Conservatives willing to brave the touchy-feely miasma of the Supreme Court’s recent decision of Grutter v. Bollinger, which allows universities to consider race in admissions as an element of diversity, should be heartened by the ruling, flawed as it is. Here’s why.
Two ideas under discussion in North Carolina would make it more difficult for illegal residents of the state to be admitted to the University of North Carolina.
The first is a bill before the state Senate to extend in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants and other noncitizens. Senate Bill 987, currently before committee, would amend the General Statutes to extend resident tuition status to any “individual who (i) has attended school in North Carolina for at least four consecutive years and (ii) has received a high school diploma from a school within North Carolina or has obtained a general education diploma (GED) issued in North Carolina.”
Next to “diversity,” used as a synonym for discrimination by race, a favorite euphemism at universities today is “critical thinking.” The usual occasions for its use, however, are rather ironic — to stymie rather than stimulate critical thinking.
This spring Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” devoted several segments to the obscene goings-on in a human sexualities class at the University of Kansas. Viewers were told how Prof. Dennis Dailey showed “highly explicit” material including nude images of little girls, said he understood how some could be pedophiles, held a “wheelchair sex day” in class, showed pornographic films, compared one photograph of a female’s spread genitals to the Virgin Mary, and also made obscene gestures to students who demonstrated offense.
A report from the Cato Institute suggests an alternative method for paying for higher education. As the need for new methods of finance is growing with the rapidly rising costs of higher education, and as student loans are beset with defaulting and graduates dealing with the uncertainty over being able to make fixed loan payments, the report argues, human capital contracts should be an attractive alternative.
The latest raspberry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the state’s hoi polloi is that their kids aren’t good enough to fulfill Chancellor James Moeser’s vision of achieving “the best public university in the nation.” Thus UNC-CH wants to cut the proportion of students it enrolls from NC.
Last year, 15 universities comprising the University of North Carolina system (excluding the N.C. School of the Arts) received $123.6 million in what are known as “overhead receipts” from federal research grants. That money, which the UNC system prefers to call “facilities and administrative receipts,” is money given on top of the actual grant amount that is intended to defray the administrative and institutional costs in conducting the actual research.
Race preferential admissions tend to depress the grade, the graduation rates, and advancement to graduate school for those favored in the admissions process. The Supreme Court will soon rule on the legality of such preferences in university admissions. What might this ruling mean for North Carolina?
This past semester several political items were removed, as soon they appeared, from the student union at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Among them: anti-war flyers labeling President George Bush a “bully,” depicting Lady Liberty impaling a dove by its rectum on a sword, and having the U.S. flag being produced in the exhaust fumes of B-1 bombers; magazines containing a photograph of men engaging in anal sex; a large sign advertising “The Vagina Monologues” that called for all [offensive slang for vaginas] to “Unite!”; and flyers in support of war against Saddam Hussein.
Actually, only the last one was deemed offensive enough for removal from campus. The rest were allowed to stand.
A news article in The Daily Tar Heel April 24 contained a shocking lead: “A woman is raped every two minutes. Almost one in every four women between the ages of 18 and 24 is a survivor of sexual assault.”
No sources for this information are given — which is mildly surprising since it is published in the campus newspaper for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a UNC flagship university with a well-known school of journalism. It is not, however, unusual for any campus discussion of that particular subject.