RALEIGH – Academic freedom and the rights of students to express their views on different subjects will be among the topics discussed during the annual John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy Conference Saturday at the Jane S. McKimmon Center at N.C. State University.
On September 29, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser delivered his “State of the University Address.” Throughout his speech, Chancellor Moeser talked repeatedly about the importance of the university showing leadership. Leadership would indeed be a splendid thing if it were in the areas central to the university’s educational mission.
RALEIGH — High-level administrators at the North Carolina School of the Arts engaged in “willful, deliberate, and intentional” violations of N.C. law in what State Auditor Ralph Campbell described Tuesday as “similar to the debacle at Enron.”
Campbell said the findings at the NCSA were as serious as any his office had uncovered previously.
RALEIGH — Last week the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued a ruling that a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had sexually and racially discriminated against, and harassed, a student in her class last fall. I repeat: the OCR found that, at UNC-CH, a teacher abused her authority to discriminate against and harass one of her students based upon the student’s race and sex.
CHAPEL HILL – During his annual State of the University Address Wednesday, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser announced plans to increase the number of students covered under the school’s Carolina Covenant.
The Carolina Covenant, first proposed during Moeser’s 2003 State of the University address, is a measure to provide a debt-free college education to low-income students. Moeser said the school intends to increase the scope of the program to include students who are at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, up from 150 percent this year.
RALEIGH – The lack of a general requirement for students to study Western civilization in the University of North Carolina system is nothing new to National Association of Scholars President Steve Balch. UNC system school’s reluctance to require students to study Western civilization is party of a growing national trend to focus more attention and resources towards multicultural or cultural diversity courses.
A young man I know who attends UNC-Chapel Hill recently told me, “People would be amazed if they knew how easy it is to get a degree from Chapel Hill without really learning anything.” He’s probably right, and much of the blame for that should be placed on the erosion of the college curriculum.
RALEIGH – General-education requirements at 11 University of North Carolina institutions are weak, according to a new study commissioned by the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. UNC students are seven times more likely to be required to take a cultural diversity course than they are to study a foreign language, unlikely to be required to study Western history or civilization or even introductory literature, and not required at all to study United States history.
The study, by the National Association of Scholars for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, examines the general education requirement and two bellwether majors, English and history, at 11 North Carolina universities, based on information provided by the institutions in their university catalogs for the years 2002 or 2003. We have taken into account the various ways in which individual universities design and publish their catalogs, and have effectively compared all the institutions for the same time frame.
Ludacris does not represent N.C. State, or what N.C. State supposedly stands for, and the university shouldn’t associate itself with him, even by giving him a stage and cutting him a check.