCH Daily Tar Heel’s Editorial Board has penned ever-more-delusional attacks on the UNC Association of Student Governments this past academic year, for reasons unknown to me. At first I thought it was because I was willing to regularly call out their incompetence (see Exhibit A and Exhibit B and Exhibit C and Exhibit D and Exhibit E and Exhibit F).
But now that my term as President is over, in their second-to-last paper of the semester, they finally explain: they’re upset over their relative lack of influence compared to UNCASG. So after delivering the electoral Kiss of Death for the last 2 years in a row, the DTH is endorsing an SBP candidate 10 months early in an effort to get back into the influence game.
As a quick prefatory note, it’s common knowledge among nearly everyone in or around the Graham Student Union at UNC Chapel Hill that Rick Ingram is running for Student Body President in February 2011 and Deanna Santoro is managing his campaign. It’s a point so frequently mentioned in conversation after conversation that someone like me — who’s not even a UNCCH student — has known about it for months now.
Their respective political aspirations are why they “leaked” to the Daily Tar Heel that there were alleged issues regarding Dakota Williams’s eligibility for Senior Vice President, when they (mistakenly) thought Williams was ineligible. It’s also why they encouraged the paper to conduct an exposé on my love life when they (mistakenly) thought it would be detrimental to one of Mr. Ingram’s potential opponents.
The fact they’ve been feeding stories to the paper is evident even in this most recent opinion piece. The DTH column claims, for example, that “[o]nly Ingram and Deanna Santoro… voted for the amendment.”
Yet the vote on the amendment, like votes on most amendments in most assemblies, was done by voice vote. In other words, there’s no record of who verbally said “aye” and who said “nay”. This wasn’t a roll call vote, where someone’s name would be tied with their opinion explicitly. This wasn’t even a standing counted vote, where those in the room could at least see who stood and who didn’t.
How then can UNCCH’s purported “newspaper of record” so definitively declare who voted for the amendment? Because they were fed the information by people with an agenda to push, and the DTH ate it up like a buffet.
That agenda was evident in an email Mr. Ingram sent me back on March 4th, where he outlined his plan to try and cut officer stipends and put the money into Campus Innovation Grants to “get some really good press” (you can read his email here). I told him in response that I disagreed with his plan for various reasons, but that he’d have the opportunity to raise his concerns in March when the budget came up for its initial vote. (You can read my response here).
So when the budget came up last month, after it was extensively and thoroughly debated by the Council of Student Body Presidents (see the DTH news coverage), did Mr. Ingram offer his amendment? No. Did he even say anything in debate? No.
In fact, unlike the DTH Editorial Board’s nonexistent “evidence” that Mr. Ingram and Miss Santoro were the only two people to support his shameless political stunt this past weekend, there actually is roll call evidence of Mr. Ingram’s position on the stipends… supporting them.
That kind of spineless, vacillating, Kerry-esque “I actually did vote for the $3,000 before I voted against it” style of “leadership” is the exact opposite of what UNC students need in a Student Body President. It’s even more disappointing that two political aspirants would go out of their way to elicit negative media coverage of a group they belong to just to promote their own political careers.
But I guess that’s what separates student politicians from student leaders.
The bigger issue is how totally divorced from reality the Daily Tar Heel’s Editorial Board has become over the past year.
The Editorial Board’s piece begins, for example, with the farcical assertion that “[t]he Association of Student Governments has yet again failed to demonstrate that it is dedicated to reform that would produce tangible benefits for students.” The Board has apparently missed the reforms that have already taken place — ASG’s reorganization, accountability measures, the transparent budget, among others — along with the “tangible benefits” that have come with it, including among others the $50+ per student in reduced tuition/fee rates compared to their $1 investment as a result of UNCASG’s work on the state budget, a near-complete revamp of the student health insurance program beginning this Fall, and the creation of the very Campus Innovation Grant program this same DTH editorial lauds.
A cursory review of the adjournment resolutions from the past 2 years (see last year’s resolution and this year’s resolution) shows a fairly extensive list of what’s been achieved with the “vision of reform” that my running mates and I brought to UNCASG when we took office.
But you don’t even have to look at the Association’s documents to know what it has achieved — you can just stick to reading the Daily Tar Heel’s own news coverage. The Editorial Board’s laughably ridiculous Tuesday editorial was bookended by a Friday news piece highlighting the record participation during my tenure, while a news piece on Wednesday noted the aggressive student lobbying of the General Assembly to repeal its 8% student tax.
So if the state’s key decisionmakers in higher education (the Board of Governors and the General Assembly) know UNCASG has completely turned around, other Student Governments in the University system know UNCASG has completely turned around, and the Daily Tar Heel’s own news staff know UNCASG has completely turned around, how on Earth could the Editorial Board be so willfully clueless?
The answer is: they’re not. They just have an agenda to promote, factual accuracy be damned.
Here’s hoping their choice to discard journalistic integrity in the name of attaining some level of influence on the UNCCH campus doesn’t prove to be a pyrrhic bargain.
[Edit @ 04/29/10 12:35am: I spoke with Miss Santoro at length by phone following publication of this note. While I told her I would not edit any of the original note contents, I did agree to put this disclaimer at the bottom. She assured me during our phone call that she was not involved in any way with Mr. Ingram's SBP campaign, and also assured me that she had no personal involvement feeding information to the DTH. I have no reason to doubt her credibility and I take her at her word. -TGD]
Contracts exam in the morning, I’ll let y’all know how it goes. Have a great night everybody!
My apologies in advance to the regular readers here at law:/dev/null — most of you were never given the context behind tonight’s entry, and those of you who were in all likelihood won’t care This particular post is dedicated to a (relatively) small group of people, the overwhelming majority of whom don’t even know this blog exists.
But this is one of those occasions where something needed to be said…
I don’t believe I’ve ever written a post on this blog while intoxicated. And I probably shouldn’t even admit that I drink on this site since I have -0- doubt that prospective employers have checked out this section of internet real estate on more than one occasion. But the glories of in-browser spellcheck (thank you Apple and its Safari development team!) have enabled me to exercise questionable judgment free of any technical obstacles
It’s about 4am on Sunday morning, and for the past 5 hours I have had the incredible privilege and honor of being in the presence of (and yes, drinking with) about 30 of my closest friends — including quasi-adopted family — as we all celebrated my last meeting as President of the UNC Association of Student Governments, followed by our annual end-of-year awards banquet that was executed at the highest level of perfection.
And the success and smoothness of the meeting coupled with the banquet coupled with having these folks over tonight has truly meant an incredible amount to me
For better or worse, I’m actually a fairly stoic guy.1 It’s partly a bi-product of my upbringing, but it’s mostly the result of my chosen extracurricular vocation — being in charge means having to make tough decisions, having to make tough decisions usually means hurting people’s feelings, and hurting people’s feelings usually requires maintaining one’s composure in order to make a decision that’s in the best interests of everybody even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time.
So as a result of that well-cultivated stoicism, I rarely convey to the people around me how deeply appreciative and moved I am by their presence in my life. And when I do, frankly no one believes me But I tell you folks — and this is one of those #truestory moments — I can’t fully articulate in words how grateful I am for all of you.
I’ve served on behalf of students in some capacity or another every year that I’ve been in college. I began my freshman year as a Student Senator, and I was absolutely abominable at it — I was arrogant, disrespectful, thought I had all the answers, the list goes on. I actually ran for Student Senate President and got obliterated, coming in 3rd place out of 3 candidates. I spent the next year in the campus equivalent of political exile, fought my way back into the Senate a year later… just to drop out of college entirely.
As utterly ridiculous as I’m sure it sounds, it ate away at me during the 5 years I was a college dropout to know I had ended on such a low note. I had been rejected by 26,000+ students because of my own arrogance, thought I had recognized the error of my ways and worked to improve, only to then get put out of school entirely. So I fought my way back into N.C. State in August 2005, and I’d be lying to you if the thought of getting back into SG didn’t cross my mind all the way back then.
To make a very, very, very long story short, I thought God had other plans for me. I resumed writing an editorial column for the student newspaper, the Technician. I supported a friend of mine for the Student Senate Presidency. I ran for 1 of 3 Student Senate seats for seniors in the College of Engineering, and came in 4th out of 4 candidates — losing to a guy who didn’t even campaign.2 And I had resigned myself to the fact that at best I would be, as the Technician once quoted me, “the old guy in the back of the room who knew all the rules” and spent his time helping the other folks do their jobs.
Fast forward 3 years. I was elected by the campus of N.C. State to serve as Student Senate President — winning the position I had sought almost 10 years earlier — largely by virtue of the fact my opponent had questionable fashion sense. I was elected to a 2nd term as Senate President the following Spring, then a few weeks later elected President of UNCASG by a 1-vote tie-breaker cast by the presiding officer following a marathon 3+ hour political debate.
And as much as I’d like to pretend I had something to do with that latter victory, the truth of the matter is the Pickle Princess (my running mate) was a far more capable+likeable leader than I, and managed to pull votes from the campuses who didn’t like me at all
I was privileged to serve a 2nd term — a rarity among Presidents — and over these 2 years have been blessed to take part in major efforts to refocus the organization, proactively address the costs of higher education, and serve the students of the University by tackling the issues that impact them most.
That all came to a close tonight when my successor and his own vice president were sworn in, both of whom have a lot of work ahead — but who I truly believe are the most capable people for their positions. Despite my official role as ASG President wrapping up, it’s still truly humbling to have been an out-of-state native, political washout, former college dropout, slightly-older-guy-with-slightly-thinnning-hair, and still be asked to work as a student leader with many of the finest such leaders the State of North Carolina has ever produced.
Anyhow, I know this entry is hitting the rambling side (word count in WordPress says I’m pushing 1,000 words), but I just wanted to say *THANK YOU*to each and every one of you with whom I’ve had the honor of serving in the N.C. State University Student Senate3) or in the UNC Association of Student Governments. I know I don’t say it enough, and I know when I say it you probably don’t believe me, but it has been the highest honor of my life to consider you my colleagues and friends. Your work has made an incredible and tangible difference to higher education and the students of the University of North Carolina, and I thank God every day for having the amazing opportunity to be a part of that and to serve alongside you.
Thank you for an incredible journey these past 4 years Your support and presence tonight has been incredibly humbling and deeply appreciated. I truly do love you all and look forward to serving with you (albeit in other capacities) for many more years to come.
Thank you all so much,
-T Greg Doucette
Though you’d be forgiven if you couldn’t tell amid all the emoticons I throw into these entries [↩]
Even though he later became one of the few people in my life who I would call if I were ever faced with imminent death and needed help :beatup: [↩]
The single most distinguished student deliberative assembly ever conceived in the State of North Carolina : [↩]
Unfortunately I don’t have time to put together a real entry tonight — CrimLaw exam is at 9am tomorrow morning, followed by a UNCASG meeting that will last the rest of the day, before a brief break to change into a tuxedo then head to our end-of-year banquet. Basically I’m in a mix of studying law and panicking to make sure everything goes off perfectly smooth tomorrow afternoon+night and basically looking like :crack: until it’s over.
Nan's $.02 on the media :)
So given my lack of original content, I figured I’d leave y’all with some light reading. The UNCCH Daily Tar Heel ran a surprisingly complimentary story on my upcoming retirement as President. How surprising was it, you may ask?
It was so surprising that my grandmother even offered some commentary on my Facebook profile.
It must be good if even Nan approves — especially because she hates the fact I spend so much of my time in Student Government stuff when I could be focusing on my grades and making $$
But it means she read this article, and since she knows about some of the other ones she must have read those too, which makes me happy that she cares what I’m doing even if she doesn’t approve of it
Speaking of the article, here’s a quick chart I put together of everywhere I’ve been over the last 2 years. 115+ trips, comes out to around 5ish campus a month, every month, for 24 months straight :surprised:
Taking Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" literally :D
Have a good night y’all! And if you’ve got any spare prayers to offer up, send some of them my way for this CrimLaw exam!
…and gently pointed out that at least two parties (a certain administrator at UNC General Administration and the student newspaper at my alma mater) ended up eating their respective words of opposition, uttered back when UNCASG’s efforts with the petition first began
More vindication came today while I was sitting in CivPro trying to pay attention.
Quick prefatory note: the tuition petition campaign was just one piece of a multi-faceted plan of attack for the Association.1 Starting literally the day after the General Assembly adopted the budget — you can read an email from me to campus Presidents in UNCASG’s archives — we began preparing for the 2010 legislative session that starts next month. Since August there have been numerous meetings between our folks and policymakers in Raleigh. Numerous meetings with policymakers in their home districts. Numerous phone calls. Numerous emails.
The entire effort has occurred largely out of the public spotlight (which is just as well since the Daily Tar Heel’s Editorial Board would probably just complain anyway), but needless to say it’s been a tightly-focused, methodical, and consistent effort on the part of student leaders to get this student tax repealed.
This marks the first public endorsement of our proposal by a high-ranking elected official since we started pushing the idea back in August 2009!
Now it’s true both chambers of the state legislature have already started work on the budget, so this is just one link in the chain. But it means (i) we’ve been promoting the right ideas all along and (ii) we’re successfully persuading the people who count.
Equally important: it also means the Governor’s lobbyists, the University system’s lobbyists, and the students’ lobbyists (me+UNCASG) will all be pushing for the exact same thing when legislators come back to town in May.2
Now if only I could be right this often in Contracts…
I used to work as a lobbyist back in the day. One of the cardinal rules of lobbying is to never fire all of your ammo at once. [↩]
Another rule of lobbying: build coalitions. You can’t beat somebody with nobody [↩]
Doucette, an N.C. State grad and current N.C. Central University law student, recently stepped down as the president of the Association of Student Governments, the group of student leaders from across the UNC system.
Shouldn’t happen again any time soon (hopefully) since class tends to keep my mind focused on routine. Please accept my apologies 
