RALEIGH – Jane S. Shaw has been appointed executive vice president of the J.W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a Raleigh-based nonprofit organization dedicated to improving higher education in North Carolina and the nation. The center is named for the late John William Pope, who was a trustee of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Shaw comes to the Pope Center from the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana, where she was a senior fellow and director of outreach for over twenty years. PERC is a nonprofit institute that applies economics to understanding and solving environmental problems. Before joining PERC, Shaw was a journalist. She moved to Montana from New York City, where she was an associate economics editor for Business Week. Shaw has a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College.
Shaw is perhaps best known for her writing about the environment. With Michael Sanera she coauthored Facts, Not Fear: Teaching Children about the Environment (Regnery, 1999). This book points out the exaggeration and pessimism typical of middle-school and high school textbooks and offers more balanced discussions of environmental issues from acid rain to global warming. She also edited a series of young people’s books on environmental topics published by Greenhaven Press, and coedited a book on land use, A Guide to Smart Growth (2000).
Her goal at the Pope Center is to strengthen its contribution to reform of postsecondary education.
“There’s a growing consensus,” says Shaw, “that students in college are not getting a satisfactory education. Many graduate with poor skills, inability to think critically and logically, and without an understanding of the historical background that fostered a country that favors personal freedom and limited government.
“We will join with other reform groups as well as those directly involved in higher education – faculty, administrators, and trustees – to bring about appropriate changes. We will criticize in some cases and, in others, showcase good examples worth building on.”
During the past few years, the center has published reports critical of North Carolina universities. It has identified weak and biased curricula and recommended changes in the method of selecting the University of North Carolina Board of Governors. The center holds an annual conference on higher education topics.
Shaw will work with George Leef, who has been named vice president for research, and Shannon Blosser, who heads the Chapel Hill office of the Pope Center. Leef, who has been with the center since it became an independent organization in 2003, is a widely published writer on educational and economic topics. He edited Educating Teachers: The Best Minds Speak Out, published in 2002, and wrote Free Choice for Workers: A History of the Right to Work Movement (2006). A recent paper, “The Overselling of Higher Education,” has received national attention.
Shaw, who lives in Raleigh, is married to Richard L. Stroup, currently a professor of economics at Montana State University. Their son attends Duke University.