In response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, members of the “Progressive Faculty Network” at UNC-Chapel Hill have sponsored a series of “teach-ins” to give an alternative view of the attacks.
Someone used the Campus Calendar section of The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to place a fake announcement of a gay pride rally later in the week. The prank set into motion a ludicrous, only-at-Chapel-Hill chain of events.
There were plenty of comparisons made to Nazis and other totalitarian regimes at the University of North Carolina’s “teach-in” held in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, but the focus of the comparisons wasn’t Osama bin Laden or terrorists in general, but the United States of America.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill needs more money from taxpayers and donors and more issues advocacy from faculty and administration members, Chancellor James Moeser said this Sept. in his first “State of the University” speech to the Chapel Hill campus.
Every year the American Association of University Professors publishes a detailed look at faculty compensation titled, “The Annual Report of the Economic Status of the Profession.” This paper standardizes measures of compensation for cost of living and quality of life and examines recent compensation increases in public universities.
The latest skirmishes in the Culture War have resulted in a wash, according to experts reading the field journal of the decades-long battle, Lingua Franca.
UNCW has completed its “needs assessment” for a proposed women’s center there.
Among the successful attacks on President Bush’s education bill, already mauled by the education establishment and its pack of congressional Dobermans, is a provision to dump more federal money into training “certified” teachers. I suggest that a large part of the explanation for the poor student performance, however, is the fact that our teacher-education programs are often worse than useless.
Rapid changes in technology are providing students with newer, easier, and quicker ways to cheat. They are also making it easier for teachers to detect cheating. Perhaps the most well-known way of cheating in the Digital Age is through what are called “on-line paper mills,” web sites that provide ready-made term papers on thousands of topics for a per-paper fee.
In early May, more than 2,000 college students marched from N.C. State University to and through the State Legislative Building to protest a proposed reduction in state appropriations to schools in the University of North Carolina system.