Following is my e-mail conversation with someone who identified himself as one of Jane Christensen’s students at N.C. Wesleyan College (some background for those who need it). I provide it because I think the student’s progression in the exchange rewarded my optimism for him.
The following is my e-mail exchange with NC Wesleyan Prof. Jane Christensen, teacher of Political Science 495: “911 The Road to Tyranny.”
House Bill 1183 would give the children of illegal immigrants the privilege of attending UNC schools and community colleges in N.C. for in-state tuition. Looks like yet another talking point used to sell us on the $3.1 billion bond referendum for higher education in 2000 could turn out to be a big fat whopper.
They promised 500 and delivered … a handful.
2002: “How many small cuts do you take before you cry out in pain?”
1992: “The state’s flagship university is being nickel-and-dimed to death.”
The letter, for which we at the Pope Center cannot vouch and which could be an expedient hoax, begins: “WE THE UNDERSIGNED FACULTY are writing to express our concerns about the ongoing secret negotiations between high-level university administrators and John Edwards regarding the ‘poverty’ center.”
The Dionne article anticipated last week’s big Edwards news. He now has an issue: the alleviation of poverty. Dionne doesn’t write that Edwards has no idea about how to accomplish it; instead, as he graciously puts it, Edwards is “planning to set up a center to study ways to alleviate poverty.” That would be UNC’s new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, of which Edwards will be director.
Critics of higher education often write about leftist bias in the classroom, barely literate students who somehow gain admission, dumbing down of course content, and academically disengaged students. Sometimes, however, those problems write themselves.
RALEIGH — In June 2003, the Supreme Court heard two cases concerning racial preferences in Michigan higher education, Gratz v. Bollinger (on preferences used by the University of Michigan) and Grutter v. Bollinger (on preferences used by its Law School). The Court ruling against outright racial preferences in admissions while ruling in favor of considering race in admissions so long as it is used as only one of “pertinent elements of diversity.”