According to the most recent data, taxpayers in North Carolina pay the fourth-highest per-pupil amount in the nation to subsidize public-college students in their state. Also, N.C. students attending the state’s community colleges or public universities pay the second-lowest amounts in tuition and fees in the nation in either category of institution.
Over a hundred faculty worked with a handful of students and staff members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to produce a proposed new general education curriculum for the university.
Their report, “Making Connections: An Initial Proposal to Revise the General Education Curriculum,” is a significant step toward the first major overhaul of UNC-CH’s general education curriculum since 1980.
A fiscal crisis is forcing North Carolina to raise college tuition and scale back university budgets. The education community worries that N.C. students are losing “access” to higher education. A look at the most recent data suggests that N.C.’s high standing among the 50 states in those measures means it can weather the current fiscal problems and still provide better access than most other states.
The faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro have provided state legislators and others a lesson in responsibility and charity in the face of dire fiscal times.
If the announced concerns of the American Association of University Professors’ special committee to study academic freedom in the wake of Sept. 11 are any indication, look for more rarefied hand-wringing over the academic left’s travails and cricket-chirruping silence over others’.
Hours and services will be restored to D.H. Hill Library on the campus of North Carolina State University, school officials have announced. Public pressure, student activism, work between library officials and the provost’s office, and the state legislature’s joint conference committee budget report all contributed to a restoration of library services, which will be effective Oct. 16.
The fall semester has started. The war on terror is reportedly about to extend to Iraq. Both those events mean that “teach-ins” are about to return to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose chancellor recently spoke of his vision of UNC-CH as “America’s leading public university,” a “university with a moral compass.”
A new academic program has been proposed for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It would be a certificate program, similar to a minor, in the field of “sexuality studies.” According to the News & Observer (July 29), students in the program would take five courses that “delve into issues of sexual identity, sexual ambiguity and the role of sex in society, politics, art, law, history and religion.”
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser recently told the National Press Club in Washington that the university would continue to pick “provocative” books for its infamous Summer Reading Program. No one asked, “Provocative to whom?”
About every year or so, a group interested in education reform will poll college seniors about ought-to-be-well-known facts concerning American history, politics, and other subjects. These invariably find about the same thing: in those subjects, students know surprisingly little.