In late February a federal commission released its final report on recommendations on reforming the enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Entitled “‘Open to All’: Title IX at Thirty,” the Secretary of Education’s Commission on Opportunity in Athletics praises the legislation for expanding athletic opportunities for women but criticizes how enforcement has led to the elimination of opportunities for men.
Last fall Shaw University fired a professor for “disloyalty” and evicted a student from campus housing over a faculty resolution criticizing Shaw President Talbert O. Shaw and the Board of Trustees.
Dr. Gale Isaacs, head of the Dept. of Allied Health, admitted to helping write a resolution criticizing the university on several grounds.
Chancellor Marye Anne Fox of North Carolina State University issued a statement on tolerance this week. Published in Technician, N.C. State’s official student newspaper, Fox wrote that “Several students have told me about highly offensive, hurtful and disrespectful graffiti that appeared on the wall of our Free Expression Tunnel on Monday night.” Three sentences later she wrote, “The offensive graffiti has been removed, and I have asked our Campus Police to investigate this incident.”
“I have been proud,” announced Chancellor James Moeser of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in his “State of the University” speech this past September, “to speak for the entire community in defending our fundamental rights as Americans from any who would seek to limit the scope of free expression and inquiry. In the past 12 months, UNC has shown the world what it is to be a great, free, American public university.”
The litigation over race-based admissions policies is probably the most important case the Supreme Court will decide in its current term. Those who think that it’s somehow progress for government institutions to treat classes of individuals differently because of their ancestry are pulling out all the stops to defend race-based admissions policies, including an intellectually dishonest argument that diversity enhances education and cries that the sky will fall if schools like the University of Michigan can’t stack the deck in favor of applicants in certain groups. Here are a few thoughts on this momentous case.
A Duke University professor of environmental science has reinvigorated the national debate over grade inflation. Professor Stuart Rojstaczer announced a web site, GradeInflation.com, wherein he has compiled data on over 50 colleges and universities nationwide showing how average grade-point-averages at them over time have risen. Rojstaczer also announced his findings in a Jan. 28 Washington Post column.
The news last fall of sweetheart deals to exiting administrators of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill placed the institution under unsettling scrutiny of its priorities. Those deals amounted to $520,000 plus travel expenses to two former vice chancellors, Susan H. Ehringhaus and Susan T. Kitchen. They came to light after other UNC-CH officials had spent months making the university’s case against any more budget cuts affecting them, on the basis that the university had nowhere left to cut.
In March a group of about 50 women’s rights activists from the North Carolina mountains plans to present state legislators with a “new” agenda on the needs of women in the state.
Before the Council of State’s vote on North Carolina State University’s proposed hotel and conference center, university officials asked and received a delay in the vote. Chancellor Mary Anne Fox told media that she requested the delay not because university officials were counting votes, but because they had not done enough to answer council members’ questions, especially over the issue of private financing of the project.
The laurels were still fresh from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s defense of academic freedom and religious pluralism in its requirement that incoming freshmen read portions of the Koran. Nevertheless, UNC-CH found itself facing a lawsuit threat from a Christian student organization, which said the school had threatened to revoke its official recognition on campus.
