As the administration has considered privatizing UNC Student Stores over the past few months, parts of the campus community have communicated one message loudly: Save our store.
But now, as we near the end of the bidding period, we are hearing a different request: Make information public.
In the debate over Student Stores privatization, we, as UNC community members, find ourselves in an unusual position. As both important stakeholders in Student Stores and its primary customers, we are heavily affected by the decision to privatize or not to privatize.
Our community has worked hard to magnify the voices of Student Stores workers and supporters who are deeply concerned by the potential privatization. And these voices should not be lost in the shuffle of committee decision-making; we hope and expect that the reasoned arguments coming from the campaign to save student stores will be heeded in the administration’s examination of the proposals.
But as this process of bids continues, we believe the members of this community should also be able to engage with this process ourselves — that we should be able to examine the businesses’ proposals ourselves and make up our own minds. We propose that the community should have free and open access to the same information as administrators on this issue.
We hold this to be especially true considering that all sides of this debate have the same stated goals: store efficiency, a continued responsiveness to local interests, good wages and conditions for workers, product affordability and high scholarship revenue. If the UNC community could critically examine the business plans put forward by all parties, we could reason through our own conclusions about the best decision for our own store.
Even more, if we were armed with all of the information provided by these companies, we could more clearly and persuasively articulate our positions to the Board of Trustees and the administrators who will ultimately make the decision concerning Student Stores.
If the campus community and the administration are both evaluating these proposals with the same goals in mind, we propose that we can engage more effectively with the deciding committee and have a larger part in the conversation around this issue. This would give the Board of Trustees an opportunity to hear the campus reaction to the proposals and weigh the arguments from all sides. Though that still will not gain us a formal vote in this process, we will be able to reason through the facts and present our arguments to the board with all facts in hand.
For these reasons, we ask that the proposals be made public, that the committee meeting be open to the University community and that the committee promote transparency throughout this process.
